March 1, 2025: Volume XCIII, No. 5

FEATURING 302 Industry-First Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction, Children’s, and YA Books

JOJO MOYES WANTS YOU TO FEEL SOMETHING

In her new novel, We All Live Here, the bestselling author goes for laughter—and tears

FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK

A TIME FOR COMFORT READING

“I WANT PEOPLE to finish this book feeling a bit better about human beings and life in general,” says Jojo Moyes about her 18th novel, We All Live Here, coming from Pamela Dorman/Viking on Feb. 11.

Moyes has been publishing fiction since 2002, but she really broke out a decade later with Me Before You , the story of a man embittered by life after an accident renders him quadriplegic, and the aimless young waitress who is hired to be his caregiver. The book was a romance, a cathartic tear-jerker, and a hit that went straight to the top of bestseller lists in the U.K. and then the U.S.

“I love when I read a book that can make me feel something, whether it makes me laugh or cry,”

Moyes tells contributor Kerry Winfrey in the cover story on p. 14, and that’s exactly how readers will feel about We All Live Here, which centers on a middleaged woman forging an unlikely new family after her husband leaves her and her mother dies. In a starred review, our critic calls it a “moving, realistic look at one woman’s postdivorce family life that manages to be both poignant and funny.”

At a time when the headlines are full of bad news—wildfires, plane crashes, and political mayhem—readers are craving books that comfort. For some, that means sexy fantasy fiction full of dragons and romance (Rebecca Yarros’ Onyx Storm sold 2.7 million

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copies in its first week on sale); for others, tales like Moyes’ are just what the doctor ordered: real, recognizable characters facing real-life situations with humor and heart. For still others, comfort is a cat—or a cat book. Few have embraced this genre more fervently than the Japanese, for whom cat books exemplify what is called iyashikei, or “healing type” works (often anime or manga). Take, for example, Syou Ishida’s We’ll Prescribe You a Cat (Berkley, 2024). The novel, translated into English by E. Madison Shimoda, concerns the fictional Kokoro Clinic for the Soul in Kyoto, where struggling patients are prescribed cats to cure what ails them. A sequel, We’ll Prescribe You Another Cat , is scheduled for U.S. publication this fall. If the cat lounging inside a giant pill bottle on the cover of Ishida’s book regards the viewer with feline skepticism, the kittens on the cover of Kiyoshi Shigematsu’s The

Blanket Cats (Putnam, Feb. 25) are straight-up adorable. In this collection of tales, translated by Jesse Kirkwood, a Tokyo pet shop sends customers home with one of seven special cats, each wrapped in a blanket, to be returned after three days. These cats may not solve all the humans’ problems, but the coziness of the setup is undiminished. Finally, what’s more comforting to a book lover than a book set in a bookstore? (If the shop has a cat, so much the better.) In Hwang BoReum’s Welcome to the Hyunam- Dong Bookshop, translated from Korean by Shanna Tan (Bloomsbury, Feb. 20), the protagonist leaves her high-powered corporate job to open a neighborhood bookstore where the regulars are like family. Isn’t that the best kind of fantasy?

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

“Taylor’s debut novel examines the workings of a Christian congregation in a small Arkansas town.”

“...a memorable exploration of the morality of this small congregation and the varied people who belong to it.”

“A thoughtful, heartfelt look at an American community that goes beyond stereotypical portrayals.” —Kirkus Reviews

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Contributors

Nada Abdelrahim, Paul Allen, Stephanie Anderson, Jenny Arch, Kent Armstrong, Mark Athitakis, Colette Bancroft, Audrey Barbakoff, Nell Beram, Elizabeth Bird, Ariel Birdoff, Christopher A. Biss-Brown, Sarah Blackman, Jennifer Brough, Jessica Hoptay Brown, Kevin Canfield, Catherine Cardno, Hailey Carrell, Tobias Carroll, Charles Cassady, Ann Childs, Rachael Conrad, Adeisa Cooper, Jeannie Coutant, Perry Crowe, Kim Dare, Cathy DeCampli, Dave DeChristopher, Elise DeGuiseppi, Suji DeHart, Steve Donoghue, Melanie Dragger, Anna Drake, Eamon Drumm, Robert Duxbury, Jacob Edwards, Gina Elbert, Lisa Elliott, Joshua Farrington, Katie Flanagan, Amy Seto Forrester, Mia Franz, Ayn Reyes Frazee, Elaina Friedman, Laurel Gardner, Fiona Giles, Chloé Harper Gold, Carol Goldman, Danielle Galván Gomez, Melinda Greenblatt, Vicky Gudelot, Dakota Hall, Peter Heck, Loren Hinton, Katrina Niidas Holm, Yung Hsin, Abigail Hsu, Yunte Huang, Kathleen T. Isaacs, Darlene Ivy, Wesley Jacques, Jessica Jernigan, Danielle Jones, Betsy Judkins, Deborah Kaplan, Ivan Kenneally, Akifa Khan, Colleen King, Lyneea Kmail, Andrea Kreidler, Alexis Lacman, Megan Dowd Lambert, Carly Lane, Christopher Lassen, Maya Lekach, Seth Lerer, Donald Liebenson, Elsbeth Lindner, Coeur de Lion, Barbara London, Patricia Lothrop, Georgia Lowe, Mikaela W. Luke, Wendy Lukehart, Kyle Lukoff, Isabella Luongo, Michael Magras, Joan Malewitz, Joe Maniscalco, Francesca Martinez, Gabriela Martins, J. Alejandro Mazariegos, Dale McGarrigle, Zoe McLaughlin, Don McLeese, Kathie Meizner, J. Elizabeth Mills, Clayton Moore, Rebecca Moore, Andrea Moran, Rhett Morgan, Jennifer Nabers, Yesha Naik, Cleyvis Natera, Christopher Navratil, Mike Newirth, Katrina Nye, Erin O’Brien, Tori Ann Ogawa, Connie Ogle, Hannah Onstad, Mike Oppenheim, Emilia Packard, Nina Palattella, Megan K. Palmer, Derek Parker, Sarah Parker-Lee, John Edward Peters, Christofer Pierson, William E. Pike, Shira Pilarski, Margaret Quamme, Carolyn Quimby, Kristy Raffensberger, Kristen Rasmussen, Maggie Reagan, Stephanie Reents, Charles Reichmann, Amy Reiter, Jasmine Riel, Erica Rivera, Amy Robinson, Lizzie Rogers, Lloyd Sachs, Bob Sanchez, Caitlin Savage, Jerome Shea, Madeline Shellhouse, Danielle Sigler, Linda Simon, Laurie Skinner, Wendy Smith, Leena Soman, Margot E. Spangenberg, Mo Springer, Allison Staley, Mathangi Subramanian, Jennifer Sweeney, Deborah Taylor, Eva Thaler-Sroussi, Desiree Thomas, Bill Thompson, Renee Ting, Lenora Todaro, Jenna Varden, Katie Vermilyea, Francesca Vultaggio, Barbara Ward, Caroline Ward, Katie Weeks, Sara, Beth West, Kimberly Whitmer, Sam Wilcox, Kerry Winfrey, Marion Winik, Bean Yogi, Jean-Louise Zancanella

WOMEN’S LIVES, PAST AND FUTURE

IT’S WOMEN’S HISTORY

Month, and writers are looking not only backward but forward. Here are some recommendations that range from the 16th century to sometime in the future.

Isola by Allegra Goodman (Dial, Feb. 4): French noblewoman Marguerite de la Roque has been under the control of her guardian, Jean-François Roberval, since her parents died, and he’s been milking her fortune dry. When, in 1542, he sails for what’s now Canada, he takes her along—and when she has the temerity to fall in love with his secretary, Roberval deposits the young lovers on a deserted island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Based on a true story, Goodman’s novel about Marguerite’s two years on that island is written “with fluid beauty, deep empathy, and an emotional undertow that pulls you in and holds you from the first page to the last,” according to our starred review.

The Antidote by Karen Russell (Knopf, Mar. 11): In her first novel since 2011—when Swamplandia! memorably introduced

readers to female alligator wrestlers—Russell heads to the Dust Bowl. Antonina Rossi is a witch in 1935 Nebraska; she relieves customers of unwanted memories, storing them in her own subconscious until a dust storm sweeps them away. That means danger. She bands together with three other misfits, including a teen basketball player and a government photographer. Our starred review says the book is “a singular, haunting vision that fearlessly excavates the past and challenges the reader to face the future head-on.”

The Rest Is Memory by Lily Tuck (Liveright, Dec. 10):

The latest novel by 86-yearold Tuck tells the story of Czeslawa, a real Polish

Catholic teenager who was killed in Auschwitz, leaving behind only some photographs of herself taken by the camp’s photographer. “With myriad references to the historical realities of the Holocaust, the work beautifully interweaves Tuck’s imagined story of Czeslawa’s constrained life before the German occupation and the hideous conditions she faced during her short, brutal months at Auschwitz,” says our starred review. “A painful, essential, unflinching memento.”

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami (Pantheon, March 4): The world of Lalami’s latest novel feels scarily contemporary, just taken a few steps further. Los Angeles woman Sara Hussein is flying home after a conference in London when she’s pulled aside by the Risk Assessment Administration, a federal agency that says her dreams show her to be at

imminent risk of committing a crime. She’s put in a “retention center” run by a private company that doesn’t show any inclination to let her go. It’s an “engrossing and troubling dystopian tale,” according to our starred review.

Luminous by Silvia Park (Simon & Schuster, March 11): A “Bloodless War” has reunified North and South Korea. Robots have become a normal part of everyday life. Jun is trans, a cop, and a recovering virtual-reality addict. His estranged sister, Morgan, is a robot programmer. Their father, a tech pioneer, brought them up alongside Yoyo, an early robot they considered their brother—and then took him away. We meet Yoyo, too, though his siblings don’t know he’s alive. Our starred review calls it “a messy, visionary debut.”

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.

LAURIE MUCHNICK

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

EDITOR’S PICK

A Native American man returns home to heal wounds both literal and metaphorical.

Abe Jacobs, the hero of Curtis’ finely tuned debut, is 43 and seriously ill. He’s taken a break from his job as a bookseller in Miami (and from his wife, Alexandria East), to visit family on a Mohawk reservation in upstate New York. He’s suffering from chronic fatigue and lesions on his legs that baffle his doctors; while he waits for a formal diagnosis, he skeptically but desperately accepts some folk treatment from a great-uncle. Otherwise, he spends his stay reconnecting with friends and family, attempting to make sense of his various past struggles: a

depression that led to a suicide attempt, a difficult open relationship with Alex, and a stalled career as a poet. That last challenge gives the novel a poignant, lyrical lift: An alter ego of Abe’s, Dominick Deer Woods, regularly intrudes on the narrative, sharing excerpts of Abe’s poetry and generally serving as his snarkier, more confident self. (“Abe? He’s just the guy with the rotting skin who panicked and fled his wife, friends, and job in Miami. Why should he need to know what’s going on? It’s just his sanity.”) Some of those sidebars deal with Native American life, from food to tribal relationships, to the bigotry that informs Abe’s skepticism of

Old School Indian

traditional medicine, to forced sterilizations, and more. A formal diagnosis, when it finally arrives, pushes the narrative into a deeper, more soulful, and in some ways more surprising territory. Thematically, the novel contains echoes of Leslie Marmon Silko’s

classic Ceremony (1977), which also dealt with themes of trauma and Indigenous paths to healing. But Curtis’ voice is his own, and its ending, while a left turn, feels wholly earned. An affecting tale of loss and healing that thrives through its seriocomic style.

The Sleeping Land

Alexander, Ella | Unnamed Press (250 pp.)

$28.00 | March 4, 2025 | 9781961884199

A wry, unpredictable tale of an archaeological expedition to Siberia.

It’s 1994, and a trio of Canadian graduate students and their advisor travel to Siberia on a research expedition. Just a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there’s a stark contrast between Russia’s rapid societal changes and the archaeologists’ much longer timescale. Alexander spends time on all three of the students, but it’s Valerie Howe who occupies the spotlight longest, for understandable dramatic reasons: “She had seventy dollars in her bank account and her apartment lease would expire two weeks after the end of the dig. She was lying to everybody about her progress on her thesis.” The bitter Mark Auchmill—who spends a lot of time reading a biography of Stalin—and family man Kit Lai round out the trio, while professor George Auberon is a bit more mysterious. Alexander memorably teases out the contradictions in these characters and the ways in which they ricochet off of one another. The narration includes a few sharp asides about the work they’re engaged in: “You could say anything was the most important in human history as long as you said ‘arguably’ first. The boys loved it.” As the archaeologists explore a cave and discover a historically significant artifact, the comedy of manners gives way to a paranoid-thriller vibe. The central characters worry about losing control of the site, and the presence of a few other people of unclear allegiance adds more tension to the proceedings. Things get stranger from there, and the climax involves a few very big risks. The grand ideas at work in this book make for an intriguing read, but the dry wit with which Alexander tells the story is the real reward.

One part academic satire, one part archaeological thriller.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One

Arnett, Kristen | Riverhead (272 pp.)

$28.00 | March 18, 2025 | 9780593719770

A lesbian clown walks into a bar and tries to figure out her life.

In Arnett’s new novel, Cherry Hendricks, a 28-year-old part-time aquarium-store worker, wants nothing more than to be a full-time clown. Though her persona Bunko, a rodeo clown terrified of horses, is successful on the Orlando birthdayparty circuit, she’s broke because “going rates for clowns are at basement lows.” In addition to her money issues, Cherry is struggling with complicated family dynamics and an increasingly messy love life (including a penchant for “sleeping with people’s moms”). Five years ago, Cherry’s outgoing, hilarious, and successful brother, Dwight, died unexpectedly. In his absence, the already strained relationship between Cherry and her mother, Nancy, who is also a lesbian, is made even worse. Cherry’s life begins to change after a terrible first date with Margot—better known as Margot the Magnificent—who is nearly twice her age. One of Orlando’s finest magicians, Margot finds herself at a strange career crossroads in the wake of her divorce from Portia, her wife and magician’s assistant. Both Cherry and Margot see potential in each other—and begin a relationship that blurs the lines between personal and professional. As they become more closely enmeshed physically and artistically, Cherry must decide what kind of art she wants to make— and what she wants to be remembered for. During an eccentric sex scene near the beginning of the novel, Cherry says that “clowning is an excuse to make everyday life wildly, luxuriously absurd.” Though the novel dips into the absurd, Arnett grounds the characters and relationships beautifully through her signature style of humor and heart. Her writing is particularly strong when exploring the ways we show up for

ourselves and our communities—as well as the sacrifices we should and shouldn’t make for our art.

A funny and tender novel about life’s best and worst punchlines.

Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room

Auster, Paul | Adapted by Paul Karasik, Lorenzo Mattotti & David Mazzucchelli

Pantheon (400 pp.) | $35.00 | April 8, 2025

9780553387643

Following the acclaimed 1994 graphic-novel adaptation of City of Glass, adaptations of the remaining books in Auster’s experimental noir trilogy now join the first in this complete collection, each illustrated by a different artist: comics legend Mazzucchelli, New Yorker cover artist Mattotti, and cartoonist Karasik, who also art directed all three.

In City of Glass, a traumatized mystery writer finds himself playing detective. He becomes embroiled in a case involving a femme fatale and her deeply troubled husband, who had been inhumanely raised by a mad professor in an attempt to rediscover “God’s language.” Ghosts —presented mostly in picture-book format (one large image above a chunk of text) rather than the sequential panels of the other two stories—follows a private investigator who stakes out the apartment of a man who seems to do little other than write and read. As the investigator (named “Blue”—all characters’ names are colors) compiles reports of his mundane observations, he comes to question exactly who is observing whom. In The Locked Room, a hack writer inherits the literary legacy (and wife and child) of his vanished and exceptional childhood friend, attaining a blissful life—until he can’t resist trying to track down the friend, who forbids being found on penalty of death. Themes of identity run through the books, as do literary

Decades of New York City turmoil, filtered through one complicated family.

GLASS CENTURY

references and contemplations on the writerly life—particularly the idea that a writer does not have a life of his own. (“Paul Auster” also appears as a character.) The stories resist easy interpretation, but opaque moments, like characters’ descents into madness or explanations of complex theories, receive rich visualization from the talented trio of artists: Mazzucchelli’s crisp, confident lines; Mattotti’s sumptuous shading; and Karasik’s inventive paneling. An engrossing marriage of literature and pulp.

Glass Century

Barkan, Ross | Tough Poets Press (482 pp.)

$33.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9798218443351

Decades of New York City turmoil, filtered through one complicated family.

Barkan’s third novel centers on Mona Glass, Brooklynite, Jew, hotshot tennis player, and, as the story opens in the early 1970s, a fraud. She’s in love with Saul Plotz, the Queens borough director for Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, but he’s already married; to appease (and deceive) her parents, the two stage their own wedding. Mona’s risk-taking extends to her career: At a friend’s urging, she takes a job as a photographer for an upstart tabloid, the Daily Raider, and snags an exclusive photo of Vengeance, a street vigilante who has both riled and thrilled New Yorkers. The novel, which stretches to the Covid-19 era, strives to be a widescreen, Franzen-esque study of the city’s crises as they entwine with Mona and Saul’s. Manhattan’s increasing wealth parallels the

disintegration of Saul’s relationship with his unsuspecting wife, Felicia; the 9/11 attacks kill people close to both of them; a son Saul and Mona have together creates a further fracture in their relationship, and serves as a pathway to explore the city’s playground-for-the-wealthy callowness. Mona is a lively spitfire of a character—an excellent early set piece has her besting a smug man on the tennis court—and Barkan is a close student of New York history. (Early on, Saul takes a meeting with developer Fred Trump, attended by his teenage son, Donald.) The book feels overstuffed for its scope and at times predictable; it’s not hard to figure what will happen to the friends with jobs at the Twin Towers. And though a subplot about the extended life of Vengeance strains credulity, it provides some glue to the book’s everything-is-connected ethos. As Mona says: “Either everything in life is connected, or nothing is.”

An ambitious tale of an anxious 50 years in New York City history.

Kirkus Star

Spent: A Comic Novel

Bechdel, Alison | Mariner Books (272 pp.) $29.99 | May 20, 2025 | 9780063278929

The author of Are You My Mother? (2012) and Fun Home (2006) offers something that’s not quite a memoir and thoroughly wonderful. We meet our protagonist, Alison Bechdel, when she’s been shocked from sleep by a shotgun blast. It’s her partner, Holly, trying to scare a bear away from the compost pile on their Vermont pygmy

goat sanctuary. In addition to sharing a name, this character has a lot in common with her creator. Both are in middle age. Both made their names with a comic strip about lesbians. Both have written a much-lauded memoir in graphic-novel form. And both have seen their autobiographies refashioned by other artists. Bechdel the author could have written another story from her own point of view but, in creating an avatar, she gives herself some room to mess around, and the results are delightful. Alison the character is supposed to be finishing her next book, but she finds herself endlessly distracted. There’s her sister, who wants Alison to edit her manuscript. There’s a trio of old friends who have turned into a throuple. There’s the fact that Holly’s woodchopping videos and tool reviews are turning her into an Instagram influencer. And there’s the way Alison is trying to escape finishing her book by selling a reality show that’s kind of like Queer Eye except that instead of making people look better she’ll help them live more ethically within capitalism. As Bechdel lets the lives of her characters unfold, her words and pictures become the reality show. Alison and her friends are beautiful and ridiculous and ridiculously beautiful, and Bechdel is such a master of her craft that it might take a little while to appreciate what she does here. Bechdel is incisive, tender, and funny—often at the same time.

Everything I’ll Say to You Tomorrow

Benavent, Elísabet | Sourcebooks Casablanca (464 pp.) | $18.99 paper March 18, 2025 | 9781728296357

A 30-something Madrid woman struggles to come to terms with her grief after the man she thought was her one true love dumps her. Miranda is flying high—in addition to having a job she loves as the deputy editor of a globally known fashion magazine, she has a partner,

Tristan, whom she adores. But she’s forgotten that love is not necessarily forever, and that all the promises and plans made by the two of them aren’t carved in stone. That future crumbles and fall into dust the day that Tristan dumps her, saying he loves her too much to stay with her as unhappy as he is. He’s not his best self in Madrid, he says, and he’s not making her happy. Here, the story takes an unexpected turn: From this point forward, Miranda wakes up every morning on a different day in the past five years of their relationship. Whether she’s actually time traveling, as she thinks, or just dreaming, or having vivid, grief-induced memories is left unclear. At first, Miranda is angry and tries to keep the relationship from ever happening, to save herself the pain of having it end, but as the days go by, she changes her mind and leans in—she tries to alter each moment, making different choices to try to change the ultimate outcome. Throughout, her best friend, Ivan, a stylist, listens and supports her individuality and strength, reminding her that there is no single person for anyone in life. This is a surprising book: thoughtful, heartfelt, and often extremely sexy, but also tender and unexpected.

A genre-bending story of grief, choices, and the importance of loving yourself and staying true to who you are.

Gabriële

Berest, Anne & Claire Berest | Trans. by Tina Kover | Europa Editions (368 pp.) $28.00 | April 22, 2025 | 9798889660897

A remarkable champion of the avant-garde, unremembered by history, is rescued from obscurity by her great-granddaughters, a pair of writing sisters.

Wife of Francis Picabia, mistress of Marcel Duchamp and, later, Igor Stravinsky, close friend of Guillaume Apollinaire and many other notables, Gabriële Buffet-Picabia

Ardently whimsical, yet never centerless—solid stories about our tenuous times.

EXIT ZERO

(who died in 1985 at age 104) was an unknown figure to her great-granddaughters, French novelists

Anne—bestselling author of The Postcard —and Claire. Why was this memorable woman lost to both her family and the world? The Berests set out to explain the mystery in a curious biographical novel which traces some of Gabriële’s story, drawing on archives, interviews, and historical works. A student of music, first in Paris and then Berlin, Gabriële took no interest in men until, in 1908, her brother introduced her to Picabia, already a star of the art world. It’s a meeting of minds, “conjoined intellects,” and Gabriële inspires the artist to discard Impressionism and paint differently, in a style reminiscent of music. They marry and have four children, Picabia remaining “a flamboyant hotshot”: impulsive, promiscuous, socially voracious, nervously unstable. The novel becomes an account of this union, the art movements (Cubism, Dadaism) Picabia and his friends explore, and of a colorful, creative circle. The couple forms a very close friendship with younger artist Duchamp, who falls in love with Gabriële and folds her into his work. Similarly, writer and critic Apollinaire becomes an intimate, as do others, both in Europe and the U.S. The artistic ferment is interrupted by World War I, by which time the marriage is becoming strained. And there are glimpses of the future: Gabriële’s decline, and an explanation of the family mystery. Throughout, the authors emphasize Gabriële’s intellect, but also her preference—unlike her husband’s— for “remain[ing] in shadow.” This flavors the book, too, which extols but doesn’t fully animate her.

An atmospheric excavation of an unusual woman and marriage, both intriguing and remote.

Exit Zero

Bertino, Marie-Helene | Farrar, Straus and Giroux (208 pp.) | $18.00 paper

April 22, 2025 | 9780374616472

Twelve stories that slide into the magical while staying determinedly real. The protagonists of Bertino’s stories tend to be beleaguered yet brave, quixotic yet stouthearted, bemused by but also compassionately attentive to the strange worlds they find themselves inhabiting. In the title story, Jo, a disaffected event planner for a national association of doctors, travels to her estranged father’s New Jersey home after his death only to discover that, in addition to the detritus of his mostly solitary life, she has also inherited his pet unicorn. In “The Night Gardener,” Claudia prepares her small patch of yard for the local Horticultural Society’s City Gardens Contest in a near-future world wherein species after species is succumbing to extinction. When balloons carrying messages seemingly meant just for her begin to appear in her garden, Claudia switches her focus from bearing witness to a departing world to attempting to communicate with what lies just over the horizon between the living and the dead, the present and the unimaginable future. Bertino’s characters—largely women living through interstitial periods between love affairs (“Edna in Rain,”), during the death throes of marriages (“Can Only Houses Be Haunted?”), between accident and aftermath (“Lottie Woodside and the Diamond Dust Cher”)—are unique in their own right but also comfortable vessels for readers’

experiences of feeling adrift in a world that admits to no defining beginnings and no definitive ends. Even if the reader’s world does not include unicorns, semisentient balloons, or ex-lovers falling from the sky, it is a good bet the characters who experience these travails will remind us of our neighbors, our friends, even ourselves as we navigate their worlds in Bertino’s confident hands. Ardently whimsical, yet never centerless—solid stories about our tenuous times.

Shopgirls

Blau, Jessica Anya | Mariner Books (272 pp.)

$30.00 | May 6, 2025 | 9780063052352

A woman comes of age in FifthFloor Dresses at San Francisco’s upscale I. Magnin department store in the 1980s. There are a lot of things 19-year-old Zippy has never done: She’s never been to a school dance or on a date, never been told she’s pretty, had a real boyfriend, or had sex; and, until she met her current roommate, Raquel, never had a best friend, tried alcohol, or taken a cab. She’s never eaten an artichoke or been to Seattle or Sonoma; she’s never met her father or even known his name—she’s the product of a one-night stand and grew up in a tiny apartment over a liquor store, sleeping in the hallway after her mom married a man named Howard. Though no one has ever noticed Zippy’s obvious intelligence or suggested she apply to college, there is one area where this naïve people-pleaser shines, and that is selling clothes. The highlight of Blau’s latest is the vivid department store setting, from the Adrienne Vittadini and Bill Blass dresses to the individual saleswomen, the hold tags, the complaint cards. Those pesky complaint cards! Despite Zippy’s tireless work and top-selling status, there have been a flood of cards claiming she’s pushy and bossy, that she forces bras and shoes on customers, that people are afraid to return clothes while she’s there. How can

such a smart girl not immediately realize these must have been fabricated by a jealous colleague? Well, the other thing is that Zippy is profoundly insecure. Her low self-esteem is focused in particular on her appearance and her body, and this drives a subplot about dieting and weight loss. Though this coming-of-age story is not as edgy as some of the author’s earlier work, it still has plenty of unusual sex talk—a penis “so lumpy” it looks like “a miniature sack of kittens”; much discussion of holes, smells, and fluids; a venereal disease rumored to cause “fuzzy buttons” on a man’s testicles. AIDS, too, plays a role, though not an unduly serious one, in Zippy’s journey toward filling some of the gaps in her life.

A quirky fairy tale with a vibrantly realized setting and a wonderfully outrageous twist.

Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert

Bob the Drag Queen | Gallery Books/ Simon & Schuster (240 pp.) | $27.99 March 25, 2025 | 9781668061978

The famous abolitionist plots her comeback with the help of a hip-hop producer.

The literary debut by Bob the Drag Queen— Instagram star, Madonna concert emcee, and winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race —imagines a host of famous figures returning to life: Cleopatra is a fashion influencer, John D. Rockefeller is a robber baron all over again, and Harriet Tubman, a key figure in the Underground Railroad, wants to share her story via a Hamilton-style album. To assist, she’s assembled a backing band called the Freemans as well as the narrator, Darnell, a producer who’s down on his luck for reasons revealed later in the novel. For the moment, though, the project is an opportunity for him to “reconcile what it means to be Black, queer, and American all at once.” Bob doesn’t explain why Tubman’s resurrection has occurred, or why Tubman is, of all things, a musical

talent—the novel is mainly a thought exercise about what Tubman’s ferocity and determination might mean in our current moment. Conceptually, that’s intriguing, but eliding the whys and wherefores would be more forgivable if Bob’s treatment of the conceit wasn’t so simplistic. Insights into the horrors of slavery or pioneering drag figures like William Dorsey Swann are whittled down to observations slight even by the standard of Insta captions. (“I can’t even imagine the patience it must take to wait your turn for freedom. Hell, I don’t even like to sit through commercials on YouTube.”) The role of Quakers in the abolition movement is reduced to a blunt-smoking little person working as Tubman’s DJ. Some imagined lyrics are included, but descriptions of the creative process are shallow. (“She had written a song and wanted me to take a look at it, to see if it was any good. It was great.”) Bob is seemingly concerned that Tubman’s labors aren’t considered relevant to the current moment, but the novel exchanges sepia for cardboard. A well-intentioned but ill-executed speculative work.

The Book Club for Troublesome Women

Bostwick, Marie | Harper Muse (384 pp.) $18.99 paper | April 22, 2025 | 9781400344741

A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four uppermiddle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.

Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and

Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post ’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters. A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.

No One Knows

Dazai, Osamu | Trans. by Ralph McCarthy New Directions (256 pp.) | $15.95 paper Feb. 4, 2025 | 9780811239332

A collection of stories featuring female narrators amid the turbulence and upheavals of mid-20thcentury Japan. Though Dazai often drew from his own life in his novels—a life marked by alcoholism, drug addiction, and time in a mental institution—both the voice and perspective are different here. In every story, the first-person protagonist is a young woman, generally in her early-tomid-20s. Or younger, as in the day-in-the-life of “Schoolgirl,” one of the longest and best pieces. Proceeding

chronologically, the stories cover an expanse from the late 1930s to the late ’40s. Early on, the narrators struggle with the constraints of gender and class, or how the male author believes his female characters felt about such issues. (It can be difficult to tell whether some of the disgust expressed by his self-lacerating narrators represent their own or the author’s attitude toward being female.) The pivot arrives with “December 8,” a slice of Japanese life from the day after Pearl Harbor, when the everydayness seems pretty much the same as it did before. From here, it won’t, as all hell breaks loose in the subsequent stories. Amid the bombing of houses, the disappearance of spouses, and the disintegration of familial relations, conventional morality pretty much collapses. There are no happy endings or glimmers of hope. In “Osan” (1947), a young wife tries to hold her home and family together as she suspects that her husband has embarked on an affair that brings him no happiness. It ends with the narrator lamenting, “I can’t stop trembling—not with sorrow or anger so much as disgust with the absolute idiocy of it all.” The author died by drowning in 1948 at the age of 38, seemingly in a double suicide with the lover for whom he had abandoned his own family. Some of the earlier and lesser stories are merely diverting, but the longer and later ones are devastating.

Kirkus Star

My Darling Boy

Dufresne, John | Norton (288 pp.)

$29.99 | Jan. 14, 2025 | 9781324035732

A story of love, drugs, and hope. In Anastasia, Florida, Olney Kartheizer had been a doting father to his son, Cully, and a devoted husband to Kat, who eventually leaves him. The lad was a star athlete who could pitch with either hand and write in Spanish with one hand

while writing in English with the other. One day, he tells Olney he’s quitting sports because “fun will only get you so far.” Cully has some minor but painful accidents that lead to his use of OxyContin—or does the Oxy lead to the accidents? We never know, but the addictive poison wedges itself between father and son. Cully keeps asking his dad for money for one thing or another to “turn his life around,” and Olney is increasingly reluctant to give it. Cully tells his father he doesn’t need his approval and is “uncomfortable with constant parental proximity, preferring, himself, the bliss of distance.” Cully says he wishes his dad would treat him like a human being who has feelings, but Olney seems to be doing his best. Then Cully disappears, Olney looks for him and finally finds him—but not for long. The young man is on a self-destructive path, even getting fired from jobs such as sign twirling. His sometime girlfriend aptly calls him an “oxy moron,” one of the many examples of clever wordplay that help lighten the story. Olney, who doesn’t believe in God but likes to watch religious programs on TV, by chance meets Mireille Tighe, who is sweet, funny, and dying. Her throat is constricting from dysphagia, and soon she’ll be unable to swallow. “I intend to get to know you,” he tells her. “Better hurry up,” she replies. Readers will feel worse for this lovely woman than she does for herself, adding a layer of emotion atop the tale of filial loss. Olney could be any single father, any ordinary man who loves his child. But he spends a lot of time daydreaming about the past because that’s where he left his son. Meanwhile, does Olney love Cully only for who he was and not for who he is? Or is the love unconditional, as it may seem to the reader? Cully keeps leaving without a trace, and Olney keeps looking. And hoping. Deeply emotional and satisfying.

For more by John Dufresne, visit Kirkus online.

Kate & Frida

Fay, Kim | Putnam (288 pp.) | $28.00

March 11, 2025 | 9780593852385

A book order sent by letter from Paris to Seattle turns into a flourishing friendship.

It’s charming to encounter an epistolary novel these days. The once-popular form has fallen out of fashion in the age of digital communication, but Fay resuscitates it, setting her story in the early 1990s, the last possible time when it could be convincing. The letter writers are two young women, Kate Fair and Frida Rodriguez, who even meet through the mail. Kate works at Seattle’s Puget Sound Book Company and is given the task of answering a chatty letter Frida sends to the store ordering a copy of The Face of War, published in 1959 by journalist Martha Gellhorn. “I was told I’m the only person here who’s perky enough to respond to you,” she writes. Frida wants the book because, although she was raised in Los Angeles, she’s living in Paris with big dreams of becoming what she calls a War Journo Dame. Kate, too, wants to be a writer and has finished several novels without publishing any. Their correspondence quickly becomes a friendship, their letters full of their personal histories, current dreams, and romantic relationships. Kate falls for a depressive young novelist, while Frida follows a dashing war correspondent to Sarajevo under siege—and suddenly her letters become heartbreakingly serious, no longer lively reports on Paris cafes but stark descriptions of the horror of war. She returns to Paris, unsure whether she has the courage to be a War Journo Dame, but finds a new passion

working with refugees. Back in Seattle, Kate deals with her own losses and discoveries. Their voices remain distinct in the letters, often naïve, self-doubting, or overconfident, but authentically the voices of young women finding themselves. The book spans several years with lots of fun ’90s pop-culture details, and it often focuses on food, from peanut butter cookies to chiles rellenos, with several recipes included at the end. An old-fashioned form and two lively modern women make for an enjoyable novel.

Counting Backwards

Friedland, Jacqueline | Harper Muse (384 pp.) | $18.99 paper March 11, 2025 | 9781400347308

A contemporary woman’s quest to have a baby is interwoven with a historical legal case about involuntary sterilization.

In the present day, the narrator is Jessa Gidney, a young lawyer at a Manhattan law firm who lives in a posh Upper East Side apartment with her husband, Vance, a hunky finance guy. Sounds pretty sweet, but Jessa’s growing obsession with getting pregnant and her ongoing failure to do so are putting massive strain on her job and marriage. Orphaned when her parents died in a car crash, she was raised by her doting grandmother and feels driven to continue the family line. When she takes on a pro bono case helping Isobel Pérez, an undocumented immigrant, avoid deportation, she learns that while in detention her client was surgically sterilized without giving consent—and Isobel isn’t the only one. The book’s

The heart of the book is gossip about the power-hungry.

historical plot focuses on Carrie Buck, a real person who in 1927 was the plaintiff in the U.S. Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell. Carrie was born to a single mother, grew up in poverty, and had little education. After she was raped as a teenager, she bore a daughter who was immediately taken from her. She became a test case for a Virginia eugenics law that allowed the state to sterilize “promiscuous” or “feebleminded” women, with or without their consent. The court ruled the law was constitutional, and the eugenics theories it was based on became a foundation for the Holocaust. As Jessa passionately pursues Isobel’s case, she learns shocking secrets, some too close to home. For the first part of the book, the interlinked stories, the abuses of the women in the detention center, and the women’s engaging voices make a compelling combination. But in the last portion, the stories of Carrie and the immigrants drop into the background and Jessa takes over. Some of her successes, though, are unconvincing, and the plot ends up with too many loose ends.

An intriguing pair of plots about women’s reproductive rights starts off strong but goes astray.

Climbing in Heels

Goldsmith-Thomas, Elaine

St. Martin’s (384 pp.) | $29.00 April 29, 2025 | 9781250274786

A Jewish girl from the suburbs of Los Angeles relentlessly pursues her dream of becoming a top movie agent in this not-quite roman à clef.

Like many pieces of storytelling these days, this book begins with a death, the circumstances of which are withheld. The deceased is Beanie Rosen, age 35, “the most powerful agent in Hollywood.” The first chapter lays out how Beanie rose through the impossible muck of the male-dominated industry with two

women at her side, but at the moment of her death in 1995, these former roommates are no longer friends. What happened? For the next several chapters, the viewpoint alternates among the three: Beanie; Ella Gaddy, the free-spirited daughter of a traditional Southern family; and Mercedes Baxter, an Englishwoman on the make. None come from happy homes and all have interesting, specific beginnings. But once they all end up at the fictional Sylvan Light agency, the story mostly focuses on Beanie, with Ella being her support and Mercedes her enemy—the premise of the first chapter belied by the swiftness of Mercedes’ heel turn. It’s a shame to lose the two other perspectives, which give the story some roundness. But Beanie is smart, tenacious, and fun to watch. She’s a company girl to a fault and never admits defeat, even when everything is against her (and everything frequently is). Far too much is made of her zaftig body type, and readers should also note that sexual assault is de rigueur at Sylvan Light. The heart of the book, though, is gossip: agent politics and dirty dealings, actor name-drops, affairs left and right, power and the power-hungry. Overstuffed but juicy.

Bitterfrost

Gruley, Bryan | Severn House (304 pp.) $29.99 | April 1, 2025 | 9781448315406

Gruley returns to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for another round of bloody murder. Jimmy Baker has always had anger issues. His career as a minor league hockey player ended abruptly when he was ordered to go after opposing player Cory Richards, goaded Cory into punching him in order to juice his own adrenaline, and then nearly killed him. Divorced from his wife and separated from his daughter, Jimmy operates Zelda the Zamboni on the Calvin & Eleanor Payne Memorial Arena, home to the Bitterfrost IceKings. Trouble arrives in

the form of two guys from the Lower Peninsula who appear at the Lost Loon on a night when Jimmy mysteriously gets blood on his jacket, loses his all-important gloves, and goes to sleep only to wake up the next morning with no memory of that previous night. When one of the men turns up dead, all the circumstantial evidence points to Jimmy as his killer. Needing legal representation, Jimmy calls on his old friend Devyn Payne, a defense attorney, who persuades her wealthy mother, Eleanor, to post $250,000 for Jimmy’s bail. Being out of jail with an ankle monitor, however, offers him little relief, since the bodies continue to drop and Jimmy continues to get blamed for them. Gruley briskly alternates between Jimmy’s and Devyn’s perspectives and that of Det. Garth Klimmek, who painstakingly gathers evidence against Jimmy, as each of them does what they do over and over again until Jimmy goes on trial and sees Cory Richards appear to testify against him from his wheelchair. The fade-out seems to hint at a sequel, though it’ll be hard-pressed to keep up with the intensity Gruley maintains here.

A freezing, sobering exploration of the hero’s mantra that “every day’s a penance.”

The Pretender

Harkin, Jo | Knopf (496 pp.) | $30.00 April 22, 2025 | 9780593803301

A lumbering yarn of a once-andfuture British king, save that the future never quite materializes. How you gonna keep him down on the farm after he’s seen Dijon? John Collan, 10 years old when we meet him, is obsessed with ridding his farm hamlet of a devil goat that, he writes, “knocked me in the mud again today & has TRODDEN churlishly over my back.” John also keeps himself busy absorbing the folk wisdom of the simple Saxons among whom he lives, including a

cheesemaker with a salty tongue: “A fucking nuisance, she was,” she says of Joan of Arc. “I like to think Banbury cheese had a hand in her downfall.” Well, along comes a mysterious stranger who reveals that John is not who he thinks he is, but instead the tucked-away descendant of a murdered nobleman and, to boot, a claimant to the throne. Trouble is, the other claimants, among them the last of the Plantagenets and the first of the Tudors, have other ideas. John is hauled off to Oxford to learn his Latin and courtly manners and such. There, his kindly patron tells him, “Your real name is Edward, but we can’t use that yet. In letters we’ve coded you Lambert, so we may as well stick at that. You are Lambert Simons.” His education is polished in Burgundy and Ireland, where he finds love and intrigue, per historical fiction formula. Harkin’s tale is slow-moving, with often labored writing that makes for labored reading, and with a kind of half-commitment to using period language: “Sir James Butler has a maugre against the York kings. He picked the Lancastrian side in the great wars, the doddard.” Suffice it to say that at tale’s end, we’re glad to see John/ Lambert/Edward sail off for Spain. A middling entry in the library of medieval English historical fiction.

Saltwater

Hays, Katy | Ballantine (336 pp.) | $30.00 March 25, 2025 | 9780593875551

On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family. When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family,

hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed. A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.

Open, Heaven

Hewitt, Seán | Knopf (224 pp.) | $28.00 April 15, 2025 | 9780593802847

Twenty years later, an Irish man revisits his hometown, and his first love. In the prologue of Irish poet Hewitt’s debut novel, set in 2022, narrator James Legh has an insight: “Every time I looked into a lover’s eyes—even, I think, my

husband’s eyes—I wanted to see Luke’s eyes, green and urgent, holding me.” He decides to return to Thornmere, where he grew up and where, at the age of 16, he fell in love with a boy who was staying on a farm that was one of the stops on the early morning milk run, his first job. James is a deeply awkward and lonely boy, and coming out to his parents and classmates has only isolated him further. In addition to economic struggles, his parents have another hardship: James’s 5-year-old brother, Eddie—an adorable character, perfectly depicted—has a serious chronic illness that causes frequent, terrifying seizures. Over the next few months, James’ adolescent crush on Luke will completely consume him, leading to sublime tortures and tortuous sublimes and, finally, a critical crossroads of loyalty. Or, as James puts it, “I had come to find love, its vision, its company, to be changed by it, set free into its passionate balance, knowing that it would deplete me as much as it sustained, that it would torture me as much as it made life, the thing it threw into agony, worth living.” This is a poet’s novel, with as much nature writing as action and dialogue; Wordsworth meets Justin Torres in its aching intensity and passionate descriptions. Here is James regarding Luke as he thumbs through a porn mag: “I watched him, trying to trace any flicker of emotion or intent across his face, and all the green and golden light of the trees was washing over him, the leaves a lush blur behind him. Occasionally, a breeze would life and sway a branch, and make a lovely sighing sound, and then came the crinkling noise of a page being turned.” Readers looking for gorgeous language and richly developed atmosphere will be impressed and moved. A queer coming-of-age novel that achieves rare peaks of lyricism and emotional intensity.

Overkill

Jance, J.A. | Gallery Books/ Simon & Schuster (336 pp.) | $28.99

April 1, 2025 | 9781668035788

Arizona cybersecurity CFO Ali Reynolds juggles two far-flung cases—the murder of her husband’s former business partner in Washington and the stalking of her salesperson in California—that both strike uncomfortably close to home.

Talk about overkill. The night of his 60th birthday party, Video Games International owner Charles Brewster is murdered, stabbed 17 times while his second wife, Clarice, lies sleeping next to him in bed. Det. Raymond Horn, of Edmonds PD Homicide, wastes no time arresting Clarice, who admits she must have killed the husband who’d filed for divorce even though she can’t remember a thing about it. Adam Brewster, who’d left his father’s home 20 years earlier over his discovery that Chuck was sleeping with his first wife’s friend Clarice and Chuck’s discovery that Adam was gay, is sickened by the crime, which took place hours after his reconciliation with his father. So is B. Simpson, who’d co-founded VGI with Chuck. Ali, B.’s wife and partner in High Noon Enterprises, is convinced that Donna Jean Plummer—the longtime Brewster housekeeper the cops are trying to tie to the murder along with Clarice—is innocent, so she sets up a serious lawyer for Donna Jean. In the meantime, High Noon’s Camille Lee spots a suspicious man during a sales trip to Los Angeles and is convinced that he’s spotted her

>>>

A queer coming-of-age novel that achieves rare emotional intensity.

OPEN, HEAVEN

JOJO MOYES

The bestselling novelist laughs her way through the trials of middle age in We All Live Here.

BY KERRY WINFREY

Jojo Moyes never imagined her writing career would take her this far.

“Success came to me relatively late,” Moyes says. “I was not an overnight success by any stretch of the imagination. I’d written three books that didn’t get published before I had one published, and all I could think was that I finally got my name on a spine. I was so excited just to have published a book.”

Then came Me Before You , the 2012 novel that sold millions of copies worldwide. “Everything that has happened since then has so far exceeded any possible expectation I had for myself. I’m so grateful and so happy.” And then, with the sense of humor her readers have come to expect from her characters, she asks, “Does that sound really nauseating?”

Moyes has written about topics as varied as horseback librarians in 1930s Kentucky (2019’s The Giver of Stars) and London women who accidentally switch gym bags and wind up literally walking in one another’s shoes (2023’s Someone Else’s Shoes). With her latest, We All Live Here, she turns her focus to

one family’s chaotic but relatable life. The novel follows Lila Kennedy, a writer who published a successful book about keeping the spark alive in her long marriage…a mere two weeks before her husband left her. Now Lila lives with her two daughters and her stepdad while balancing endless home repairs, her next book, and an exciting (if confusing) new dating life. When her biological father shows up begging for a place to stay, things get a bit too crowded for comfort. The novel tackles grief, aging, parenting, and heartache, but always with Moyes’ signature warmth and her deeply human characters.

“I feel really strongly that my characters should be allowed to mess up,” Moyes says. “There isn’t a person among us that hasn’t made a couple of catastrophic decisions in their life. Humans are so good at assuming we understand what’s going on in somebody else’s head, but we’re really spectacularly bad at it. We mostly don’t have a clue.”

Moyes recently spoke with Kirkus via Zoom. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I like writing about ordinary women getting through stuff with messy lives and money worries.

Many of your books are written on a really large canvas, but in We All Live Here you zeroed in on one family. What drew you to this story? I’ve always wanted to write about a family that wasn’t the conventional “mom, dad, and 2.4 children” structure, because I didn’t grow up in that kind of family. I grew up with two stepbrothers, one half-brother, and two half-sisters. It may not be the typical family structure, but we all love each other.

Also, I’m in my 50s, and you do a lot of introspection in your 50s. One of the themes that comes up a lot, at least for me, is forgiveness. What do you let go of and what do you take forward? Lila is blind to the ways in which she’s going to reproduce her family’s past by taking it into the future. I wanted to examine whether she can see clearly enough to free herself and her family from that burden—but in a funny way.

Speaking of humor, there are so many heavy situations in We All Live Here —including Lila’s divorce and the loss of her mother—but you still manage to write about these struggles in a funny way. How do you balance humor with more serious topics?

I love when I read a book that can make me feel something, whether it makes me laugh or cry. We’re in a time that feels particularly dark, and I feel like the world is beset with a lot of challenges. What I want to do is address them in an indirect way and make people laugh while I do it, because my aim is to make people feel a little bit better.

It seems that women in midlife are having a moment in fiction. In We All Live Here, Lila’s agent says that “sexy menopause is all the rage right now.” A lot of readers are gravitating towards female characters who are beyond their 20s and 30s—what do you think is behind this, and what drew you to writing about a character at this turning point in her life? Well, I hope you’re right, because it’s a demographic that has been

We All Live Here

Moyes, Jojo

Pamela Dorman/Viking

464 pp. | $30.00 | Feb. 11, 2025

9781984879325

hideously underserved for decades. For years, the only mothers in fiction were dead or put-upon or being cheated on. What’s been great, especially for me as a woman in my middle years, is to see that women are being represented in a 360-degree way now. They can be funny, they can be childish, they can be annoying, they can be irritable, they can be highly functioning and also falling apart at the seams.

I like writing about ordinary women getting through stuff with messy lives and money worries. They have their moments of giddiness and their moments of sadness. I just try to write characters who are as fully fleshed out as the people that I know. When I look at the women around me, I see a kind of heroism. I see women who are managing finances, working all the time, taking care of everybody’s emotional needs, looking after

elderly parents, caring for young children, and stepping in when their friends need help. Not to say that men never do this, but I think there is a very particular female experience that comes with this age that I wanted to show without it looking like a grind. A lot of my friends are really silly, and I wanted to represent the kind of friendship where there’s silliness along with the serious stuff.

We All Live Here is full of so many vivid characters, like Lila’s stepfather, Bill (a lentil-obsessed health nut) and her biological father, Gene (an egocentric struggling actor). Who was your favorite character to write? Gene! Every now and then you get a character that just falls into your lap. It happened in Me Before You with Will and Lou, it happened in The Giver of Stars with Margery, and it’s happened in this book with Gene. He’s this really fun combination of ego, childishness, kindness, and impulsivity. He’s basically just a big man-baby who’s never had to grow up. And as someone who’s worked in Hollywood a bit, one of the things you see is that acting is a profession where people don’t always have to grow up or take responsibility. Gene is the absolute extreme version of that, but as the book goes on, you realize that there’s more to him than you thought.

What do you hope readers take away from We All Live Here? Firstly, a bit of joy because I think we’re all in dire need of it at the moment. The Giver of Stars was a very serious book to write, and it kind of pulled everything out of me. I felt like my entrails were in that book. Since then, I’ve wanted to write something lighter. I want people to finish this book feeling a bit better about human beings and life in general, and perhaps with a bit of an understanding that what you see isn’t always what’s going on behind the scenes.

Kerry Winfrey is the author of Waiting for Tom Hanks and other titles.

too. With the help of Frigg, High Noon’s AI, Camille and Ali identify the suspect as Bulgarian trafficker Bogdan Petrov. But what designs could he possibly have on Camille? As usual, the reliable Jance emphasizes methodical investigative work and domestic subplots over splashy surprises. Two rewarding cases don’t amount to overkill at all.

The Fantasies of Future Things

Jones, Doug | Simon & Schuster (288 pp.) $27.99 | April 22, 2025 | 9781668016282

As Atlanta prepares for the 1996 Olympics, two young Black men deal with challenges at work and in their personal lives. Jacob is a Brooklyn native, staying on in Atlanta after graduating from Morehouse to take a job with a real estate developer who has won the contract to “revitaliz[e]” (aka destroy and gentrify) the Black neighborhoods near the Olympic Village. He knows he’s gay, but has had very little experience and has not come out to his parents. He works closely with Daniel, an Atlanta native whose white mother has recently died without ever having explained to him how he is Black while his siblings and her husband are all white. Daniel, too, is dealing with confusion about his sexuality. As the book lays it out, in characteristically passionate prose, “Was a life—this life —between two Black men possible? Two Black men in love and protecting each other against whatever was out there in the world, moving together toward an unknown future?” The dual aspirations of this debut novel—to create a detailed, fact-based portrait of Atlanta on the cusp of change and to depict the pressures on gay Black men coming of age in the 1990s—are both realized, the former with detailed research about the specific neighborhoods involved, the latter with intense

dramatic situations and inner monologues. Anger breaks through in fistfights, verbal showdowns, and a near-riot. Sometimes, the author seems not to trust us to keep the stakes and the big picture in mind. In the middle of a conversation with a new man in his life, Jacob begins ruminating on “the conversation that lurked just beneath their discussion” and “the unvoiced masculinity code,” themes already strongly articulated in the novel. During a tense meeting in the school principal’s office about a teacher who has made a remark about Daniel’s parentage, obviously different than his siblings’, it occurs to Daniel’s mother that “life roamed beyond them in that office— wild, reckless, unpredictably wonderful and unexpected. Life, large and sweeping, filled with gasps of intensity and excitement.” These are lovely observations but seem unlikely to have occurred to her in the moment. Another issue is that Jacob and Daniel’s boss, a white woman, is a two-dimensional villain, though her portrayal is explicitly linked to “the history of what little Black boys and little white girls have always been told about each other.”

An ambitious and heartfelt debut.

Ruth Run

Kaufman, Elizabeth | Penguin Press (304 pp.) $29.00 | April 15, 2025 | 9780593832646

Readers are asked to root for an unrepentant thief in this first novel, a jokey cybercrime thriller. Ruth, a hacker of microchips, would say that she isn’t the worst kind of thief: “I skimmed chump change from banks. Are you really going to side with a bank?” Mike, formerly a salesman who worked with Ruth and now a clock puncher for what he calls “the Agency,” has spent seven years on Ruth’s trail. At some point during the car chase that brings Ruth and her nearly 3 pounds of stolen cash from Northern California to Nevada and

beyond, she learns that she’s being framed in the double murder of her coding assistant and his boyfriend. Ruth and Mike’s cat-and-mouse act has an odd, couplelike tetchiness: Ruth considers Mike “a self-important jerk” and “a government flunky”; Mike sees Ruth as “an almost pathologically nonconformist spirit” who “dressed badly” and who, for all the good trying to elude him will do her, “might as well have tried to hide from the sky.” Cat and mouse take turns narrating this cunning and constantly surprising novel, giving readers a passenger-seat view from which to witness each adversary’s missteps and monitor their weaknesses. (Ruth’s kryptonite: food and the dog she picks up on the road. Mike’s kryptonite: Ruth.) Luddite readers will miss some of the novel’s finer points, but underneath all its talk of microchips, databases, and firewalls is a character-fueled story in which a bit of heart occasionally seeps out from between the cracks in Ruth’s armor, or at least tries to: “I reminded myself that life was about more than money; what money could buy also mattered.” No tech expertise required to enjoy this diverting and funny-as-hell cyber caper.

Never Flinch

King, Stephen | Scribner (448 pp.) $22.40 | May 27, 2025 | 9781668089330

Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped? In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular

Knight explores the painful and exhilarating experience of growing up.

THE LIFE CYCLE OF THE COMMON OCTOPUS

feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is. Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.

The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus

Knight, Emma | Pamela Dorman/ Viking (384 pp.) | $29.00

Jan. 7, 2025 | 9780593830451

While attending the University of Edinburgh in 2006, a young woman is taken in by an enigmatic family as she discovers secrets about her own.

Penelope Winters is far away from her Toronto home as a freshman at the University of Edinburgh. But it isn’t only education that drew Pen abroad—she knows that her divorced parents have been keeping secrets from her, and she thinks that her father’s estranged best friend, a mystery writer named Elliot Lennox who lives in Scotland, may be able to shine some light on the mysteries of her past. After spending a weekend with the Lennox family, Pen falls in love with them—including their handsome son Sasha. But as Pen balances getting to know the Lennoxes with trying to uncover her own family’s hidden mysteries, she’s also dealing with the many firsts that come along with living on her own at university. She and her best friend, Alice, a fellow Canadian, navigate exams, sex, and independence as their friendship grows and changes. In her fiction debut, Knight delicately explores the painful and exhilarating experience of growing up, which for Pen includes falling in love for the first time and realizing that her parents are flawed human beings. This is largely Pen’s story, and while the occasional point-of-view shifts do add depth, they

are sometimes a bit disorienting. However, the charming characters, Pen’s personal growth, and a nostalgic portrait of campus life make this an altogether enjoyable read.

A lovely and poignant coming-of-age story.

City of Smoke and Sea

Márquez, Malia | Red Hen Press (168 pp.) | $16.95 paper March 18, 2025 | 9780963952837

A young woman struggling through a series of setbacks finds herself involved in a murder investigation surrounding her beloved grandmother’s death.

All narrator Queenie Rivers ever wanted to do was write. But once she drops out of college and leaves New York for LA with her deadbeat boyfriend, everything goes wrong. Stuck working jobs she hates for more years than she’d have liked, a car accident almost claims her life. Gran, her Roma grandmother, takes care of her and helps her land a “recovery” job at a restaurant owned by a shadowy friend named Wyatt Jones. Queenie’s world turns upside down yet again when she walks into Gran’s house one day to find her grandmother dead on the kitchen floor. Shattered and in need of answers, she begins reading Gran’s secret journal and talking to Wyatt and his mysterious friends. Weaving realism, history, and fantasy, Márquez takes readers on a journey through co-extant layers of reality. The two most mundane involve Gran’s immigrant journey to Los Angeles and the murder investigation. The third and most extraordinary follows both Gran and Queenie’s involvement with beings who control the air, earth, water, and more, and who recognize Gran as one of their own. In Márquez’s skilled hands, a murder mystery filled with intriguing characters and wondrous twists becomes a richly compelling narrative about a woman’s encounter with—and acceptance of—the gifts of

For more by Stephen King, visit Kirkus online.

her own imagination as she seeks truths about her past, herself, and her place in “the ebb and flow of existence.”

A unique multilayered story that will enchant readers with its blend of magic, mystery, and fabulist fantasy.

Famous Last Words

McAllister, Gillian | Morrow/ HarperCollins (336 pp.) | $30.00 Feb. 25, 2025 | 9780063338425

When her husband is accused—and seems guilty—of committing a violent crime, Camilla Deschamps must decide whether she truly believes in his goodness and innocence. In the sweet—and sometimes challenging—blur of her first nine months of motherhood, bookworm Cam has found domestic joy with her daughter, Polly, and her husband, Luke, as well as enough downtime to do some pleasure reading, so she’s nervous about returning to her job at a London literary agency. Her first day back certainly doesn’t turn out as she imagines: Unable to find Luke, she drops Polly off at day care and goes to work. When Luke doesn’t answer her texts for hours, she starts to worry. Then, on a television in her office, she sees live footage of an ongoing siege at a nearby warehouse—and realizes her husband seems to have taken three people hostage. Several hours later, despite the intervention of Niall Thompson, a trained police hostage negotiator, two of those three people will be dead, and Luke will be in the wind. Seven years pass, and while both Cam and Niall seem to have moved on in various ways, they’re both tethered to the memories and pain of that June afternoon. Niall’s wife left him that same day, and ever since he’s been troubled with dreams of the gunshots that destroyed not only the lives of the hostages, but also his career. Cam

A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.

THE CRASH

finds joy in Polly’s growth, but she can’t let go of her love for her husband—and her deep-rooted belief that he must still be out there, and may have an explanation for everything. Cam’s fierce love for Luke is admirable, but it also feels somewhat naïve, even as she and Niall begin to uncover discrepancies and coincidences about that day and the weeks leading up to it, many of which seem like quite a narrative stretch. The sweet mundanity of Cam and Luke’s “before” relationship is the true treasure of the book, as is the tension of the early chapters. McAllister asks us to consider whether blind faith in those we love is always justified—and worth the cost.

Shines most when asking complicated questions; as a thriller, it’s a little too neat.

The Crash

McFadden, Freida | Poisoned Pen (384 pp.) $14.39 paper | Jan. 28, 2025 | 9781464227325

A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare. Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s

cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a firstperson-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.

Soapy, suspenseful fun.

For more by Freida McFadden, visit Kirkus online.

Kirkus Star

Atavists

Millet, Lydia | Norton (256 pp.) | $27.99

April 22, 2025 | 9781324074410

A group of characters in Los Angeles face climate crisis and existential angst in 14 interconnected short stories. Two families stand at the center of Millet’s lovely, keening tales: Buzz, Amy, and their children Liza and Nick; and single mother Helen with daughters Mia and Shelley. They are well-educated, middle-class, liberal Americans, appalled by the state of their country and, in the case of the parents, bemused by their children. The younger generation “seemed to be void of ideology. Beyond naming and shaming each other for perceived identity bias,” comments Trudy, another character who turns up in several stories. This isn’t entirely true of Liza, who impulsively married a “DACA kid,” Luis, while still in high school, or Nick, a Stanford grad enraged by Americans’ complacency in the face of the “fivealarm emergency” of climate catastrophe and impending global extinction. “What we need,” he tells his therapist, “is a worldwide revolution. Yesterday.” Nonetheless, he’s stocking shelves in a big-box store and bartending in a gay bar, and his attitude of “what can I do?” is shared by most of Millet’s wonderfully human, believably flawed characters. A few creeps turn up—there’s one in “Pastoralist,” about a man who preys on vulnerable women, and another in “Cultist,” where Shelley’s smug boyfriend, Jake, spouts “pieces of pat received wisdom from business school” to her amused mother and the horrified Nick, who has become Mia’s boyfriend over the course of the stories. But generally, the author is gentle with confused, well-meaning people immobilized by the scope of the apocalypse they see looming. As she did in such novels as Dinosaurs (2022) and

A Children’s Bible (2020), Millet blends a blunt assessment of our refusal to deal with the ecological catastrophes we have created and a tender portrait of human beings with all their foibles. Sharply observed, beautifully rendered, and heartbreaking.

When the Harvest Comes

Norris, Denne Michele | Random House (304 pp.) | $28.00

April 15, 2025 | 9780593729601

A gay man must confront his painful past in this debut novel. As Norris’ novel opens, Davis Freeman, a Black violist, is eagerly awaiting his upcoming wedding to his white boyfriend, Everett, who works in a wealth management firm. Davis is head-overheels for his partner: “Everett is anywhere, everywhere, his presence heard and felt with the matter- offactness of air, trees, and water.” The two gather with Everett’s family at a beachside home in Montauk where they’re set to be wed. The ceremony goes well, but during the reception, Davis’ sister tells him that their father—whom they both call “the Reverend,” and from whom Davis has long been estranged—has been in a serious car accident. The Reverend dies, and Davis skips the funeral, finding it difficult to navigate his feelings about the man who reacted with rage on finding out his son was gay. Davis’ struggle affects his marriage to Everett and his relationship with his sister, who has been hiding a secret of her own. This is a novel filled—overfilled—with emotion, and Norris slips into a maudlin register too often; there are also a few unfortunate cliches. (When Davis finds out about his father’s car accident, he drops the champagne flute he’s holding.) Norris’ dialogue is strong, but she seems committed to telling rather than showing; one wishes

she would trust the characters to move the story forward with their words. There is no denying this book is bursting with heart, but it reads like a melodrama trying to be a social novel. A novel brimming with emotion but hamstrung by its sentimentality.

The Sea Gives Up the Dead

Olguín, Molly | Red Hen Press (152 pp.) $16.95 paper | April 29, 2025 | 9781636282718

Death is only one of many transformations in this enchanting debut story collection, which won the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction. Olguín’s characters shed their genders; they anglicize their names; they ascend to sainthood; they yearn to leave their human bodies behind, metamorphosing into mermaids. The book’s opening story announces this theme: “Here is the truth: everyone has but a single death to give to God…This is also the truth: Roque Contreras and his family died seven times in three years, with only one grave to show for it.” Here, as in many of the other stories, some of these transformations defy human reason. After Roque’s son is hit by a car and everyone is certain the boy is dead, he manages to peel himself off the pavement and return home, more worried about the damage to his beloved bicycle than his body. Other transformations, though less permanent than death, are no less profound, as in the deeply affecting “The Sea Gives Up the Dead,” a story set in the aftermath of World War II about a mother traveling to France to say goodbye to her dead son, only to get a second chance to see him if she is willing to let go of her idea of who he should be. Throughout, Olguín brilliantly queers more traditional tales and the conventional roles that women often play in fiction. The price of consummated desire is not death for the women in “The Princess Wants for Company,” and in the

standout, “The Undertaker’s Dogs,” the protagonist’s reluctance to mother her boyfriend’s dog’s fragile puppies seems entirely sensible. Though a few pieces fall short, Olguín is a transporting writer whose stories are gripping from the opening sentences to the last lines. Stories that affirm the value of truly being alive.

Kirkus Star

Luminous

Park, Silvia | Simon & Schuster (400 pp.) $29.99 | March 11, 2025 | 9781668021668

The lives of two estranged siblings—one a detective in the Robot Crimes Unit and the other a worldclass robot programmer— collide when a robot goes missing in a unified Korea. Jun, the cop, is a veteran of the “so-called Bloodless War” that united North and South. He’s also trans, and a recovering virtual-reality addict. His younger sister, Morgan, is a lonely corporate pawn gunning for her shine at Imagine Friends, the Apple of a thriving neurobiology industry. Both struggle with the burden of their father’s pioneering career in technology along with tremendous grief for Yoyo, the robot brother he introduced into their family when they were children and then took away without explanation. It turns out that Yoyo lives, unbeknownst to his first family, in a nearby junkyard, where a young girl named Ruijie finds him and recognizes how special he is even in a world now replete with robots. Both Jun and Ruijie are disabled, from war injuries and illness respectively, and use robowear, a bionic existence which offers them added kinship with these new members of society. The speculative world Park creates feels remarkably robust: The robot revolution mirrors the way smartphones fundamentally altered modern life in less than a decade and the post-war landscape erupts with

familiar tensions around immigrants, refugees, class, civility, violence, and security. There are some problems: The story suffers from an unnecessary withholding of information early on, as well as an overwhelming number of complications. Worldbuilding is one thing—and this world is indeed extraordinarily imagined—but the narrative bulges with tedious scenes and dialogue, questionable structural choices, and too many characters with little import. Still, the second half more than makes up for the misses of the first. Stay with this one for the big philosophical questions it asks about the nature of God, souls, humanity, politics, power, purpose, consciousness, memory, death, and, of course, love. Park is nothing if not ambitious, and the sheer scope of the endeavor is the reward. While stylish, the single word title doesn’t do the breadth of the novel justice. A messy, visionary debut.

Something in the Walls

Pearce, Daisy | Minotaur (304 pp.)

$28.00 | Feb. 25, 2025 | 9781250334381

A fledgling British psychologist tries to unravel a teen’s mysterious affliction in a Cornwall community gripped by the occult.

Six years after the death of her brother, Eddie, Mina Ellis is still haunted by memories that have been mercifully ameliorated by her attendance at a bereavement support group. There she meets empathetic journalist Sam Hunter, who hires her to do background research on a story he’s covering for the Western Herald. Though she’s professionally inexperienced, Mina has recently gotten her degree in psychology. Since she’s also feeling secretly uncertain about her upcoming marriage to the brusque Oscar, the assignment, which sends her to the bucolic parish of Banathel, provides a welcome getaway. The subject is Alice Webber, a bedridden teenager who

believes she’s possessed by a witch. Parents Lisa and Paul are warmly supportive, but siblings Tamsin and Billy are frustrated and skeptical. The womblike aura of the household makes Mina homesick. Her arrival disturbs the parish, which has a long history of sorcery-related tragedy (think The Wicker Man), and a clutch of citizens visits the Webbers to demand that she leave. Shortly after Mina becomes convinced that Alice’s malady is psychological, the arrival of Alice’s nemesis, Vicky Matherson, triggers a horrific incident that shocks everyone. Pearce’s firstperson narrative compellingly captures Mina’s mental fragility, the swirling anxiety simmering beneath even her most mundane human interactions and intensified by the heatwave that’s gripping Britain, marked by brown grass that’s a metaphor for her dark psyche. Can Mina trust her own analyses? A taut tale that chillingly intertwines psychological and supernatural suspense.

That’s What She Said

Pilcher, Eleanor | Avon/HarperCollins (368 pp.) $18.99 paper | April 15, 2025 | 9780063412101

When Beth, a 28-year-old demisexual virgin, decides it’s high time to take control of her sex life and see what all the fuss is about, she turns to Serena, her bisexual best friend, for guidance. It’s clear from the opening pages of Pilcher’s debut novel that, though Beth and Serena are best friends, roommates, and generally attached at the hip, they could not be more different from one another. Beth is a socially awkward people-pleaser who struggles to feel like she fits in both at work and with her friends. Serena, on the other hand, oozes self-confidence in day-to-day life and on the dating scene. When Beth decides she finally wants to cash in her v-card, Serena is more than happy to help her out on her sexual odyssey. But

what begins as a lighthearted comedy of errors ranging from speed dating to hiring an escort soon throws both the women’s worlds and their longstanding platonic friendship into disarray. A crush from Beth’s work begins to show interest in a way she wasn’t expecting and Serena’s casual hookup asks to be more than just friends with benefits. While the writing is messy at times, its messiness effectively reflects the state of Beth and Serena’s lives as they navigate the strains on their friendship as well as their individual romantic endeavors. Pilcher manages to capture what it feels like to be adrift and unsure of what comes next on the cusp of 30 in a way readers of all ages will find easy to relate to. The end result is a charming spin on the coming-of-age novel that examines the nuances of sexuality, modern dating, and, perhaps most importantly, female friendship.

A charming novel that examines the complexities of female relationships, both platonic and romantic.

Major Arcana

Pistelli, John | Belt Publishing (344 pp.) | $24.95 paper | April 22, 2025 | 9781953368928

T he kids are not all right—but neither, to be clear, are the adults.

In a place known only as “Steel City,” first-year student Jacob Morrow shoots himself through the right eye on his university’s campus. His friend Ash del Greco, an unusual and nihilistic junior whose face bears a spiral scar, films the act. Both are enrolled in Studies in the Graphic

Novel, a class taught by Simon Magnus, author of “those insane comic books with the sodomy and the exploding fetuses and whatnot” and “the first member of the English faculty to declare publicly…that Simon Magnus was party to no gender and would henceforward use ‘they/them’ pronouns” before denouncing personal pronouns altogether. Over the course of one summer, about 20 years prior, Simon Magnus wrote the comic Overman 3000 in the company of Marco Cohen, the comic’s artist; Ellen Chandler, Simon Magnus’ editor at VC Comics and romantic partner; and Diane del Greco, Marco Cohen’s wife (who will later be Ash’s mother), an occasion that brings profound career and personal consequences. Pistelli eschews linear storytelling to describe these characters and others—including Jacob Morrow’s grieving mother, Jessica, and a close friend with whom Ash del Greco embarks on a tumultuous exploration of gender in high school—at different points in their lives, charting interconnections that will eventually lead back to the circumstances of Jacob Morrow’s noteworthy suicide. In addition to writing with a stylistically heavy hand (all characters are almost exclusively referred to by both their first and last names, for example), the author doles out extensive digressions and critiques, often satirical in their exaggeration, about a wide range of hot-button topics: In addition to gender, there’s political correctness, tarot, suicidal ideation, and advancing technology, to name a few. This unrelenting approach will undoubtedly alienate some readers, but others will be enthralled. Pistelli pulls off a few notable narrative surprises along the way, too.

A rich and enriching novel, for readers who persist through its challenges.

The kids are not all right—but neither, to be clear, are the adults.

MAJOR ARCANA

Kills Well With Others

Raybourn, Deanna | Berkley (368 pp.)

$29.00 | March 11, 2025 | 9780593638514

Four talented assassins combine their skills in order to survive what they’d expected to be a peaceful retirement.

Billie, Mary Alice, Natalie, and Helen— 60something women who long worked for the clandestine organization known as the Museum—are already underappreciated because of ageism. After having spent years working alone and together, they’re supposed to be retired. When they receive postcards summoning them to Williamsburg, Virginia, they hope it has something to do with their pensions, which were canceled when the Museum decided to kill them—a plan that luckily failed in Killers of a Certain Age (2022). Emerging from their accommodations, which are far from high-end, to meet their former boss, Naomi, they learn that another retired member of the Museum has just been murdered. A black wolf carving found in her hand suggests that the motive may be connected to a 40-year-old case. The four are assigned an off-the-books job killing Pasha Lazarov, the son of one of their earlier targets, before he kills them. Pasha is traveling to England aboard the Queen Mary 2 . Not until after they come up with a clever plan to knock him off do they learn that it’s his sister, Galina, long thought dead, who’s actually pursuing them. Delighted to be back at their old job despite their bickering and squabbling, they relive past cases as they travel to several unsavory European and Egyptian spots in search of Pasha’s murderous sister and end up involved in an art theft case that dates back to the Third Reich.

A nonstop-action thriller that’s often disconcertingly funny in posing moral questions about the murder of horrible people.

The Float Test

Strong, Lynn Steger | Mariner Books (320 pp.)

$28.99 | April 8, 2025 | 9780063390737

In the wake of their mother’s death, a Florida family regroups.

Strong’s fourth novel, set over two recent summer months in a wealthy area of Florida, is defined by an unusual decision: The third-oldest of the four Kenner siblings, Jude, is its omniscient narrator. At one point, there is a parenthetical acknowledgement of how weird this is: “A lot of what I’m saying here I found out later; the rest, as Fred would say, I’ve imagined my way into, because why not.” The reason Fred, short for Winnifred, would say this is that she, the second child, is the writer in the family, and her published books have been the source of difficulty and estrangement. With the story she tells here, Jude is effectively taking back the narrative, describing Fred’s (and everyone else’s) experiences in Florida so intimately that one has to keep reminding oneself that this is Jude’s story and trying to recall which woman goes with which husband or ex-husband, etc., and that Jude is largely offstage in New York. As the novel opens, the children’s mother has had a stroke while running and died two days later. Jude and her youngest sibling, George, come to town for the funeral; George remains at their parents’ house for the rest of the novel. One of the things Jude “found out later” is why he didn’t want to go home to Houston. Another such thing is that at the “party that was not a party” after the funeral, Fred found a gun in their mother’s dresser drawer. The story of this gun,

both in the past and the present, is the closest thing the novel has to a throughline, and the suspicion that it must at some point be discharged proves true. Every one of the many characters, including the dead mother, has backstories and subplots and friends and associates. Threaded through it all is bad news about the Floridian landscape and climate that plays little role in the plot. An abundance of good writing and interesting storylines and environmental information, but not much to tie it together.

The Emperor of Gladness

Vuong, Ocean | Penguin Press (416 pp.)

$27.00 | May 13, 2025 | 9780593831878

A young man’s path to redemption runs through a New England chain restaurant. Hai, the hero of Vuong’s ambitious second novel—following On Earth

We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019)—is a 19-year-old college dropout and painkiller addict prepared to kill himself by leaping off a bridge in East Gladness, a rural Connecticut town. He’s coaxed to safety by Grazina, an 82-year-old woman with dementia, and soon he becomes her in-home support; with the help of a cousin, Sony, he lands a job at HomeMarket, a fast-casual joint. This is an unlikely milieu for a novel about the long consequences of violence, but that’s what Vuong strives for: In poetic, somber prose, he contemplates Grazina’s memories of escaping her native Lithuania under Stalin’s purges,

A young man’s path to redemption runs through a chain restaurant.

THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS

the U.S. Civil War (Sony is obsessed with battles and the film Gettysburg), and his own family’s escape from Vietnam to America. The book is filled with some brilliant set pieces: A harrowing scene where Hai and his co-workers slaughter pigs for extra cash, his boss’s ill-fated attempt to launch a career as a pro wrestler, and moments where Hai soothes Grazina in the midst of her dementia by pretending to be a U.S. Army sergeant helping her escape Stalin’s clutches. And throughout, Hai serves as a sponge absorbing America’s worst elements: addiction, racism, and the urge to feign hollow successes. (He routinely lies to his mother, who believes he’s thriving in med school.) The references to Slaughterhouse-Five and The Brothers Karamazov underscore Vuong’s interest in exploring war and morality, but this is remarkable as a novel that tries to look at those themes outside of conventional realism or combat porn. It’s a messy but worthy exploration of how hurt and self-deception leaches into everyday life.

A sui generis take on the surprising and cruel ways violence is passed on across generations.

The Staircase in the Woods

Wendig, Chuck | Del Rey (400 pp.) | $30.00 April 29, 2025 | 9780593156568

Four kids who swore an oath of friendship reunite as adults to face their fears.

The foundation of this novel is a consciously employed trope about messed-up kids, from the Losers Club in Stephen King’s It (1986) to more recent groupings of youth gone wrong in everything from Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids (2017) to Gerard Way’s The Umbrella Academy comic-book series. Here, it’s five kids from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, circa 1998: charismatic Matty, cynical Nick, carefree Hamish, cool-ahead-of-her-time Lore-néeLauren, and nervous nail-biter Owen. Each burdened with terrible families, they

Kirkus Star

create a pact, the Covenant: “It’s how they’re there for each other. How they’ll do anything for each other. Get revenge. Take a beating. Do what needs doing.” But when they discover the titular staircase during a camping trip and their impulsive leader Matty disappears while climbing it, the band breaks up. Decades later, Lore is a successful game designer, having abandoned Owen to his anxieties, while Hamish has become a family man and Nick is dying of pancreatic cancer. When he invokes their pact, the surviving members reassemble at a similar anomaly in the woods to make sense of it all. Climbing another staircase into a liminal space marked with signs saying “This place hates you,” among other things, our not-so-merry band suddenly finds themselves trapped in a haunted house. There’s plenty of catnip for horror fans as these former kids work their way through shifting set pieces—rooms where children were tortured, murdered, and worse, including some tailored specifically to them—but the adversary ultimately leaves something to be desired. The book isn’t as overtly gothic as Black River Orchard (2023) or as propulsive as his techno-thrillers, but Wendig has interesting things to say about friendship and childhood trauma and its reverberations. Lore gets it, near the end: “We’re all really fucked up and just trying to get through life, and it’s better when we do it together instead of alone.”

A flawed but visceral take on shared trauma and the fragility of friendship when we aren’t just kids anymore.

The Human Scale

Wright, Lawrence | Knopf (448 pp.)

$30.00 | March 11, 2025 | 9780593537831

In Wright’s latest topical novel, the murder of an Israeli police chief in a West Bank settlement inflames tensions, ultimately leading to the October 7 massacre. When FBI agent Tony Malik, whose father is Palestinian, travels to the historic

city of Hebron to attend a cousin’s wedding, he’s still recovering from a bomb explosion that left him with erratic memory loss. His sense of disorientation deepens when, drawn into the investigation of the chief’s murder—after having been falsely named a suspect—he encounters extreme forms of violence, hatred, and inhumanity on both sides of the conflict. Teamed with hardline Israeli cop Yossi Ben-Gal, he soon recognizes that anyone could have killed the police chief, whose pacifist leanings may have cost him his life. Asked whether he’s worried about dangerous activities in Gaza, Yossi dismisses them as “some virus that pops up every few years, sometimes deadly, sometimes you hardly notice, like the difference between a cold and the flu.” No one, including Malik, is safe in this hostile environment, where religious leaders financed by drug money call for the destruction of the enemy and a “human scale” determines the value of a life, as in one abducted Israeli being worth 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Lacking the deep literary expression of a Robert Stone, Wright falls short of capturing “the implacable darkness of human nature” (though he comes close in having the slain chief’s missing head become a pawn in a deadly game), and he frequently slips into didacticism. But the book, based on the author’s years of reporting in the region, is fully believable—and full of suspense. “What nobody outside understands is the real enemy is not each other,” says one of many ill-fated characters. “It is peace we hate.”

A timely and gripping novel that works best as a political thriller.

The Haunting of Room 904

Wurth, Erika T. | Flatiron Books (320 pp.) $28.99 | March 18, 2025 | 9781250908599

things about this novel is Wurth’s refusal to waste time on extreme worldbuilding or overly complicated stage-setting. She jumps headfirst into the action involving paranormal investigator Olivia Becente, whose clients are being plagued by a series of hauntings. Yes, there is an afterlife, and from it arise spirits demanding the attention of the living. Are they angry? Vengeful? Trying to impart a vital message that shouldn’t be ignored? Olivia, who lives and works with Alejandro, her gay best friend, isn’t sure of their motives. But she quickly comes to understand that her sister, Naiche, who died under shocking circumstances in a Denver hotel room several years earlier, is somehow involved in the hauntings. A woman dies by suicide in that room every few years, and possibly involved in this mysterious, bloody manifestation are a suspicious cult, Olivia’s abusive ex, and a local journalist who seems determined to paint Olivia as a fraud. Wurth also weaves in the history of the Sand Creek Massacre, an 1864 atrocity in which U.S. troops murdered more than 200 Cheyenne and Arapahoe people, mostly women, children, and the elderly. She handles the memories of the massacre interspersed through Olivia’s narrative with great sensitivity, and her portrayal of Olivia’s grief, guilt, and regret over her sister’s death rings painfully true. The novel does grow slightly convoluted, and a few developments, like the sudden arrest of Olivia’s ghost-sleuthing partner, are more difficult to believe than the presence of the furious ghosts. But Wurth makes up for any missteps with her compassion and her insistence on the importance of families, whether they’re related by blood or not.

A Native American paranormal investigator finds herself caught up in a series of hauntings that may include her dead sister. One of the most refreshing

A scary but sensitive story that never loses its compassion for real-life horrors.

For more by Erika T. Wurth, visit Kirkus online.

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Glimpses of a Fictional

By Eiren Caffall

By Fernando A. Flores

By Julia Kornberg;

Jack Rockwell & Julia Kornberg

Ali Smith

Erika Swyler

SEEN AND HEARD

New Novel

by Patricia Lockwood

Coming This Fall

Riverhead will publish Will There Ever Be Another You  in September.

Patricia Lockwood’s second novel is coming later this year, Elle reports.

Riverhead will publish the poet and novelist’s Will There Ever Be Another You in the fall. The press describes the book as a “vertiginous novel about a woman’s descent into illness and insanity.”

Patricia Lockwood

Lockwood made her literary debut in 2012 with the poetry collection Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and followed that up two years later with another collection, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. In 2017, she published a memoir, Priestdaddy, which was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and released her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, a Booker Prize finalist and Dylan Thomas Prize winner, in 2021.

Will There Ever Be Another You will follow a young woman whose life is thrown into disarray after she becomes ill during a global pandemic. Lockwood told Elle that the novel was inspired by her own experience contracting Covid-19 early in the pandemic, an experience she previously wrote about in an essay for the London Review of Books

“Even in the most cognitively lowered state that I was in, there was something that was still there that was myself,” she told Elle. “There was this figure that persisted. You can stand in the corner of the room of your own body and watch. That’s how it felt.”

Will There Ever Be Another You is scheduled for publication on Sept. 23.—MICHAEL SCHAUB

For a review of No One Is Talking About This, visit Kirkus online.

David Levenson/Getty Images

Matt Bomer Narrates New A Little Life Audiobook

The actor has lent his voice to Hanya Yanagihara’s Kirkus Prize– winning novel.

Matt Bomer has lent his voice to a new audiobook edition of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, Penguin Random House Audio has announced. Yanagihara’s novel, published in 2015 by Doubleday, follows four college classmates living in New York whose lives are affected by the past trauma of one of them. The book won the Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Booker Prize; in a starred review of the book, a critic for Kirkus wrote, “The phrase ‘tour de force’ could have been invented for this audacious novel.”

Bomer, known for his roles in the Broadway shows 8 and The Boys in the Band and on the television series White

SEEN AND HEARD

Collar, said in a statement, “I was truly, deeply moved to be asked to read Hanya’s brilliant, heartbreaking, and timeless novel. It’s a book that I’ve been fascinated with since I first heard about it.”

Yanagihara said, “It’s a dream to have Matt Bomer—an actor of great generosity, beauty, and depth—as the new voice of the A Little Life audiobook. New listeners will get to experience the book as I’d always hoped; repeat ones will, I think, find new dimensions thanks to Matt’s subtlety and skill.”

A previous audiobook version of A Little Life was narrated by actor Oliver Wyman. Bomer’s version of the audiobook was released on Feb. 4.—M.S.

Matt Bomer For a review of A Little Life, visit Kirkus online.

A beautiful Breton island is the scene of an ugly murder.

AN ISLAND OF SUSPECTS

An Island of Suspects

Bannalec, Jean-Luc | Trans. by Jamie Lee Searle | Minotaur (320 pp.)

$28.00 | Feb. 25, 2025 | 9781250893116

A beautiful Breton island is the scene of an ugly murder. Two days before Commissaire

Georges Dupin is scheduled to mark his 10th year in Brittany with a party planned by his colleagues, he gets a call about a body found in the harbor at Doëlan. The dead man turns out to be Patric Provost, a resident of Belle-Île, one of three small islands off the Breton coast. Dupin’s decade of service has never before brought him to Belle-Île, and he’s instantly smitten. The sea offers a cavalcade of blues, and the lichen-covered rocks glitter green, silver, lavender, and even pink. Each turn of the road brings a vista more spectacular than the last. Dupin’s investigation is far more prosaic. Provost was a miserable old codger who seemed bent on thwarting the hopes and dreams of every one of his Bellilois neighbors. So, as the title suggests, there’s no dearth of suspects. Unfortunately, Dupin’s thorough interviews generate a timetable that eliminates all of them. It takes considerable ingenuity and luck to determine who could have been in the right places at the right times to dispatch Provost, but insight strikes in the nick of time, allowing Dupin’s well-deserved celebration to go forward as planned. The star of the show, as always, is the meticulously described local color, with extra marks this time for showcasing a little-known gem. Bannalec’s puzzle may be timeworn, but his Brittany is timeless.

Fudge and Marriage

Coco, Nancy | Kensington (336 pp.) | $8.99 paper | April 1, 2025 | 9781496743725

A fudge-making, hotel-owning bride-to-be obsesses about wedding plans but never imagines murder will be involved. Two weeks before her marriage to Mackinac Island lead police officer Rex Manning, Allie McMurphy’s still reading wedding books and magazines. That’s why she overhears Velma French and Myrtle Bautita’s tiff at the library over some craft books. Leaving the library, she finds Myrtle crying over the body of Velma, who’s been bludgeoned to death with a rock; when Velma’s ex-husband suddenly appears from around the corner of the building, he accuses Myrtle of the crime and kicks the rock into the nearby lake. Other witnesses might be distraught, but Allie, who’s had plenty of experience with murder, is more anxious about dealing with her mother, who’s arrived early with her own plans for the wedding. Allie and her best friend, Jenn, a wedding planner, have planned a large outdoor event with a charmingly simple wedding dress, but Allie’s wealthy mother wants a smaller wedding restricted to close friends and relatives at the island’s fanciest hotel and an extravagant gown for Allie. Furious with her mother and the snobbish relatives who arrived early, Allie tries to placate them by agreeing to hair and makeup appointments and wearing the expensive dresses on offer. Luckily, gathering her book club friends to help find the killer takes her mind off her real problems, and her dog, Mal, helps her uncover several clues. Every day brings a new fight with her mother, and her never having met

Rex’s relatives turns out to be a major last-minute problem at the wedding, which almost doesn’t take place. Plenty of stressful pre-wedding jitters and hidden secrets add up to a tense but often humorous mystery.

Sacramento Noir

Freeman, John. | Akashic (264 pp.) | $16.95 paper | March 4, 2025 | 9781636142012

Thirteen sad stories curated by a Sacramento native whose memories of his hometown seem overdue for an update. Sacramento certainly has its dark side. Like every big city, it has its share of homelessness. Residents struggle to keep up with the high cost of living in California. Housing is too often unaffordable, thanks in part to an influx of telecommuting tech workers from the Bay Area. But Freeman ignores the city’s real struggles, offering instead a collection of stories that could take place just about anywhere. In “The Former Detective,” Jamil Jan Kochai’s hero works at the Port of Sacramento but seems never to have left Afghanistan. Editor Freeman’s “Intersections” takes place largely in the West Bank city of Bethlehem. “The Sacrament,” Reyna Grande’s story about a painter and a sex worker, is set in East Sacramento, a locale not particularly known for art or sex work. And Luis Avalos’ “A Textbook Example,” supposedly set in Broderick (now called West Sacramento), actually takes place largely on the campus of UC Davis. Two of the stories really do give a sense of what Sacramento is (or was) like. Naomi J. Williams’ “Sakura City” provides a powerful look at Sacramento’s now-destroyed Japanese community, and Nora Rodriguez Camagna’s “Painted Ladies” at life in the Sacramento River Delta. For the most part, though, the collection is a study in lost opportunities. Surely a noir set in the capital city of the country’s most populous state, the city that gave rise to the Gold Rush, offers

the chance to chronicle misdeeds that are genuinely Californian. Noir enough, but needs more Sacramento.

Who Will Remember

Harris, C.S. | Berkley (384 pp.) | $29.00 April 15, 2025 | 9780593639214

A sleuth in Regency London probes the death of a controversial aristocrat.

Amateur detective Sebastian Alistair St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, is visited in 1816 by Irish urchin Jamie Gallagher with the news that a corpse is hanging upside down in the ruins of a rundown chapel off Swallow Street. The victim is crusading Lord Preston Farnsworth. What was a moralistic nobleman doing in such an unsavory location? Sebastian’s thoughts turn immediately to Major Hugh Chandler, the close friend who once saved his life and was a sworn enemy of the righteous Preston. Determined to exonerate his friend, Sebastian begins investigating. The road to a solution in Harris’ 20th Sebastian St. Cyr mystery is long and winding, proceeding with stately elegance. Nearly every short chapter introduces a new setting and a colorful new character, beginning with a head-spinning number of entangled lords and ladies. The enormous cast of Dickensian breadth ranges from leathery young soldier Billy Callaghan to alluring French cartomancer Madame Blanchette to gritty Henry Otis McGregor III, known as Half-Hanged Harry. The discovery that Harry has been hanged himself shortly after he confronts Sebastian indicates the novel’s deft irony even as it pumps urgency into the plot. The historical details that are a hallmark of the series include speculations about France’s uncertain future following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, a devastating volcanic eruption in Indonesia, and the resulting cold, wet aftermath in England, the “year without a summer.” While the whodunit’s solution

is solid, the journey to it, full of entertaining Easter eggs, is even more satisfying. A consistently brisk and engaging period mystery.

What Remains of Teague House

Johns, Stacy | Poisoned Pen (432 pp.)

$17.99 paper | April 8, 2025 | 9781464230936

Secrets and corpses are buried in the backyard. Whodunit?

Johns’ ambitious debut is built on a series of twists and revelations rooted in the complexity of family relationships. It begins with the death of elderly matriarch Val Rawlins, whose head “bursts like bubbles into sweet relief and darkness” after she notices unsettling activity in the woods behind her house. Before the family reunites at their childhood home, Val’s children, Jon, Sandra, and Rob, are introduced in a handful of short chapters. Also in the mix is Val’s younger sister, Phyllis, who appears in a flashback to 1972, when both she and Val are teenagers. Take-charge Aunt Phil wants to get rid of Teague House; her wish, and Val’s death, are MacGuffins for an investigation stretching back decades. For a good while the plot moves slowly, focusing mostly on family dynamics. It’s accelerated by the discovery of a buried finger and leaps into full speed when the number jumps to five sets of human remains. All the while, its perspective is kaleidoscopic, cycling briskly through the perspectives of the siblings, Aunt Phil, and appealingly rumpled private detective Maddie Reed, whose chapters alone are written in the first person. The mystery, rolling forward from the 1970s, is juxtaposed against the stories of the survivors of this psychologically wounded family. The dogged Maddie comes into sharp focus; members of the family, not so much. An intricate solution is disclosed in tantalizing tidbits, but will the reveal live up to the lengthy foreshadowing? Complex murder puzzle-cumdysfunctional family saga.

Dead Post Society

Kelly, Diane | Minotaur (304 pp.) | $9.99 paper | April 1, 2025 | 9781250359322

A spent bullet lodged in a porch leads an amateur detective on a wild ride to solving a cold case. Whitney Whitaker Flynn and her cousin Buck have taken a break from their house-flipping partnership to work for Whitaker Woodworking, the firm run by Buck’s father, Roger, who’s about to begin a major job reinventing a boarding school that’s been closed since 1982 as a senior-living facility. Whitney’s especially intrigued by a large Victorian mansion on the property that was once the headmaster’s home. The house looks bad outside but is remarkably well preserved inside, complete with valuable antique furniture. While looking around, Whitney notices a splintered porch post and digs out a bullet. She learns that the school’s last headmaster, Dr. Irving Finster, and his wife, Rosie, were discovered shot dead in what the police believed to be a murder-suicide, though they never closed the case. After talking things over with Buck, she offers to buy the house from Troy Loflin, the developer who’s hired Whitaker Woodworking. Once the offer is accepted, the cousins set about executing their plan to turn the place into a boutique hotel. As they work on the project, Whitney becomes more and more fascinated with the Finsters’ story. She gets support from her police detective husband, Collin, who knows that she often comes up with clues other people miss. Along with her research, Whitney talks with several people who either worked at the school or were students there. The Finsters, it turns out, were liked by many people but not by everyone. Whitney’s snooping makes her a danger to a killer who wants the past left alone.

Clues from the past and a wide cast of possible killers make this game worth the candle.

Murder at Gulls Nest

Kidd, Jess | Atria (336 pp.) | $28.99 April 8, 2025 | 9781668034033

An undercover nun tracks the fate of a lost friend and solves a dastardly murder in an English seaside town. A brief, murky prologue describes an unnamed woman trapped in a tunnel overrun with rats, with little hope of escape. Cut to determined Nora Breen, arriving at the down-at-heels coastal boardinghouse Gulls Nest on a mission. She’s set aside her decadeslong identity as Sister Agnes of Christ to find her friend and former novice Frieda Brogan, who went to the seaside on doctor’s orders and raised Nora’s concern by abruptly halting their frequent correspondence. At the Nest, Nora meets a large and quirky cast of suspects-to-be, including the brusque landlady, Helena Wells; handsome young couple Teddy and Stella Atkins; elderly showman Professor Poppy, who has an unsettling attraction to his collection of Punch puppets; and Mrs. Wells’ precocious daughter, Dinah. She’s just getting to know her new housemates when the Frieda mystery is shoved to the back burner by the fatal poisoning of Teddy. Even after sturdy DI Rideout arrives to investigate, Nora doggedly continues to ask questions as well. Suspicion falls on Czech guest Karel Ježek, who’s gone missing. In fact, the deeper Nora digs, the more incriminating evidence she discovers about the entire Gulls Nest group. Nora’s surveillance of Irene, Helena’s assistant, leads to the first significant tidbit about Frieda’s disappearance. Lest there be any doubt that Nora’s further adventures will include the colorful residents of Gulls Nest, the story fades out with Rideout requesting Nora’s help on another baffling case.

A delightful series kickoff in a cozy community primed for more murder.

Obelists en Route

King, C. Daly | American Mystery

Classics (384 pp.) | $25.95

April 1, 2025 | 9781613166208

In 1934, the same year Agatha Christie published the definitive railroad whodunit Murder on the Orient Express, King (1895–1963) matched her with this tale of murder aboard the maiden voyage of a nonstop train across America.

The Transcontinental has every amenity imaginable: a breathlessly accelerated timetable, luxuriously appointed staterooms, late-night snacks, ping-pong tables, and a 5-foot-deep swimming pool in which the train’s barber finds bank executive Sabot Hodges’ body—sunk, not floating—the morning after the train leaves Grand Central Terminal. The suspects, of course, are limited to the passengers aboard the fast-moving train. But Lt. Michael Lord, NYPD, focuses even more narrowly on Hodges’ secretary, X.L. Entwerk; his daughter, Edvanne; and her beau, Hans Summerladd, the publicity director for The Transcontinental. Assisted, or at least provoked, in succession by integrative psychologist Dr. L. Rees Pons and a background trio of prattling psychologists of different persuasions, he keeps reconsidering the case. Lord must return repeatedly to the question of whether there’s a case at all because Dr. Loress Black, the medical examiner who comes aboard the train in Chicago, insists that Hodges didn’t drown (there’s no water in his lungs) and wasn’t murdered (there’s not a mark on his body or any trace of poison in his organs). The most striking developments apart from the theories Lord and Pons keep generating in response to incoming evidence are conversations in which they take turns pontificating to each other about psychology and economics— exchanges Otto Penzler’s introduction pointedly suggests skipping—and a sudden violent episode that narrows the pool of suspects even further.

Extravagantly brainy, gloriously dated in every possible way, and no threat to the preeminence of Agatha Christie.

No Precious Truth

Nickson, Chris | Severn House (240 pp.) $29.99 | April 1, 2025 | 9781448314454

Nickson adds a new series to his collection of delightful Leeds-based historical mysteries.

In February 1941, World War II is making life treacherous for British citizens. Rescuing a child from death by tram is just part of Cathy Marsden’s duties as a police sergeant who’s been seconded to the Special Investigation Branch. One day, to her surprise, her older brother Daniel—who’s always been the clever, ambitious one in the family— shows up at the SIB office; turns out he works for MI5, though he’d always told Cathy that he just “worked for the government.” Now he’s been given the job of finding Jan Minuit, a Dutch engineer working for Germany, and Cathy is assigned to work with him, in addition to her regular work. The SIB’s current focus is finding Jackie Connor, a deserter and crook involved in most of Leeds’ criminal goings-on. Cathy’s boss notices the tension between her and Dan, but they assure him they can work together on what may be the most important case of her life. Most German spies have been identified and either turned to work for the British, imprisoned, or shot. Minuit, who’s escaped his handler, was apparently sent to England to sabotage the war effort, and he could cause tremendous damage. Several local plants making war materials seem the most likely targets, so security is beefed up. SIB launches a massive hunt for Minuit, and Cathy uses all her contacts to turn up a woman police officer who’s pretty sure she’s seen him. Penniless when he vanished, Minuit has managed to acquire money, a false identity, and dynamite. When the WPC notices Minuit again, she follows him and is attacked. Despite spending many freezing nights in

a backyard air raid shelter, Cathy pushes hard to find the spy, who may be using Jackie Connor to further his ends. A rousing wartime drama with a protagonist determined to fight both the enemy and the stigma against female police officers.

The Museum Detective

Phillips, Maha Khan | Soho Crime (336 pp.)

$25.99 | April 1, 2025 | 9781641296564

The city of Karachi turns out to be a hotbed of criminal activity in this series opener. When Pakistani museum curator and Egyptologist Gulfsa Delani receives an urgent phone call in the middle of the night from Deputy Superintendent Farhan Akthar, she assumes he has news about her niece, Mahnaz, who’s been missing for three years but is never far from her thoughts. Instead, she’s escorted to the site of a drug bust, which incongruously includes an ornately carved wooden sarcophagus with a female mummy inside. Gul is excited by the prospect of examining the artifact further in private, and she insists that only by taking the mummy to the museum will she be able to keep the valuable artifact— and piece of evidence in the drug case—from deteriorating. Acknowledging its value, Akthar provides her with a police escort to protect her from the criminals he’s sure will try to get it back. Gul’s examination of the sarcophagus and its contents involve analysis of the accompanying cuneiform writing and consultation with several experts. Not long after, Gul is indeed attacked and lands in the hospital, and the sarcophagus is stolen. In this first installment in a new series, Phillips spends considerable time presenting a full picture of her heroine’s life and of Karachi’s notable features. Gul teaches English at a homeless shelter run by her friend Manora Fernandes and has a contentious relationship with her brother and sister-in-law, Bilal and Sania. Readers are taken to Parsi Colony, a Zoroastrian enclave; the picturesque Cantt railway station; and

City Central University. Phillips, who lives in London, was born in Karachi and her attachment to the city is infectious. At length, she offers surprising solutions to both the theft of the sarcophagus and the disappearance of Gul’s niece.

A deep dive into a fascinating city complete with multiple menacing mysteries.

Not Dead Yet

Siger, Jeffrey | Severn House (240 pp.)

$29.99 | April 1, 2025 | 9781448314966

A suspicious plane crash on the Peloponnese is merely the tip of a criminal iceberg. The nefarious Dimitris Onofrio, missing for a week and declared dead, is actually very much alive, having stumbled away from the wreckage of his private plane. He’s found on a remote Ionian beach, weeping over the body of his wife, Alexandra Boutsis. Athens-based Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis’ feelings about the news are dominated by concern for the safety of his own wife, Lila Vardi, whose history with “Greece’s kingpin for international drug-smuggling operations” is long and tangled. Multiple murders are just some of Onofrio’s alleged crimes. An extended cat-and-mouse game follows, as Andreas unsuccessfully tries to interview Onofrio and government agencies attempt to investigate the crash. Siger gets some comic mileage out of Andreas’ frustration with Greece’s investigative bureaucracy, but for the most part Andreas’ 14th case is a bit of a departure, less drolly focused on him and his amiable ragtag team and more on forensics. Flashbacks fill in the details of Onofrio’s criminal career, his storied romance with Alexandra, and his menacing history with Lila and her philanthropist father. Multiple inconsistencies about the crash lead investigators down various rabbit holes as the plot caroms like a pinball from one surprising discovery to the next. Murder and attempted murder further complicate the case. Not until Andreas finally gets to interview Onofrio

face-to-face do the pieces of the complex puzzle come into sharp relief.

A knotty tale of Greek organized crime and brutal punishment.

A Death on Corfu

Sullivan, Emily | Kensington (288 pp.)

$27.00 | April 29, 2025 | 9781496751416

Period romance, intrigue, and murder on the beautiful island of Corfu are the setup for a new series.

The year 1898 finds widowed Minnie Harper and her two children, Cleo and Tommy, living in a semi-decrepit villa in Corfu. Minnie’s husband, Oliver, had retired early from the British Foreign Service in order to raise the children in a quiet spot. Only some of the extensive work needed by the house had been completed when Oliver died four years earlier, and the money he left is dwindling. A villa overlooking Minnie’s has just been rented to famous mystery author Stephen Dorian, sending the English colony all atwitter. Cleo pushes her mother into accepting Florence Belvedere’s invitation to an evening soiree to welcome Dorian. Minnie doesn’t readily take to Dorian, but when he offers her a job typing his current book manuscript, she can’t turn down the good salary. Despite the scandal surrounding his divorce and his often grouchy persona, Minnie grows more attracted to him. But she’s disturbed by an awkward conversation she has with Daphne, Florence’s strange new maid, and another discussion in which Florence urges her to override Oliver’s wishes and take Cleo to England for school. When Minnie stumbles over Daphne’s body, Dorian comes to her rescue, which draws the pair closer. The police are happy to pin the murder on a vagrant, but Minnie and Dorian are not. The sleuthing duo make a rather scandalous unchaperoned trip to the nearby island where Daphne lived to see if they can uncover the truth.

A mystery steeped in Greek atmosphere, a budding love story, and answers that lie in the past.

EDITORS’ PICKS:

Old as Stone, Hard as Rock: Of Humans and War by Alessandro Sanna, trans. by Ammiel Alcalay (Unruly)

Oasis by Guojing (Godwin Books)

Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton (Pantheon)

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami (Pantheon)

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

Bellosio by John F. Shekleton

SOS Podcasts by Rosamaria Mancini

Warning by Gene J. Miller

Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches From Outer Space! by I.S. Noah

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

Fully Booked

Previewing spring’s hottest books with special guest Cynthia Weiner. BY MEGAN LABRISE

EPISODE 407: MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF SPRING 2025

On this episode of Fully Booked, we look at the most anticipated books of spring 2025 in fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature. It’s shaping up to be a promising year packed with exciting new titles, and our editors are on hand to share a few of their favorites.

But first, I welcome special guest Cynthia Weiner, author of A Gorgeous Excitement (Crown, Jan. 21), one of this season’s most eagerly awaited debut novels. Weiner, who lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, is a Pushcart Prize–winning short story writer and assistant director of the Writers Studio in New York City. A Gorgeous Excitement is inspired by her experience growing up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in the 1980s and her personal connection to an infamous murder. Kirkus calls it “carefully paced and beautifully written” and says “this edgy coming-of-age novel succeeds on all counts.”

Here’s a bit more from our starred review: “In an author’s note prefacing her terrific debut, Weiner explains that she was inspired by her experiences during the summer of what became known as the Preppy Murder in Central Park. Her title quotes Sigmund Freud’s characterization of the effects of cocaine, a reference that occurs to her intelligent, articulate, insecure protagonist, Nina Jacobs, as she’s about to try the drug for the first time with her new friend Stephanie. It’s the summer before Nina leaves for college at Vanderbilt, and she spends her days temping at office jobs.…By night, she hangs out with her friends at a bar called Flanagan’s, where they don’t card the underage patrons. There, she meets an extraordinarily handsome but moody boy named Gardner Reed, with whom she and every other girl in the place are wholly infatuated.… Weiner’s recreation of the period and the milieu—the headlines, the music, the

Gorgeous

Excitement

Weiner, Cynthia Crown | 368 pp. | $29.00 Jan. 21, 2025 | 9780593798843

products—is like a perfect pointillist painting, all the tiny details adding up to a richly textured, authentic impression of the city as it was in that decade. Each of her young female characters is fully threedimensional. With the strong young characters and the skin-crawling atmosphere created by creepy men, crimes in the news, porn shops, and overheated adolescent sexuality, the book recalls another excellent true crime–inspired novel, Emma Cline’s The Girls.” Weiner tells me why she decided to include an author’s note at the beginning of the novel and how she approached writing fiction inspired by real events. We discuss the many obsessions of 18-yearold protagonist Nina Jacobs, including preppy heartthrob Gardener Reed, who’s less of an insider than he appears to be. We talk about girlhood, friendship, and societal pressures; writing about drug use; the provenance of the title; the fun of revisiting the music, fashion, movies, and clubs of the 1980s; short stories versus novels; and Weiner’s hopes for the book.

Editor at large Megan Labrise hosts the Fully Booked podcast.

AWARDS

Finalists for the 2025 Edgar Awards Are Revealed

Liz Moore and Robert Jackson Bennett are among the authors in contention for the mystery prizes.

The Mystery Writers of America announced the finalists for the 2025 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, given to “the best in mystery fiction, nonfiction, and television published or produced in 2024.”

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore made the shortlist for the best novel prize, along with The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett, Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco, Things Don’t Break on Their Own by Sarah Easter Collins, Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera, The In Crowd by Charlotte Vassell, and My Favorite Scar, written by Nicolás Ferraro and translated by Mallory N. Craig-Kuhn.

The finalists in the category of best first novel by an American author are Twice the Trouble by Ash Clifton, Cold to the Touch by Kerri Hakoda, The Mechanics

of Memory by Audrey Lee, A Jewel in the Crown by David Lewis, The President’s Lawyer by Lawrence Robbins, and Holy City by Henry Wise.

Making the shortlist in the young adult category were Looking for Smoke by K.A. Cobell, The Bitter End by Alexa Donne, A Crane Among Wolves by June Hur, Death at Morning House by Maureen Johnson, and 49 Miles Alone by Natalie D. Richards.

From left, Robert Jackson Bennett, Katrina Carrasco, and Liz Moore.

The winners of this year’s awards will be announced at a ceremony in New York on May 1. A full list of the finalists is available at the MWA website.—M.S.

For more literary awards news, visit Kirkus online.

Kirkus Star

Chaos

Fay, Constance | Bramble Books (352 pp.) | $19.99 paper March 11, 2025 | 9781250330437

A tech genius falls for a man who was turned into a genetically enhanced supersoldier against his will.

Caro Ogunyemi works as an engineer aboard the spaceship Calamity, and there isn’t a piece of tech she can’t operate, repair, or hack. While her crew is on leave, she accepts a job to infiltrate Shikigami, a luxury prison planet for wealthy criminals operated by the Pierce family. Her mission is to find evidence that Carmichael Pierce has a secret lab at the prison where he’s using stolen tech to build supersoldiers out of unwilling test subjects. Caro’s shameful secret is that she worked for Pierce a decade ago, and she suspects some code she developed and attempted to destroy might be part of the supersoldier protocol. Once on planet, Caro learns that most of Pierce’s attempts to create supersoldiers have failed, with the exception of a terrifying specimen they call Leviathan—and her bungled attempt to infiltrate the prison puts her into a face-off with him. During the life-or-death fight, Caro discovers that her touch deactivates Leviathan’s chip, which allows him to reason and think for himself as long as she can keep her hands on him. Caro feels instantly attracted to Levi as his real self, and he feels a similar pull, calling her “angel” and begging her not to abandon him. Caro is charmed by the man behind the programming and vows to save him. With the help of two undercover friends, Caro makes a plan to destroy all of Pierce’s records and extract Levi. Everything that can go wrong does, leading to a series of high-stakes and at times hilarious adventures. Caro is a robust, interesting character, and her sweet romance with Levi allows her to forgive herself for past mistakes. The gang’s adventures on the prison planet are a rollicking good time, with complex,

The gang’s adventures are a rollicking good time.

CHAOS

fast-paced plotting and intricately choreographed action sequences. A wildly entertaining space adventure explores the nature of love and humanity.

The Trouble With Anna

Griffiths, Rachel | Gallery Books/ Simon & Schuster (336 pp.) | $19.99 paper

March 4, 2025 | 9781668052945

A headstrong lady and an imposing lord are matched against their will. Lady Anna Reston doesn’t want to be at her best friend Charlotte’s party—she’d rather be out in the stables or riding one of her beloved horses. She’s shy and certain that people see her as “plain to look at and prickly to deal with,” and especially wants to avoid being overawed by Charlotte’s attractive and haughty older brother, Julian Aveton, Earl Ramsey. The party goes from intimidating to tragic, though, when her grandfather dies in the middle of it. And one week later, when his will is read, she learns that she’s in line to inherit the unentailed portion of his estate—but only if she marries Julian in the next six months. Anna is terribly hurt that her grandfather chose not to leave her the estate outright, but Julian assumes it’s a setup engineered by Anna, and says he will refuse to go through with it. Once home, his mother and sister convince him he’s mistaken, and when he goes back to apologize to Anna, a slow back-and-forth begins between the two. Their attraction grows, but the connection is derailed by a series of misunderstandings. Unsure whether she even wants to inherit her grandfather’s estate but terrified of losing her horses, Anna splits her attention and devotes just as much time to a gambling scheme with Charlotte that might afford

them both some financial independence, which leads them toward a daring venture that may change everyone’s lives forever. Griffiths’ debut is a delightful and witty slow burn with enough complexity to celebrate friendship as well as romance, and loaded with ample details about horse racing to boot. Some readers may chafe at Julian’s more chauvinistic impulses, but he’s an excellent (if slightly simple), starchy hero who’s not afraid to admit when he’s wrong, and is well paired with the lively Anna. Although Anna is a fairly contemporary heroine, and the story features several steamy encounters, the book has a pleasingly old-school feel, and readers will finish with the hope that one or more of the well-drawn supporting characters will star in future volumes.

A strong Regency debut from a promising new author.

Fake It Like You Mean It

Murphy, Megan | Alcove Press (336 pp.) | $19.99 paper

March 18, 2025 | 9798892420648

A podcaster finds herself stuck in a fake-dating scheme to please her ailing grandmother. There’s no one Elle Monroe cares about more than her grandmother, Lovie. So, when Lovie’s Alzheimer’s worsens, Elle leaves her life in Chicago and her successful podcast behind to head back to her childhood home in Elkhart, Indiana. Elle doesn’t expect to find a man in the house—and certainly not in her old bed—but Adam Wheeler is Lovie’s new live-in nurse. Elle’s annoyance at finding a stranger in her room is dwarfed by her hurt that Lovie no longer remembers her. The disease makes Lovie cranky, mean, and

sometimes even violent. Strangest of all, she’s convinced that Elle is actually a younger version of herself, while Adam is Bobby, her beloved late husband. Afraid to upset Lovie’s fragile state of mind, Elle and Adam pretend that they’re deeply in love, despite the fact that they initially can’t stand each other. What starts out as mutual dislike, however, quickly turns to attraction, which presents a problem because Elle plans to move back to Chicago as soon as Lovie has a new living situation lined up. In her debut, Murphy poignantly highlights the pain of caring for a relative with Alzheimer’s. Lovie’s struggle with the disease feels real in its specificity (such as her insistence that every day is Monday and her need to garden daily, even in the dead of winter). Elle and Adam have so much chemistry off the bat that it’s sometimes difficult to understand why they’re resisting a relationship; still, they’re both such likable characters that it’s fun to watch them realize what the reader has known all along.

A moving romance that balances the heartbreak of slowly losing a relative to Alzheimer’s with the thrill of falling in love.

My Big Fat Fake Marriage

Stein, Charlotte | St. Martin’s Griffin (304 pp.) $18.00 paper | March 11, 2025 | 9781250867971

W hen two London neighbors decide to fake being husband and wife, they’re not prepared for the true feelings that emerge in the process.

Thirty-one-yearold Connie, an aspiring writer, has never trusted self-proclaimed “nice guys,” because her track record when it comes to dating them has been terrible. Either their niceness is a facade meant to cover up some big lie—like a wife at home—or they’re just pretending to be decent to get into her bed. That’s why she scrutinizes everything her American neighbor, Henry Samuel Beckett, does for her; there’s no way

anyone this cheery, well dressed, and all-around kind isn’t hiding some deep, dark secret. To an extent, Connie’s instincts are correct, since Beck does have a secret, but when he finally reveals the truth, she realizes her early skepticism may have been unfounded. At 37, Beck has always been single, but he may have told a teeny-tiny white lie about being married to save face with an irritating colleague at the publishing house where he works. Then, when Connie and Beck run into each other at a book party, she somehow tells his annoying coworker that she’s the mystery wife. Now, the two of them are trapped having to preserve this lie, especially since they’re both heading to a writing retreat where all eyes will be on them—so they’ll need to get their stories straight, not to mention figure out how to sleep in the same bed. Despite her earlier reservations about Beck, Connie finds herself in the best position to learn who he really is, and the truth is that he isn’t just any nice guy—he’s way better. Stein’s latest is a sweet rom-com with the kind of endearing, cinnamon-roll hero the genre can always use more of, as well as a heroine who’s willing to lower her walls and trust someone who might actually be worth the effort. While it would have been nice to see Connie and Beck’s romantic dynamic develop further outside the retreat setting, the characters’ strong introspection and emotional vulnerability make the book impossible to put down. A fake marriage leads to real feelings in this charming rom-com.

Code Word Romance

Walker, Carlie | Berkley (320 pp.) | $19.00 paper | March 18, 2025 | 9780593640418

A n American woman agrees to play body double for a European prime minister on the Amalfi Coast, bringing a former fling back into her life.

At 29, Margaux “Max” Adams isn’t just down on her luck: her pot of gold is bone dry. Following the pandemic—and after having borrowed

thousands of dollars from her family and friends—the former chef was forced to close Frida’s, her dream restaurant in Maine. After moving into a shoebox apartment with a perpetually stoned, ranch-dressing-loving roommate and isolating herself from her loved ones, Max now lugs boxed wine out of vans for a second-rate catering company. Then, at a wedding she’s working, she’s approached by a woman who says Max reminds her of Sofia Christensen, an assertive 30-yearold powerhouse who was recently named prime minister of a country called Summerland. While their life paths couldn’t be more different, Max is aware that she and Sofia look eerily alike, almost as if they were long-lost sisters. Max would never have imagined crossing paths with the PM, but now the strange woman—who turns out to be a CIA agent—gives her an offer she can’t refuse: Pretend to be Sofia while the government works to prevent an assassination plot, and receive $5 million for her trouble. All Max has to do is relax on a beach in Positano—under the guise of a vacationing prime minister with laryngitis, in case she can’t master a Summerlandian accent—and soon she’ll be able to pay her friends and family back every penny she borrowed. It sounds simple enough, until Max learns that her CIA handler will be none other than Flynn Forester, with whom she had a teenage summer fling. With Flynn back in her life, the sudden disappearance of the real Sofia, and the looming threat of a Scandinavian organized crime group, Max is in for the summer of a lifetime. Walker’s adventure romance is a breezy read, full of hijinks and thwarted assassins, without any fear of actual death or danger. Max and Flynn have their sweet and steamy moments, but their relationship doesn’t get enough time on the page to make it satisfying. An action-packed romp that brings the thrills but slows the romance.

For more romance reviews, visit Kirkus online.

Kirkus Star

Nonfiction

JOHN McMURTRIE

WOMEN MAKING HISTORY

IT TAKES INITIATIVE to research one’s roots. It takes far more drive—and outright courage—to challenge a world-renowned university to establish ownership of images documenting one’s ancestors. That is precisely what Tamara Lanier did in suing Harvard after discovering that the university possessed, in one of its museum’s collections, daguerreotypes of nude enslaved people—including her great-great-great grandfather, Papa Renty, and his daughter, Delia—that had been commissioned to “prove” a prominent scientist’s racist notion that Black people are inferior to whites. Lanier relates her remarkable story in From These Roots: My Fight With Harvard To Reclaim My Legacy (Crown, Jan. 28). Our review calls it “a stirring first-person account of holding powerful institutions responsible for abetting slavery.”

From These Roots is one of many new books about women who have made history—or are in the process of making it—by pressing for change. They’re perfect reading for Women’s History Month.

Another author who has been celebrated for her

activism is Catherine Coleman Flowers, the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. The founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice tells her story in Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope (Spiegel & Grau, Jan. 28). “While she is best known for her work to secure safe water and sanitation for people living near toxic conditions,” our starred review said, “Flowers recounts a varied and fascinating career of advocacy for marginalized communities.” The review called her essay collection “a passionate and thoughtful exploration of social injustice.”

Less known than Flowers’ work is the creation, in the 1970s, of the Women’s Bank of Denver—founded at a time when many women could not establish lines of credit without their husbands being present. Grace L. Williams revives this transformative chapter in Give Her Credit: The Untold Account of a Women’s Bank That Empowered a Generation (Little A, Jan. 1), which our reviewer described as “a fast-paced and riveting read [and] a fascinating history of a feminist triumph.”

Rachel Carson (1907-1964) is justly revered for her role in inspiring the environmental movement of the 1960s and beyond. In Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love (Stanford Univ., Jan. 28), Lida Maxwell argues that Carson’s intimate friendship with Dorothy Freeman helped open the author’s eyes to ways of seeing the world that she shared in her groundbreaking book Silent Spring Looking back further in time, Suzanne Cope shines a light on brave women who risked their lives, in the shadows, to fight the German occupation of Italy. “An inspiring, illuminating group

biography” is how our critic sums up Women of War: The Italian Assassins, Spies, and Couriers Who Fought the Nazis (Dutton, April 29). War may be eternal, but so, too, is the fight for freedom. In Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary (St. Martin’s, Feb. 18), author and activist Victoria Amelina chronicles her fellow Ukrainians’ resistance to Russia’s invasion. Amelina’s book is posthumous: She died in 2023 of injuries sustained during a Russian missile attack on a restaurant. And yet her bracing account survives, a testament to the power of words.

John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

EDITOR’S PICK

A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.

It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist,

platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but

discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful— writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had

other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist. Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.

The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West

Acharya, Amitav | Basic Books (464 pp.) $32.50 | April 8, 2025 | 9781541604148

The decline of the West? The end of the American century? Good thing, this sweeping history argues. International relations professor Acharya offers a definition of “world order” that admits at the outset that there’s never really been any such thing: that is, a single entity governing the entire globe. Instead, there have been multiple world orders, usually imposed by an empire, sometimes by “a system of sovereign states.” The present world order, such as it is, is less dominated by empires than before, and if China and the U.S. harbor imperial ambitions, neither is likely to be the single dominant power of the future. This, Acharya argues, is a good thing, leaving room for “a confluence of civilizations, rather than a clash of civilizations.” Acharya builds his argument from antiquity to the present: He considers the Egyptian-dominated coalition of great powers in the Middle East of three dozen centuries ago, with Egypt first among equals, whereas the Sumerian and later Persian empires “developed an imperial world order through outright conquest and domination of its neighbors.” Fast-forward to nearer our own time, when European powers rushed to build colonial empires, many sustained by enslavement, all “the result of superior military technology, religious zeal, disease, and brutality.” Against these examples, Acharya argues that the future world order will include formerly colonized nations; in this regard, he notes that Nigeria is a net exporter of popular culture via its film industry, with other film centers in India and China now supplanting Hollywood in the world market. Just so, he adds, Italian food may be the most popular in the world, but it’s now followed by

various Asian cuisines. That’s one form of world order, to be sure, and, Acharya observes approvingly, the West no longer has a lock on it.

A fresh look at world affairs that finds room for the Rest as well as the West.

Four Red Sweaters: Powerful True Stories of Women and the Holocaust

Adlington, Lucy | Harper/ HarperCollins (352 pp.) | $19.99 paper March 18, 2025 | 9780063375130

Four Jewish girls and their sorrowful connection. British novelist and clothes historian Adlington, author of The Dressmakers of Auschwitz , begins her engrossing account with a portrait of a happy Jewish family in 1938 Berlin. Few readers will doubt that unspeakable horrors await them, but there remains a readership for such stories, and Adlington tells hers with skill. None of Adlington’s subjects knew the other, yet all acquired a red sweater that symbolizes their shared experience. Western democracies deplored Nazi abuse of Jews; all, however, enforced strict immigration laws, accepting only small numbers who had money or jobs awaiting them. An exception occurred when activists persuaded Britain to accept children. There followed the famous Kindertransport, when nearly 10,000 arrived in 1938-39. A bill for a similar plan was introduced in the U.S. Congress but was defeated. Adlington describes Kindertransport member Jochewet (“Jock”) Heidenstein, age 12, who arrived in 1938; two sisters later joined her. Two brothers remained behind with her family; all were killed. Anita Lasker, a 12-year-old from a musical family, traveled from Breslau to Berlin in 1938 to take cello lessons. Later sent to Auschwitz, she became a member of its women’s orchestra and survived. Chana Zumerkorn, daughter of a shoemaker in Lodz, Poland, was 19 when the

Germans invaded. Ejected from their home, the family was crammed into the Lodz ghetto, where she labored as a knitter, until 1942, when all were shipped to the Chelmno camp and killed. Regina Feldman’s family was sent to the Sobibor extermination camp in 1942; chosen to labor in a knitting workshop, Regina was the only family member not killed on arrival. Amazingly, in October 1943, Sobibor’s prisoners rebelled; many, including Regina, broke out and survived. Tracking wartime horrors, and resilience, through cherished garments.

What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory

Adriaanse, Bette & Brian Eno Faber & Faber (128 pp.) | $19.95 March 25, 2025 | 9780571395514

Short essays on how art affects those who create and/or experience it. Eno, the distinguished British musician, begins this book with the observation that “making art seems to be a universal human activity.” But the question he seeks to answer, apart from why people need it, is what art actually does. Beginning with a definition, Eno suggests that art is the product of anything that is done beyond what is strictly necessary “for the sake of the feeling” that the creative act engenders—which includes anything from painting to cutting hair. Throughout the book, feeling is in fact at the heart of his considerations. For Eno, art is unique for the way it can safely allow observers to experience potentially life-changing feelings, including negative ones, without “real-world consequences.” Art also invites engagement with “fragments” of different worlds that can stimulate the imagination and amplify the richness of individual existence. People not only learn to identify what they like or enjoy best but also participate in what Eno

The

U.S.

prohibited women from flying in the military, but the U.K. was desperate for pilots.

SPITFIRES

calls “a reservoir of shared experiences.”

Art is “the lifeblood, the lubricant, the circulatory system of community.” It is thus a catalyst for transformative change. “Art allows us to share complicated concepts and feelings with each other,” Eno writes. “This cultural conversation opens doors to shifts—in ourselves and in society.” Set in inventively arranged type that alternates between black and pink, and illustrated throughout with Dutch artist Adriaanse’s playful, watercolor-enhanced black ink drawings, this accessible, intelligent book invites readers to think deeply about the function of art in their lives and the wider world around them.

A slim but idea-rich volume that is as visually engaging as it is intellectually stimulating.

Spitfires: The American Women Who Flew in the Face of Danger During World War II

Aikman, Becky | Bloomsbury (384 pp.)

$31.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9781635576566

Women who dared.

Journalist Aikman draws on diaries, letters, and interviews to create a brisk, lively account of nine intrepid American women, among the 25 who joined Britain’s Air Transport Auxiliary, the civilian arm of the RAF. Unlike the U.S., which prohibited women from flying in the military, the U.K. was desperate for pilots. Responding to the need, star aviatrix Jackie Cochran sent invitations

to 76 women with more than 300 hours of flying time, some as stunt flyers, crop dusters, or flying instructors. The American “Atta-Girls” came from widely varied backgrounds, from hardscrabble lives to high society; from America’s youngest flying instructor, at 21, to a 32-year-old, the oldest and most experienced, with 1,800 flying hours. All were ambitious, defiant, eager to reinvent themselves. “Professionally,” Aikman writes, “they mastered jobs that demanded technical expertise, physical strength, steely valor, and quick judgment.” The first group to arrive in 1942 were shocked by bombed-out cities, food deprivations, and the chilly British homes where they were billeted. There was a chilly reception, too, caused by a stark cultural disconnect between the boisterous Americans and the upper-class British women of the ATA. Aikman recounts the pilots’ friendships, romances, marriages, and losses, and the challenges they faced flying unfamiliar planes across unfamiliar terrain, sometimes in threatening weather. All confronted danger with every flight: “The knowledge that something as simple as an oil leak, a peculiar propeller mishap, a moment of inattention, or an unexpected conjuring of fog could bring about sudden, bolt-from-above death.” By 1944, the original 25 had been depleted to 13. Despite hardship and fear, though, they depicted their years as an Atta-Girl as nothing less than a “golden period” of their lives. Engaging portraits of a spirited crew.

Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography

Arnold-Forster, Tom | Princeton Univ. (360 pp.)

$35.00 | May 6, 2025 | 9780691215211

E xtensive life of the famed journalist and theorist of politics and international relations.

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), the brilliant son of German Jewish immigrants to New York, was ahead of his time in many ways; as Oxford University researcher Arnold-Forster notes, he may have introduced the word “robot” into English, adapted the word “stereotype” from printing terminology to apply to public opinion, and gave the Cold War its name. Only in his mid-20s when his first two books appeared, Lippmann disliked the narrowness of a growing technocracy, and he championed a certain kind of objectivity in reporting the news, allowing for a writer’s ideas while serving as a buffer to help that writer “cope with the gossip and self-interest that shaped news gathering and production.”

For more by Becky Aikman, visit Kirkus online.

Lippmann’s great subject was how public opinion is shaped: partly by journalism, partly by government, partly by events, all ideally informed by fact. Presciently, he noted that “news and truth are not the same thing,” with newspapers and other media not the only vehicle for “carry[ing] the whole burden of popular sovereignty.” In a time of totalitarianism and dawning misinformation and disinformation, he also warned that public opinion could be easily bent, the “opportunities for manipulation…open to anyone who understands the process.” Lippmann’s takes on opinion formation are of interest to anyone pressing for social change; he observed, for instance, that the reason woman’s suffrage became a reality was that activists “had kept suffrage in the news,” doing exactly that shaping by dint of not going away. Arnold-Forster’s examination of Lippmann’s nuanced support for and alternating critiques of the New Deal goes into a bit too much detail, but overall his book is a welcome addition to the literature of both

journalism and the rise of the anti-communist left and modern liberalism. A long-needed biography of a once-influential figure who merits rediscovery.

Kirkus

Star

The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780

Atkinson, Rick | Crown (880 pp.) $42.00 | April 29, 2025 | 9780593799185

The Revolutionary War enters its most desperate phase in the second volume of Atkinson’s trilogy. To read this book by prolific military historian Atkinson is to see the Revolutionary War as both a civil war—loyalists against rebels, with a sizable number of uncommitted colonists in between—and an international war involving numerous European powers. Indeed, Atkinson’s book opens in France, where two nobles, Baron Johann de Kalb and Gilbert du Motier, a.k.a. the Marquis de Lafayette, are surreptitiously making their way to a boat to America, where both have been recruited to join the Continental Army at high rank. Atkinson then shifts the scene to the frontier: to Ticonderoga, where Continentals were routed twice, and to a farm settlement where British-allied Indians infamously scalped a young woman— ironically, engaged to a loyalist officer—while she was still alive, whipping up a furiously vengeful response: “Newspaper accounts of the atrocity, published over the coming weeks…fueled American contempt for the British and rage at the Indians.” Atkinson thoughtfully appraises some of the principal figures in the conflict, including British General John Burgoyne, immensely popular with his troops and insistent on recruiting Irish Catholics, “traditionally excluded from the army.” (Toward the close of his book,

Atkinson writes of anti-Catholic riots in London that in the end were quashed with military force.) As for George Washington, having survived disastrous defeats and the hard winter at Valley Forge, Atkinson concludes that “in an era of great men, he already was in the front rank.” Between vivid accounts of engagements such as the crushing Continental defeat at Charleston, Atkinson looks at the practical facts of the war, including the heavy casualty rate the British suffered in trying to retain their colonies for an adamant King George III—for, as Atkinson rightly asks, “Without America, would Britain even have an empire?”

As ever with Atkinson, an exemplary work of narrative history.

The Novel Life of Jane Austen: A Graphic Biography

Barchas, Janine | Illus. by Isabel Greenberg Black Dog & Leventhal (144 pp.)

$28.00 | April 29, 2025 | 9780762489374

A graphic biography spotlights three key episodes in the quiet existence that fueled seven wicked comedies of manners.

Greenberg’s sprightly illustrations generally favor a muted blue-gray-yellow color scheme that bursts into vivid reds and purples when Austen imagines scenes in her novels. Part 1, in the late 1790s, chronicles several visits to Bath with her beloved sister Cassandra. Tart correspondence and conversational asides about their garrulous mother and other relatives (of whom she was fond while gently mocking their quirks) display the sly humor Austen developed in her fiction. It was unappreciated by publishers in that period, when she was disheartened by the rejection of Pride and Prejudice. In Part 2 the family moves to Bath after Reverend Austen retires, and their already modest circumstances become straitened after his death in January 1805. Jenny and Cassy, as the sisters call each other, are now past 30

and know they are unlikely to marry; they are forced to move with their mother into brother Frank’s home in Southampton. Tours of ruins and everyday domestic scenes show Austen’s sharp eye at work and nicely capture the modest details from which she crafted her brilliant novels. The appealing combination of drawings and text encourages an affection for her that will lead readers to sigh with relief when the Austen women are able to relocate to more comfortable quarters on the Hampshire estate of their wealthy brother Edward in Part 3. With more privacy and time to write, Austen finally becomes a published author with Sense and Sensibility in 1811. There’s nothing terribly new in this low-key portrait, but the focus on selected episodes gives a nice sense of the texture of Austen’s daily life. A treat for the international army of Janeites.

Kirkus Star

More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade To Control the Fate of Humanity

Becker, Adam | Basic Books (384 pp.) $32.00 | April 22, 2025 | 9781541619593

A skeptical view of grand predictions. Artificial general intelligence, colonizing Mars, living in a simulation, and immortality are rigorously investigated in this timely and thoughtful book. Becker, an astrophysicist and science journalist, takes a wild ride through speculative technologies and assesses their merit, using real science—testing claims mathematically, scientifically, and through interviews with experts. He concludes that many are neither feasible nor desirable, and some are downright bizarre. For example, he writes, “It’s effectively impossible to put a self-sustaining human civilization on

Mars.…The radiation levels are too high, the gravity is too low, there’s no air, and the dirt is made of poison. There are many other problems with this idea, and it’s one of the simpler ones involved in these visions of the future.” What’s striking when reading Becker’s work is why there isn’t more skepticism. According to Becker, it’s because the tech industry is operating under a wave of groupthink, promoting ideas associated with transhumanism, effective altruism, long-termism, extropianism, rationalism, and the singularity. Together, they make up what Becker calls “the ideology of technological salvation,” a worldview “held by many venture capitalists, executives, and other ‘thought leaders’ within the tech industry” that emphasizes technological progress above all else. Becker traces the origins of this ideology to science fiction, including its early racist and authoritarian undertones, and exposes a lack of empathy and ability to deal with reality. He writes: “For a strong longtermist, investing in a Silicon Valley AI company is a more worthwhile humanitarian endeavor than saving lives in the tropics.” The book looks at many of the think tanks, nonprofits, and other institutions promoting these ideas as inevitable. Yet, Becker writes, “this future (or set of futures) doesn’t work.”

An important and sober investigation of Silicon Valley’s boldest claims about the future.

Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival

Bienstock, Richard & Tom Beaujour

St. Martin’s (432 pp.) | $32.00 April 1, 2025 | 9781250283702

A humdinger of an oral history. In the tradition of Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me and their own Nothin’ But a Good Time, Bienstock and Beaujour spliced together dozens of

Germany’s pioneering gay activist—before Hitler’s rise.

THE EINSTEIN OF SEX

interviews with musicians, producers, staff, and others on the scene to craft an epic story of 1990s rock and roll as filtered through the heroin-hazy lens of the granddaddy of American music festivals. Originally conceived of as a farewell tour for the volatile Los Angeles band Jane’s Addiction by the band’s shamanistic frontman, Perry Farrell, Lollapalooza quickly evolved into an annual showcase for the hot new category called “alternative rock,” meaning anything too niche, noisy, or weird for commercial radio. College radio favorites like the Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth, Nine Inch Nails, the Breeders, and Hole, all of whom played the festival in the first three years, seemed to fit the bill according to most critics’ criteria. But the loose and inclusive criteria of the organizers also drew in Ice-T’s metal band Body Count, Ice Cube, Sinead O’Connor, Arrested Development, Devo, and Metallica, as well as the wild carnival freaks of Seattle’s Jim Rose Circus and MTV’s Jackass. Reading like the script of a tightly edited film or TV series, the book’s interview subjects recount backstage antics (and occasional dramas) that were often as anarchic as the performances on stage. The book’s merit, however, is not just in its close views of rock music and performance. Lollapalooza occurred at the dawn of the internet age and the infancy of viral culture. As several interviewees state, it was the era before cell phones, and yet by decade’s end, youth culture generally began to look like Lollapalooza culture. Essential addition to any rock history library.

The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin

Brook, Daniel | Norton (368 pp.)

$32.99 | May 13, 2025 | 9781324007241

The making of a gay activist. Journalist Brook celebrates German Jewish psychotherapist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), renowned in his own time for groundbreaking research on gender identity. Hirschfeld, who knew he was gay from adolescence, grew up in Bismarck’s Germany when the punitive Proposition 175 of the German Criminal Code outlawed homosexuality. Focused on studying sexuality, he pursued medical studies in Strasbourg and Berlin. Although he passed his medical licensure exam, he chose first to become a cub reporter, sailing to the U.S. in 1893 to visit his brother, cover the Chicago World’s Fair, and lecture on natural medicine. America proved puzzling: Although he exulted in the lively queer culture of cities like Chicago, he was struck by rampant racism. Returning to Germany in 1894, Hirschfeld set up a medical practice that increasingly attracted queer patients. Besides protesting against the vile Proposition 175, he co-founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, aiming to educate the public on the reality of sexual orientation. From anonymous surveys that he sent to high school students and metalworkers, he found evidence of a range of sexual proclivities and identities, which supported his efforts to champion gay rights and gender dysphoria. The construct of a gender binary, he believed, was “a figment of his society’s imagination.” Late in his career, for his theory of

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sexual relativity, he was dubbed by an imaginative PR man “the Einstein of Sex.” In 1919, his Institute for Sexual Science opened in Berlin, offering gender-affirming treatments and counseling; its Hirschfeld Museum displayed, among many sex-oriented exhibitions, an extensive display of fetishes. Brook examines Hirschfeld’s influential writings, such as The Homosexuality of Men and Women (1914) and Racism, published posthumously. He died in exile, forced from his beloved Berlin by Nazi persecution, his institute brutally destroyed.

A well-informed life of a scientist worth remembering.

The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary

Cahalan, Susannah | Viking (352 pp.) $32.00 | April 22, 2025 | 9780593490051

The sometimes blissed-out, always turbulent life of Timothy Leary’s third wife. Rosemary Woodruff was a Midwesterner who, in the early 1960s, came to New York looking for adventure, working as a flight attendant and model and exploring the wonders of then-legal LSD and then-illegal marijuana. She met Timothy Leary and accepted his invitation to hang out at Millbrook, his psychedelic research commune. The rest is tangled history, as journalist Cahalan relates: Marrying Leary, she became a helpmeet and surrogate mother to a host of acid-stunned hipsters. Often undervalued—writes Cahalan, one eyewitness remarked, “As beautiful as she was, she wasn’t the brightest star in the sky”—she receded into the background and, as Cahalan notes, “served as a footnote, an afterthought” in the Leary mythology. Nevertheless, Woodruff was busted along with her husband by none other than G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate infamy, was busted again, and

hard, in Texas and California, helped Leary escape from prison, fled with him to Algeria, and went underground for years, even as Leary, from whom she separated, made deals that got him out of jail and put him on the road, late in his career, to wealth and pop culture fame. Woodruff may have been a footnote, but she was self-aware of her role as a kind of lysergic sorcerer’s apprentice; among papers Cahalan discovered after Woodruff’s death in 2002 was a note reading, “The eyes of the audience must be on the assistant when the magician’s hands are distorting reality.” Cahalan’s swift-moving biography is admiring but not uncritical, with an admonitory takeaway about both psychedelic drugs and the outlaw life: “If you are to engage with these substances, you must respect them enough to prepare yourself for both the light and the shadow.”

A well-wrought narrative that brings deserved attention to a lost figure in the counterculture.

Fatal Abstraction: Why the Managerial Class Loses Control of Software

Campbell, Darryl | Norton (320 pp.)

$29.99 | April 8, 2025 | 9781324078951

An insider reveals the dark secrets of the software industry.

Digital technology was once touted as the path to a world that was easier, safer, and more connected. But at some point, says the author of this intriguing book, it became more part of the problem than part of the solution. Software is creeping into every corner of our society, and the trend shows no sign of slowing. Campbell’s career spans the gamut of the digital business, from gung-ho startups to ruthless tech giants, and he draws on his experience to compile a long list of stories of software going wrong. He discusses driverless cars, renegade dating apps, and near crashes of passenger aircraft. But the real issue is the

interaction of software with what Campbell calls “managerialism,” or the desire of executives to increase revenue and reduce outlays. In fact, most corporate bosses have little understanding of how software works and see only the opportunity for speedy growth. Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have already wound up or drastically cut back their internal offices responsible for ethical oversight, to save on staff costs. The problems have begun to multiply with the proliferation of AI systems, which could eventually take humans out of the equation entirely. Campbell believes that most software engineers have a genuine desire to make the world a better place, and if they work together they might be able to leverage their skills to introduce crucial safeguards. This sounds like an over-optimistic view, but Campbell is right in saying that change is needed. Without a new direction, he concludes, software will be “a digital straitjacket in which we bind ourselves ever more tightly, even as its embrace suffocates us.” A disturbing look at the evolution of digital technology and the implications for society.

The Wanderer’s Curse: A Memoir

Choi, Jennifer Hope | Norton (288 pp.) $29.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9781324035510

A first-generation Korean American attempts to come to terms with her mother, who won’t stand still. On one level, Bon Appétit editor Choi’s memoir is a not-unexpected account of life as a struggling millennial in New York City, seeking success as a creative while working scrape-by jobs in bars and restaurants. Meanwhile, back in California, Umma, her mother, rules an empty roost: “Umma was the Boss Bitch, the Decider, our Head Honcho, who held every account and paid every bill working morning and night shifts as an open-heart surgery nurse.” Finally

fleeing an unsatisfying marriage, Umma lights out for the territory, heading for a new life in Alaska. Soon enough she’s wandering the globe, eventually resettling in South Carolina, where Choi eventually moves in with her, another survival strategy for straitened times. Mom is sometimes harsh in her impatience: “I never should have raised you American. If you were a real Korean daughter, you would just sit there and listen. Like a wall.” Meanwhile, Choi begins to appreciate her mother’s strength while sorting out her own life; late in the narrative, Choi explores the Korean term “yeokmasal,” which translates to her book’s title, as a means of understanding her mother’s peripatetic nature. There are a few MFAish flourishes, such as the obligatory aside on the “science” of wandering (“Those bearing the polymorphic DRD4-7R gene variant are said to share a lower sensitivity to dopamine”), and plenty of overblown language (“Are there also random acts of kindness and solidarity transpiring every day? Yes. But jouncing between these vicissitudes I worried had altered my grip on reality”). Still, Choi’s memoir is a sympathetic study in the way mothers and daughters so often talk past each other while seeking accommodation—or, in some senses, a truce—and understanding. Sometimes affecting, sometimes stumbling, but appealing in its moments of reconciliation and redemption.

Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land

Cockerell, Rachel | Farrar, Straus and Giroux (416 pp.) | $32.00 May 6, 2025 | 9780374609269

Multivocal history, focusing on the author’s family, of the European Jewish diaspora. Part of Cockerell’s family arrived in London from Ukraine when World War I broke out, and for her great-grandfather,

in some ways, “his pre-war existence belonged to a lost world.” That existence included work in the highest reaches of Theodor Herzl’s original Zionist movement, which sought a homeland in an unfriendly world. With Herzl and, importantly, the largely forgotten intellectual and writer Israel Zangwill, David Jochelmann sought that homeland across the globe, including by means of the so-called Galveston Plan, where 10,000 Jews arrived in the U.S. by way of the Texas port, “sent there from Russia by my great-grandfather.” With a narrative whose voices are drawn from a vast range of published sources—books, letters, newspaper and journal articles— Cockerell gives shape to Jochelmann, perhaps the least known of the Zionist leaders. Along the way she looks at the slow elaboration of what would become the Jewish nation: at one point Palestine, which the New York Sun called “smaller than the State of New Jersey,” and later, in a misbegotten episode, British East Africa, “one of the few sections of Africa where white men may thrive,” which led to a rebellion against Herzl by many followers, intent on settling in Palestine instead. For many, the destination proved to be New York City, with the Tribune opining, “Few outside the Jewish world appreciate the vast difficulties involved in the Americanization of the Russian Hebrew,” while the financier Jacob Schiff urged that “the Jew of the future is, to my mind, the Russian Jew transformed by American methods.” Jochelmann himself (losing the second “n” after arriving) went to London, helping organize anti-Nazi resistance but dying before the horrors of the Holocaust became known, and before the independent Jewish state he envisioned took shape.

An innovative, rewarding contribution to Jewish history.

Speaking in Tongues

Coetzee, J.M. & Mariana Dimópulos

Liveright/Norton (144 pp.) | $26.99

May 6, 2025 | 9781324096450

An evocative conversation between the Nobel Prize–winning novelist and his translator. Coetzee has long been admired for his sinewy prose, his uncompromising humanism, and his immense sensitivity to the nuances of language in everyday life. This short book records a dialogue between Coetzee and his Spanish translator, Dimópulos, in which they range widely over such questions as these: Does language represent the world, or does it create that world? If we grow up multilingual, do we see the world in different ways? How do languages with grammatical gender organize the world? Should we try to neutralize gender in our own writing and speaking? The stimulus for the dialogue is the publication of Coetzee’s novel, The Pole. That book told the story of an elderly Polish pianist who has a relationship with a Spanish woman whom he meets as his host at a concert in Spain. Coetzee wanted the book to convey a linguistic as well as a musical world. His idea was to have the book, originally written in English, published first in Spanish and then, to use the Spanish version as the base text for all future translations (including the published English version). This move prompts the conversation about how English-language publishing largely controls world literature. More books, they note, are translated from English into other languages than the reverse—a fact they attribute to the

A portrait of the man who, before World War I, led 10,000 Jews to Texas.

MELTING POINT

Anglo-American resistance to what’s going on in the world outside their purview. They also make the point that world literature splits not just into English and non-English, but into north and south. The Southern Hemisphere, they intuit, lives among languages differently from the Northern. These issues will compel many American readers to reassess the politics of translation and their own literary and linguistic imperialism. Fans of Coetzee will also find a refreshing colloquialism to this book and a respite from his recent judgmentalism about animal rights, Western power, and public institutions. You could read this book in an hour. You could think about it for the rest of your life.

A Soldier’s Life: A Black Woman’s Rise From Army Brat to Six Triple Eight Champion

Cummings, Edna W. | Univ. of Virginia (192 pp.)

$29.95 | May 8, 2025 | 9780813953144

A female veteran fights for recognition of Black service members. Cummings, who grew up in a military family, honors the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, a division of the WACs, the only Black unit that served overseas. Made up of women of color, with 855 members, its mission was organizing, sorting, and moving out mail to soldiers during World War II. In a segregated army, the members faced considerable challenges, just as Cummings did in her own military career. For college, she chose Appalachian State University, enrolling in its ROTC program to fulfill her dream of becoming a second lieutenant in the WACs upon graduating. One of only nine Black freshman women, she was the only Black woman in the school’s ROTC program. She encountered bigotry among students and faculty, and with anti-war sentiment widespread in the country incited

by the Vietnam War, she confronted anti-militaristic attitudes as well. Graduating in 1978, her first overseas tour came in 1981, when she was posted to South Korea. Despite misogyny and racism in the Army, her career was successful—she was promoted to captain in 1982—but after she married the following year, she left the Army, moving to Virginia, where her husband had a teaching job at the Virginia Military Institute. She joined the Army Reserve, taught in an alternative school, and by 1987 had two children. Her husband’s death, however, upended her plan to remain a civilian; an Army career offered security, and she returned to active duty, rising in the ranks. Retirement, finally, in 2003, afforded her time to become a “citizen advocate” for the Six Triple Eight, devoting herself to publicizing their “patriotism, challenges, and perseverance.” Her efforts contributed to the making of a documentary about the battalion and, in 2022, the belated awarding of a Congressional Gold Medal. A fresh contribution to Black history.

Dirty Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family

Damatac, Jill | One Signal/Atria (256 pp.)

$28.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9781668084632

A hard journey to freedom. Making her book debut, Damatac weaves history, mythology, and recipes into an affecting memoir of abuse, grief, longing, and frustration. Born in the Philippines, Damatac left for the U.S. with her

family in 1992 and spent 22 years living as an undocumented immigrant before finally emigrating to England, where she is now a British citizen. Her migration, she writes, has taken her “from secrecy to revelation,” “from fear to hope.” The material hardship that her family encountered because of their status as illegal residents was compounded by her father’s violence and abuse. Erupting in uncontrollable anger, he beat her viciously, behavior she ascribes in part to “internalized colonial oppression and shame.”

Colonized by the Spanish and Americans, oppressed by the long dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, Filipinos have a long history of being exploited and demeaned. Many recipes that Damatac includes reflect this history. Sisig na Baboy, for one, a stew of pigs’ ears, snouts, feet, intestines, “is what Filipinos eat when all the best parts are taken by occupying American forces.” Filipinos like her parents went to the U.S. in search of a better life but discovered only more exploitation. “Our college-educated, white-collar parents became minimum-wage grocery store workers,” the author writes. Eventually, with the luck of a valid Social Security card, her mother landed a job in a bank, where she was able to rise to higher le vels; Damatac worked part time throughout her schooling, handing over her earnings to the father who grew increasingly manipulative and cruel to her and her mother. Diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and ADHD, Damatac made three suicide attempts; on a path to independence strewn with obstacles, including rape, extortion, and betrayal, she has emerged as a survivor, her determination forged by a “lineage of hardship.”

A disquieting tale of trauma.

Honoring the Black women who served overseas during World War II.

A SOLDIER’S LIFE

Unrig the Game: What Women of Color Can Teach Everyone About Winning

Daniel, Vanessa Priya | Random House (432 pp.)

$32.00 | March 4, 2025 | 9780593596210

Women of color leading the way. Women of color have historically been the “most progressive and civically engaged” citizens in the United States. So argues Daniel, a former grassroots activist and nonprofit executive director who writes, “No other demographic group in the nation stands up more strongly against hate and more clearly for freedom, climate action, and human rights.” In a book that draws on interviews with “beloved elders” like labor activist Dolores Huerta and civil rights leader Bernice Johnson Reagon, as well as Daniel’s own career experience, the author explores what it means to be a woman in such a role. Because women of color live at the intersection of multiple forces of oppression, they have, she writes, “360-degree vision…that begins in families and spreads to communities,” allowing them to tackle several problems at once. Women of color also have the courage to take— and encourage—bold leaps forward to help those in need and the generosity of spirit to understand that it is only by lifting their communities that they rise. Yet these abilities, combined with their visibility, put them at risk for difficulties that their white counterparts might not face. One of the most pernicious is the expectation to caretake organizations and staff members as mother or “mammy” figures. When a woman of color in leadership says no, she can be vilified by others—including her peers—and left feeling exhausted and demoralized. Speaking from experience and observation, Daniel emphasizes the need for women of color to build a “squad” of trustworthy colleagues and draw “strong boundaries” to keep overwork and self-sacrifice at bay. Impassioned and insightful, this book illuminates the true condition of women

of color as it highlights strategies to help ensure their success.

Necessary reading for leaders and anyone committed to creating positive social change.

The Mother: A Graphic Memoir

Deutsch, Rachel | Douglas & McIntyre (160 pp.) | $18.95 paper April 22, 2025 | 9781771624329

Taking baby steps into motherhood. Deutsch, a New Yorker cartoonist, always wanted to be a mother. The first step to achieving this dream, she decides, is “to find a partner.” Consequently, in her twenties, she begins dating a string of disappointing men. “Is it me?” she wonders. “Am I too picky?” In her mid-thirties, she meets Marc. “We had a particular dynamic,” she writes. “We were pragmatic and not very romantic.” Eventually, she takes “hold of Marc with just a finger or two” and, despite the tenuousness of the couple’s bond, decides to have a baby. Her pregnancy leads to a depression that forces the author to reckon with her family’s trauma history and her strained relationship with her own mother, both of which make Deutsch doubt her ability to parent. With the help of medication, her pregnancy improves. After giving birth, she fights past her insecurity and embraces a new feeling of empowerment while simultaneously battling sleep deprivation and the challenges of her relationship with Marc. With the help of couples counseling and individual therapy, she celebrates the first year of her child’s life with quiet triumph. Deutsch’s story is by turns lyrical, vulnerable, and circumspect. Her illustrations are vibrant and unexpected, and the book is full of touching and amusing moments. “Figuring out how to be a mom was like going through puberty again,” she writes, the text accompanying drawings

A tender ode to new motherhood.

Kirkus Star

The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex

Febos, Melissa | Knopf (288 pp.)

$29.00 | June 3, 2025 | 9780593537237

A year of celibacy changes a queer memoirist’s life. After two decades of back-to-back romantic relationships, Febos knew she needed a change. She decided to trade in years of serial monogamy for temporary celibacy, which she defines as abstaining from sex and dating. She writes, “It wasn’t happiness, exactly, that I sought when I decided to spend this time celibate. I had just gotten so tired.” During this time, she makes a 12-step-style “inventory” of her past relationships in which she reflects on the ways in which she treated her past partners. When she shared this inventory with someone she had long known—“a kind of ‘spiritual director’”—the person declared Febos “a user” of people, a diagnosis whose accuracy ultimately provided Febos with both direction and a sense of relief. The author peppers her narrative with research about other women who have chosen celibacy as a route to self-fulfillment and liberation, including Virginia Woolf, whose celibacy enabled her to focus on her art; Benedictine abbess Hildegard von Bingen, whom Febos describes as “empowered in ways people recognize as masculine”; and the beguines, “orders of religious laywomen” who gave up sex to escape “the servitude of marriage and motherhood.” Despite uncovering hard truths about

>>> of her in various frazzled states. But snuggling with her infant, she declares to herself, in a speech bubble, “God she smells good.”

THE KIRKUS Q&A: JOHN GREEN

The novelist and podcaster explores everything there is to know about the world’s deadliest infectious disease.

BY MARION WINIK

“If you’d told me when The Fault in Our Stars was published that a decade later, I’d be writing and thinking almost exclusively about tuberculosis,” writes John Green in Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, “I would have responded, ‘Is that still a thing?’” Too many of us are in the same boat, unaware that a disease vanquished in the United States nearly 75 years ago still kills well over a million people a year, almost all of them in Africa. But there are a lot of other things most of us don’t know about tuberculosis—it killed all three Brontë sisters, Eleanor Roosevelt, and George Orwell; it had something to do with the beginning of World War II, the statehood of New Mexico, and the invention of the cowboy hat. These stories and many others are all told in Green’s engrossing second work of nonfiction. He recently discussed the book with us over Zoom from his home in Indianapolis; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

So where did this title come from? Is everything really tuberculosis?

My wife Sarah has been joking for years that, in my mind, everything is about tuberculosis and tuberculosis is about everything, so I called the book Everything Is About Tuberculosis . Then my longtime editor misread the title, writing me to say, “I really enjoyed Everything Is Tuberculosis .” That was much better.

Honestly, though, we can’t understand the history of humans without considering this disease that’s killed

one out of every seven of us who ever lived.

Tell us about Henry Reider, the inspiration for the book. I met Henry in 2019 when I toured Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. He has the same name as my son, and a lot of the same mannerisms, and he looked to be about the same age, maybe 9. He took me all around this tuberculosis hospital, and eventually we made it back to the doctors who were meeting to talk about a few cases they were concerned

about. One of the nurses shooed Henry away, and I learned that he was one of those patients. His particular strain of tuberculosis did not respond well to second-line drugs. In Sierra Leone, that was almost a death sentence.

He had already spent years of his life continually hospitalized. He lost hearing in one ear due to the side effects of a medication he didn’t even need to be on. And he was no 9-year-old—he was 17, stunted by both malnutrition and the disease.

For most of the book, his treatment is going so poorly, I was terrified that he was going to die. Is it a spoiler to say he made it?

I don’t think he’d want it to be a mystery. He’s a remarkably resilient young man, now a student at the University of Sierra Leone.

His story recalls another in your book, of a young woman from the early 20th century who spent her entire childhood in a sanitorium. That was very common. Little kids who drank raw milk and got bovine tuberculosis would often end up hospitalized when they were 2 or 3 years old. I write about a young Massachusetts girl who lived there until she was 16. She had no memory of loving touch in her life, had no idea what it was like to be home with a family. When streptomycin was introduced, she reentered the world.

Wasn’t the sanitorium completely useless as a treatment for tuberculosis? People disagree over that. Rest and nutrition are good treatments for tuberculosis, but the sanatorium emphasized control over care,

something we see again and again in the history of TB. The sanatorium limited chains of infection, but it was very inhumane.

Patients were told they couldn’t stand up on their own. Often they weren’t allowed to have visitors, because it was seen as too exciting to their nervous systems. They were told not to read, not to write, not to do handicrafts, not to cook.

And yet tuberculosis was somehow seen as very glamorous!

In medical textbooks there were poems, odes to the beauty of consumptive women. Men were thought to experience a great creative flowering when they were suffering from tuberculosis. Percy Shelley wrote John Keats saying, “This consumption tends to strike people who write great verses, as you have done.”

To some extent its beauty standards are still with us. We still idealize pale skin. We still idealize rosy cheeks and high cheekbones and waifish bodies.

Don’t you think it’s weird? Aren’t these symptoms of imminent death?

It makes psychosocial sense. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a third of all people in England were dying of TB. You couldn’t stigmatize it away. It was killing the rich, the poor, the foolish, the brilliant. There was nothing to do with it other than to find a way to make it socially acceptable.

Are you concerned about a resurgence of tuberculosis given the new regime in Washington?

Though tuberculosis certainly could become a resurgent threat in the U.S., this isn’t the reason we should care about it. It’s already the world’s largest infectious disease. When the needs of markets don’t align with the needs of the social order, we sometimes choose markets. That’s the problem.

Once I became interested in tuberculosis, I began to hear from activists and to understand how much cost was a barrier to diagnosis and treatment. There’s this incredibly effective drug called bedaquiline that has historically been way too expensive, because Johnson & Johnson had a monopoly on it. I’ve worked in concert with Doctors Without Borders and others to get J&J to back down from attempts to make their patent eternal. And the price of bedaquiline has dropped by about 70% in

the year and a half since they did. When I started writing the book, 1.5 million people died of tuberculosis every year, and by the time I finished, it was 1.25 million. That progress is real.

Do you think this tuberculosis study will feed your fiction writing in any way? Oh, that’s an interesting question. I mean, probably in ways that I don’t see or understand. After writing two nonfiction books, I do miss writing fiction and feel called back to it, so that’s what I’m working on now.

Your next book will be fiction? I think so, but if you had asked me after my previous book, I would have said the same. I never imagined I would go down this rabbit hole with TB.

You mention that your OCD played a role in this project.

As I say in the book, mental illness is often romanticized as bringing on creative expression, but my own experience of OCD is very different from the way it’s portrayed in Sherlock Holmes. My own experience is that there are very few, if any, upsides to living with mental illness. When I’m unwell, I’m unable to write at all.

I do think that it’s probably not a coincidence that so much of my life and my writing have been oriented around my long-standing fears around contamination and infectious disease. I’ve written a lot about illness both because I’m fascinated by it and because I think it’s a bit weird that we don’t write and talk about it more.

Marion Winik hosts The Weekly Reader podcast on NPR.

We can’t understand the history of humans without considering this disease that’s killed one out of every seven of us who ever lived.

herself, Febos describes these months of celibacy as some of “the happiest of my life,” mainly because they provide her with the time and space she needs to focus on herself and, most importantly to the author, her art. Although a book about abstention, at its essence this story is about understanding, reclaiming, and celebrating pleasure, rendered sublimely and with wit. A gorgeous and thought-provoking memoir about how celibacy can teach us about love.

Shots Heard Round the World: America, Britain, and Europe in the Revolutionary War

Ferling, John | Bloomsbury (576 pp.)

$35.99 | April 1, 2025 | 9781639730155

The American Revolution, emphasizing contributions from European powers.

Ferling, author of 15 previous histories of the Revolutionary War period, strains mightily to find a new approach, and the result is an excellent history of the run-up and battles of the American Revolution with more than the usual diversions describing how other nations reacted. He reminds readers that France suffered badly in the Seven Years’ War, which ended in 1763, losing battles, ships, and colonies. Yearning for revenge, its leaders perked up when the American colonies rebelled, and the colonists themselves, in the form of the Continental Congress, yearned for France to join them. Ferling emphasizes that America’s ultimate victory required massive European aid in the form of arms, trained soldiers, sailors, money, and even gunpowder. Since well before the Declaration of Independence, the colonies were importing supplies from France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Still awash in debt from the Seven Years’ War, France had no interest in another, but it reconsidered after

A fresh look at the run-up to the Revolutionary War.

SHOTS HEARD ROUND THE WORLD

America’s spectacular 1778 victory at Saratoga and soon persuaded Spain, which had also suffered in 1763, to join. The consequences may surprise readers. Almost immediately London transferred one third of its colonial army to Canada and the West Indies and thereafter gave priority to war with its traditional enemy. America’s ecstasy at France’s entry soon evaporated. A French fleet arrived to support a massive combined operation that fizzled, after which the fleet sailed off, and the war entered a painful three-year stalemate, during which Washington took little action until the French returned and made the Yorktown campaign possible. Scholars have not ignored European participation, but Ferling writes better than most of them and pays more attention than academics to the campaigns and commanders. From battles to international relations, an outstanding introduction to the American Revolution.

Queer Moderns: Max

Ewing’s Jazz Age New York

Friedman, Alice T. | Princeton Univ. (320 pp.)

$49.95 | May 27, 2025 | 9780691267340

A confluence of artistic rebels. Art and architecture historian Friedman creates a vibrant portrait of queer bohemia in New York and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, drawing extensively from the correspondence of musician, writer, and photographer Max Ewing (1904-34). Born into a wealthy family in Pioneer, Ohio, Ewing was doted on by his parents, who encouraged his interests in the arts and accepted his sexuality. When he moved

to New York in 1923, they supported him with an allowance of $3,000 a year, ample funds for an apartment, piano lessons with an eminent teacher, and an energetic social life. His circle of friends grew to include a host of well-known writers and artists, many of whom he met through Carl Van Vechten, whose works Ewing had long admired and who became his mentor, and writer, activist, and arts doyenne Muriel Draper, for whom Ewing became escort, confidant, and constant companion. At her salons and parties, he met luminaries such as Lincoln Kirstein and Walker Evans, George Gershwin and Noel Coward. Van Vechten, who championed avant-garde and African American arts, was especially significant in Ewing’s involvement in queer culture; after Ewing drowned himself in 1934, Van Vechten gathered and donated his papers to Yale’s Beinecke Library. Friedman charts Ewing’s career as he morphed from performer and pianist to sculptor and photographer; she reports on his friends, lovers, and artistic collaborators in the U.S. and abroad and recounts his lonely, troubled last years. Profusely illustrated with artwork, memorabilia, and photographs—many from the Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits that Ewing created in his walk-in closet and his Carnival of Venice photography project—Friedman’s appreciative biography vividly conveys the spirited ambience of the interracial, international community of queer outsiders and intellectuals among whom, for his short life, Ewing thrived. A richly detailed cultural history.

For more books about queer life, visit Kirkus online.

Kirkus Star

Girl On Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves

Gilbert, Sophie | Penguin Press (352 pp.)

$30.00 | April 29, 2025 | 9780593656297

How the last three decades of movies, music, and media have written the story for women.

In a carefully buttressed and sharply written analysis that takes into account a dizzying number of cultural products and characters, Gilbert tries to understand how we got where we are today, a moment when the undeniable increase in women’s power meets the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the reelection of Donald Trump. If we can see what went wrong, the Atlantic staff writer says, perhaps “we can conceive of a more powerful way forward.” As she considers topics ranging from the Spice Girls to Nora Ephron to Paris and Perez Hilton, from American Pie to Awkward Black Girl , from Sheryl Sandberg to Sheila Heti to Kim Kardashian, she sees that “so much of what I was trying to figure out kept coming back to porn.”

Insights of that sort come fast and bright, big and small: “I’ve always wondered why people diminish girlhood as somehow cosseted or twee, when the reality of coming-of-age as a young woman is so raw, filled with emotional violence and literal blood.”

“Movies in the aughts [the decade of Shallow Hal and Knocked Up] hated women.” “Why is male honesty in art seen as brave while female honesty is so repellent?” The heroes of her account are sometimes unexpected, Taylor Swift and Instagram among them. Her exploration of torture porn and its connection to Abu Ghraib is not for the fainthearted. (If you’ve never heard of a movie called Hostel , consider yourself lucky.) Truly, Gilbert deserves a medal—not only for her

observations and conclusions, but for navigating the sludge she had to wade through to get there.

Essential cultural criticism. But brace yourself—it ain’t pretty.

Clouds: How To Identify Nature’s Most Fleeting Forms

Graham, Edward | Princeton Univ. (224 pp.)

$29.95 | March 18, 2025 | 9780691262482

An exploration of the science of clouds coupled with artistic renditions of the subject matter.

In this marriage of art and science, author Graham, award-winning lecturer, atmospheric scientist, and former editor-in-chief of Weather, the flagship journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, explores the ephemeral nature of clouds. As he contends, “Clouds have intrigued us since time immemorial,” a notion that inspired his approach to this book, combining “modern meteorology with cloud studies by some of the greatest artists ever to look skyward.” Throughout, Graham shares fascinating scientific facts and data regarding the formation of clouds, with accompanying charts, tables, and a glossary, including a discussion of the water cycle, principal cloud types, classification of clouds, and the history of cloud naming. As Graham notes, the nomenclature for clouds remained largely unchanged for centuries until smart technology gave rise to unknown cloud formations. The author discusses various color phenomena seen in clouds, including iridescence, marked by “soft hues and muted, delicate wavy repetitions,” and ice crystal haloes, spectacular optical effects typically found in polar and high-mountain climates. “Why,” Graham ponders, among the plethora of choices, “are we biased toward Cumulus being the typical cloud?”—the archetype chosen by most since our first scribble. Among the accompanying artistic works

judiciously included for illustrative purposes are The Scream by Edvard Munch, depicting nacreous clouds, the “harbingers of doom”; The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh, depicting noctilucent clouds, which appear illuminated in contrast to the darkening evening sky; and Foggy Winter Day. To the Left a Yellow House. Deep Snow by Laurits Andersen Ring, depicting the sereness of nimbostratus clouds. Readers passionate about the skies and the artists who have studied them will find this book captivating.

Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats

Gustafson, Courtney | Crown (256 pp.)

$28.00 | April 29, 2025 | 9780593727614

A cat lover’s chronicle. Cat rescuer Gustafson makes her book debut with a warm memoir about loneliness, love, and her unexpected connection to feral cats in the Tucson neighborhood of Poets Square, where she moved with her boyfriend during the Covid-19 pandemic. At times, tending to 30 howling, mewling, starving cats felt overwhelming: “I was spending a lot of time crying, a lot of time feeling like my heart was too small and too tender, a lot of time wishing I could disengage, wishing I had not been the one to find these cats.” Besides feeding them, she took them to be neutered to prevent litters of kittens added to the population—not only around her house, but in other neighborhoods, too. She became known as the cat lady, the person others turned to when they found injured cats, or just too many. Without quite knowing why, she posted adorable photos of the cats on social media; surprising to her, the Instagram site attracted followers and contributions. When she filmed a video about cooking a miniature Thanksgiving dinner for stray cats, the TikTok post went viral. Rescuing cats

and working at a food bank, Gustafson discovered that the experiences of being unhoused, friendless, and hungry were not limited to cats. Just as the felines outside her house fought for the food she put out for them, the people waiting hours for food distribution often lashed out in anger at not being able to afford “the most basic of resources” to keep themselves and their families alive. While her cat rescue work has given her “a community, a sense of rootedness” and purpose, it has also given her “an intimate knowledge of suffering, a witnessing,” she writes, “I never meant to inherit.” Affecting testimony to the need for caring.

The Ocean’s Menagerie: How Earth’s Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life

Harvell, Drew | Viking (288 pp.) | $32.00 April 22, 2025 | 9780593654286

Accounts of oceanic invertebrates are not a genre, but this “overview of” makes a good case for it.

Of 35 animal groups, one is vertebrates, from sharks to humans. The remaining 34 have no backbones; most live in the ocean and turn out to be abundant, often grotesque, and possessed of “superpowers” useful not only in their struggle for existence but also through chemicals and structures that may improve human lives and fight disease. Fish and mammals remain in the background, but few readers will complain as marine biologist Harvell, author of Ocean Outbreak: Confronting the Rising Tide of Marine Disease, describes the creatures she loves whose complexity belies their ancient evolutionary history. Passing over billions of years of single-celled life, she begins more than 600 million years ago, when the first multicellular organism appeared, probably a sponge. A sponge has no eyes, limbs, head, or organs, and it can’t move.

When the U.S. had military bases all over the world (including Greenland).

SAND, SNOW, AND STARDUST

It’s basically a collection of cells that suck in water, extract bacteria-size food, and then expel it. Despite this simplicity, it carries on sophisticated life processes. Corals exist in symbiosis with algae, which provide them with food; together, they build the world’s largest living colonies, which may stand over 40 feet high and extend hundred of miles. Intelligent octopuses, giant clams, rapacious sea slugs, deadly jellies (they aren’t fish), and essential keystone stars (also not fish) reveal their secrets and display their superpowers, a description less hyperbolic than it appears at first. It has become traditional to conclude natural histories with bad news, and Harvell does not break the mold. Warming and acidifying oceans continue to kill coral reefs across the world. Also to blame, not surprisingly, are overfishing and pollution.

A good read about bizarre creatures.

Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military

Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments

Heefner, Gretchen | Univ. of Chicago (400 pp.)

$37.50 | May 5, 2025 | 9780226831596

Environmental knowledge underpins geopolitical strategy, says a respected historian. There was a time when there was a vast network of American military bases around the world, many of them in places that were, to say the least, inhospitable. A historian at Northeastern University, Heefner begins the story in the latter stages of World War II, when attempts to build

bases in North Africa went badly due to a lack of knowledge about conditions. It sparked an interest in collecting information, and the pace picked up during the Cold War. By 1960, there were more than a thousand bases in operation. Heefner delves into the problems of building airstrips over shifting desert sand, and later in the glacial wastes of Greenland. It took a huge amount of money and a great deal of effort, but the obstacles were gradually overcome. Perhaps the most remarkable project was Camp Century, which was created in a massive space below the Greenland ice cap. Heefner is impressed by the ingenuity of military engineers and their belief that problems existed to be solved. Many of the bases became redundant as intercontinental ballistic missiles became the main weapon of deterrence, but Heefner argues that it might be time to reinvigorate the idea of a network of bases. America’s adversaries are seeking to control strategic territory, she says, and climate change is altering the world’s geography. She devotes a section of the book to the role of military engineers in planning construction on the Moon and perhaps Mars. It adds up to a fascinating account, with Heefner mixing in colorful anecdotes, personal experience, and technical information. The book will appeal to readers interested in military issues and engineering, but there’s plenty here for general readers as well.

A vivid excursion into an unknown aspect of the Cold War.

For more by Gretchen Heefner, visit Kirkus online.

Kirkus Star

Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age

Hess, Amanda | Doubleday (272 pp.) $29.00 | May 6, 2025 | 9780385549738

A panoramic query into how pregnancy, birth, and motherhood have been reshaped by technology and social media. At seven months pregnant, Hess spent an hour on an ultrasound table that became “the moment that [her] relationship with technology turned.” Her first book traces the events leading up to that moment, and then the days, weeks, and years that followed, chronicling not only her personal experience but the many— sometimes unsettling—ways that it intersects with technology. Technology, for Hess, is a behemoth, including everything from common medical equipment to menstruation-tracking phone apps to the “motherhood internet” (and its anti-natalist mirror). Each twist or milestone in the author’s story has a touchpoint with either diagnostic machinery, anonymous online message boards, data collection, or social media influencer accounts; each of those intersecting items has a history, context, and agenda related to the ideals and tensions of womanhood and society itself. Having reported on the nuances and phenomena of internet culture for the New York Times and other publications, Hess brings to her subject humility, curiosity, and a sly, self-aware wit rooted partially in her own adoption of online life. She investigates both seemingly harmless, ubiquitous advances and more fringe online movements and characters with an open thoroughness that renders her trustworthy. Her sweeping and incisive research, paired with her personal vulnerability, reveals a series of slippery slopes and potential (and existing) ethical quagmires from which no prong of technology is

entirely exempt. With her distinct perspective evolving in real time, she shares a fresh and complicated take on how the particular conditions of pregnancy and motherhood stretch and thin the lines that technologies, companies, and communities walk between informing and advertising, between monitoring and surveilling, and between sharing and judging.

A captivating, charged, and crucially provocative consideration of motherhood in modern America.

The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines

Horn, Jonathan | Scribner (448 pp.) $30.99 | April 15, 2025 | 9781668010075

A dual biography of two American generals who took part in that epic 1941-45 campaign. One was a heroic leader awarded the Medal of Honor in 1945. The other was General Douglas MacArthur. Having discovered much new material, journalist and former White House speechwriter Horn, author of The Man Who Would Not Be Washington: Robert E. Lee’s Civil War and His Decision That Changed American History, works hard to emphasize the lesser-known Jonathan Wainwright (1883-1953). Son of an army officer, Wainwright, like MacArthur, was first a captain of West Point’s Corps of Cadets and progressed steadily to become senior field commander of Philippine Forces under MacArthur. Never intending to defend the Philippines, American military leaders formulated a defensive plan in which our forces would retreat to the jungles of the Bataan peninsula, where they would hold out until rescued. MacArthur considered himself a warrior—and warriors don’t defend; they attack. When the Japanese invaded in December 1941, he ignored the plan and proclaimed that his forces would repel the enemy

wherever they landed. When, within weeks, this failed everywhere, he changed his mind, but it was too late to ship enough supplies to Bataan. As a result, the half-starved soldiers who vastly outnumbered the Japanese were doomed. MacArthur left for Australia in March 1942, leaving Wainwright to fight on and then surrender in June. Horn delivers a gripping if painful account of Wainwright’s short command and long, miserable imprisonment. In an extraordinarily mean-spirited act, MacArthur vetoed the decision to award him a Medal of Honor in 1942. Once freed, Wainwright was surprised that America did not blame him for the surrender, treated him as a hero, and awarded him a belated Medal of Honor. Always a loyal subordinate, he never criticized MacArthur and even delivered the nominating speech in his abortive 1948 run for president.

An admirable, often successful attempt to bring Wainwright out of MacArthur’s shadow.

Defund: Black Lives, Policing, and Safety for All

Hudson, Sandy | Pantheon (288 pp.)

$29.00 | April 1, 2025 | 9780593700815

A Canadian activist ventures a defense for a controversial effort at police reform. Public policing is relatively recent, and, writes Hudson, its origins are various: In her homeland of Canada, for instance, the North West Mounted Police, the ancestor of today’s Mounties, was founded “to wrest control from Indigenous people and support the colonization of the northwest territories of North America,” a paramilitary counterpart to the Texas Rangers and kindred groups. Meanwhile, as many scholars have noted of late, other police forces owe their origins to groups formed to oversee enslaved populations and chase down runaways. The class and racial elements of modern policing

can be traced to these origins, and they shape the way policing works today, by Hudson’s lights: “Heavy police presence in Black communities guarantees Black people will be observed, arrested, and imprisoned at rates far beyond those of other races,” she writes, and this presence further reinforces the notion that “Black people are inherently dangerous.” Through “copaganda,” as she calls it, the police insist on the necessity of their existence through instruments such as a controlled news media (police reports being primary news fodder) and TV series that picture the police as beleaguered heroes. In reality, Hudson argues, the police make few people safe and oppress many, with little accountability, inasmuch as “the legal system is set up to protect police, even if they violate your rights.”

Defunding the police to abolish this system is a thought experiment at present, and Hudson persuasively argues that we need not wait until all of the parts are worked out to begin putting that experiment into motion: “An unarmed civilian traffic safety service” could monitor vehicles and help correct violations: “a people-centered approach” and not a “gotcha”—“without needing to carry weaponry that can kill people several times over.”

A lucid argument for defunding—and demilitarizing—the police.

Black Tunnel White Magic: A Murder, a Detective’s Obsession, and ’90s Los Angeles at the Brink

Jackson, Rick & Matthew McGough

Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (528 pp.)

$35.00 | March 4, 2025 | 9780316365789

True-crime memoir that minutely details the labyrinthine investigation of a brutal murder. Retired Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective Jackson (writing with McGough) surveys his 34-year tenure via the long

road to justice in the 1990 stabbing of UCLA student Ron Baker in a train tunnel near Chatsworth Park. Given the era’s suspicions of occult conspiracies, investigators first pursued “a possible ‘devil worship satanic connection.’” Yet Jackson’s suspicions soon fell on Ron’s roommates, Duncan and Nathan, white and Black military veterans, respectively; despite their affability, once Duncan fails his polygraph, “the evidence [soon] stubbornly suggested that Duncan and Nathan had had a hand in Ron’s killing, whether or not it made sense.” Duncan, a committed fabulist, faked his own kidnapping and disappeared, only to be later apprehended for passport fraud; he agreed to record Nathan admitting to their planning of the killing as a faux kidnap for ransom, an “outlandish motive.” This convoluted investigation plays out against the backdrop of the Rodney King beating and O.J. Simpson’s trial: “In the span of just a few years, Los Angeles and its criminal justice system had become ground zero for the country’s racial divisions.” Regarding Duncan’s and Nathan’s divergent fates, Jackson ruefully observes, “Little did we imagine at the time how perceptions about race would enter the equation later.” After five years, both were convicted at trial and “thus deserved the same sentence: life without any possibility of parole.” Yet 25 years later, Duncan successfully received clemency while Nathan has not, deepening the appearance of structural racial bias in this bizarre case. Interviews are represented at length, which seems exhaustive, yet it allows the reader to follow a complicated homicide investigation with only senselessness at its heart. Satisfyingly intricate journey into the policing of urban violence.

Mad House: How Donald Trump, Maga Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man With Rats in His Walls Broke Congress

Karni, Annie & Luke Broadwater

Random House (320 pp.) | $32.00 March 25, 2025 | 9780593731260

A fly-on-the-wall view of the 118th Congress, “a dysfunctional legislative body populated by a bunch of clowns.” New York Times politics reporters Karni and Broadwater, who cover Congress, paint a detailed picture of what one veteran Republican representative called a “shitshow.” Few political leaders of any experience or maturity were much more complimentary: Liz Cheney remarked that “what we’ve done in our politics is create a situation where we’re electing idiots,” while legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, asked how Congress broke so irreparably, quoted Ernest Hemingway on how bankruptcy happens: “gradually, then suddenly.” The gradual bit came about with the slow but immutable hardening of the right wing. All that was left then, when people such as Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert came rolling in, was for the “traditional” wing of the Republican Party to make concessions in the hope that it could retain power. Thus Kevin McCarthy’s devil’s bargain allowed a tiny fringe of the party—just 20 members—to dictate how the other 90 percent had to vote to please both themselves and Donald Trump. Gaetz, later much in the news for disgraceful reasons, “fed on conflict and, more

1990s Los Angeles, “ground zero for the country’s racial divisions.”

BLACK TUNNEL WHITE MAGIC

quickly than any other Republican in office, took to Trump’s brand of scorched-earth politics.” He also edged McCarthy—by any measure one of the least capable persons to hold the job—out of his position as Speaker of the House, though none on the hard right were particularly pleased with the accommodationist who followed. Nancy Mace, George Santos, Jim Jordan, and many others come in for a drubbing, though Karni and Broadwater take time to review the endless series of Democratic Party mistakes that led to Joe Biden’s running against Trump in 2024 for as long as he did before dropping out. Much more fun than the Mueller Report, but just as damning.

Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty

Kucharski, Adam | Basic Books (368 pp.)

$32.00 | May 6, 2025 | 9781541606692

A data specialist investigates the long search for truth and certainty. We live in an era of fake news, bickering experts, and information overload. This raises a key question: How do we know what to believe? Kucharski is a mathematician who specializes in epidemiology, and his 2020 book The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread—And Why They Stop brought together his expertise in trend analysis, social behavior, and disease treatment. In his new book, he casts a broader net, aiming to establish how truth is uncovered in science, law, politics, philosophy, and many other areas of human endeavor. He starts with Euclid and other classical thinkers who tried to find universal truths through the principles of mathematics and geometry, and he explains how their concepts provided the foundations of Western logic and rationalism. The development of calculus added another dimension. But all these ideas broke down in the face of increasing social complexity and new discoveries.

Computer models and algorithms seemed to offer solutions but were eventually revealed as prone to bias, errors, and data limitations. Kucharski does a good job of exposing the flaws in these approaches and sees the “unknown unknowns” as the main obstacle on the path to truth. The book does not offer much advice about how to extract nuggets of truth from mountains of verbiage, but the best option, the author says, is to keep an open mind. He concludes: “We must seek out every useful fragment of data, gather every relevant tool, searching wider and climbing further. Finding the good foundations among the bad. Dodging dogma and falsehoods. Then perhaps, just perhaps, we’ll reach the truth in time.”

A wide-ranging study on separating facts from fiction, truth from lies, and evidence from presumptions.

The World of Nancy Kwan: A Memoir by Hollywood’s Asian Superstar

Kwan, Nancy with Deborah Davis Hachette (320 pp.) | $31.00 April 22, 2025 | 9780306834271

An Asian star is born. Originally named Kwan Ka Shen, Kwan was born in Hong Kong, her father’s native city. Her British mother, Marquita, abandoned Kwan when she was a baby. Marquita’s disappearance before the beginning of World War II ushered in an era of displacement, when Kwan and her family fled the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong for mainland China. Kwan then headed to boarding school in England, where, after graduating, she enrolled in the Royal Ballet School. Although she planned to move back to Hong Kong to start a ballet school, a chance encounter at a studio led to her entry into the Hollywood star system under the tutelage of Ray Stark, founder of

the Seven Arts company. After famously starring in the popular movie The World of Suzie Wong, she went on to act in everything from Disney movies to “sixties sex comedies.” Her fame propelled her through multiple marriages; she also reunited with her estranged mother and endured the death of her son, Bernie. Toward the end of her career, Kwan moved behind the camera, writing and directing films alongside her husband, Norbert. Kwan’s narratorial voice is exuberant and frank, focusing mostly on her acting career and rarely dwelling on her personal life, making the book feel more like an annotated filmography than an introspective memoir. Her behind-the-scenes accounts of the studio system are tantalizing, but the reader is often left wanting more. An entertaining Asian American Hollywood memoir.

Warhol’s Muses: The Artists, Misfits, and Superstars Destroyed by the Factory Fame Machine

Leamer, Laurence | Putnam (336 pp.)

$32.00 | May 6, 2025 | 9780593716663

Acolytes of Warhol, and his often ruthless treatment of them. Warhol (192887) was a master of self-promotion, but he knew he needed to associate with

“stunning women” who would help “bring him the publicity and public adulation he so desired.” This enlightening yet sad book is the story of Warhol’s Superstars, the term he used for the women who “played crucial roles in turning him into the most famous artist in the world.” Yet, as Leamer writes, “many of them paid terrible prices.” Most of the Superstars were white women who came from wealth and privilege. Warhol gave stage names to all except a handful, such as Mary Woronov, a Cornell student who “refused to let Warhol slap some new

name on top of her.” Famous figures from Warhol’s Factory, the name for his grungy New York studio in the 1960s, appear here in tragic detail. Among them are Edie Sedgwick, who “exuded a sylphlike, androgynous image” and whose drug taking spiraled catastrophically out of control; Ultra Violet, who dyed her hair with cranberry juice and kept a beet in her purse to rub on her lips and cheeks for maximum effect; and the sexually uninhibited Viva, with “the mind of a PhD candidate and the mouth of a fishwife.” Framing the book is the story of the feminist Valerie Solanas, who shot Warhol in the abdomen at the Factory because “he was famous and that was reason enough.” Much of this information is well-traveled terrain, but the stories are riveting in their seediness, and Leamer does a nice job of capturing Warhol’s ruthlessness, as when the young dancer Freddie Herko got so high that he danced naked out of a Factory window and fell to his death. As Leamer puts it, Warhol “wished he had been there as Herko soared out the window so he could have filmed the death. It would have been great footage.”

A fascinating if not entirely necessary portrait of the women who influenced Warhol’s art.

Kirkus Star

The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion

Lemov, Rebecca | Norton (336 pp.)

$32.99 | March 25, 2025 | 9781324075264

An unnerving history.

“How could anyone fall for that?” remains a common reaction to wacky ideas promoted over social media, but it’s less often accompanied by a chuckle, because such ideas seem to exert an inexorable appeal.

The flat Earth society is prospering; vaccine coverage is dropping. Lemov, an associate professor of the history of science at Harvard and author of Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest To Catalog Humanity, teaches a course on brainwashing. Long after the 1950-53 Korean War, when a few American prisoners “fell for” Communism, the word “brainwashing” has revived, as experts try to explain how people are persuaded to believe weird things. The first of many unsettling sections deals with the Korean War period, when Chinese overseers peppered POWs with propaganda, accompanied by treats for those who responded favorably and punishment for the uncooperative. After the armistice, citizens and the media were horrified when 23 Americans refused to return. Over the following decades, most tired of life in China and came back, proclaiming that unspeakable tortures had led to their defection. Learning the wrong lesson, the military aimed to train soldiers to resist brainwashing by inflicting brutal torments on recruits while ignoring ideology. The CIA’s ham-handed research on brain manipulation has fascinated popular writers, with an unfortunate carry-over into legitimate brain research. There are few lessons, meantime, to be learned from Patty Hearst’s 1974 kidnapping. Her months of confinement, rape, and abuse are no secret, but Americans remain titillated, and most still believe her guilty of her crimes. Matters do not improve as Lemov casts a gimlet eye on mid-20th-century mass media, later and ongoing cults, and today’s social media “hyper-persuasion,” a more acceptable term for the b-word. A superbly crafted analysis of a universally deplored but seemingly irresistible technique.

Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Great Power Prophet

Luce, Edward | Avid Reader Press (544 pp.)

$35.00 | May 13, 2025 | 9781982173647

Comprehensive biography of the influential Sovietologist and international affairs doyen.

Financial Times columnist Luce opens his sprawling— and a touch too long—narrative in Montreal, where Brzezinski (his name “pronounced ‘ZbigNieff BreshinSki,’” Jimmy Carter told his staff) was living while his father served as Poland’s consul general. Brzezinski proved early on an implacable enemy of the Soviet Union after Stalin’s bargain with Hitler to carve up his native land. Attaining American citizenship in 1958, he became an accomplished Sovietologist, one of the few who could speak Russian and Polish and, with his Czech-speaking wife, feel at home in much of Eastern Europe. He fell into the same scholarly orbit as Henry Kissinger at Harvard, an association that was rarely happy: Arthur Schlesinger Jr. later confided in his journal that Kissinger detested Brzezinski, as did Averill Harriman, who called him a “fool” and a “menace,” in part because of Brzezinski’s early Cold War sword rattling. Indeed, Brzezinski was not much liked anywhere: Among other things, many viewed him as antisemitic simply because he was from Poland, “which had had a nasty pattern of turning on its ancient Jewish communities when scapegoats were needed.” There was no basis to that charge, Luce counters, and Brzezinski,

A reappraisal of Jimmy Carter’s mostly hawkish foreign-policy guru.

ZBIG

while never quite softening his anti-Soviet views, was instrumental in arms-reduction talks as national security adviser to Carter. Still, his counsel remained hawkish overall; advocating that the U.S. sponsor a military coup to overthrow the Shah of Iran to stymie the Islamicist revolution and, at least in some sense, luring the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan, he insisted that “world politics is not a kindergarten.” Even so, toward the end of his life, Brzezinski was a foe of the U.S. war in Iraq and a prescient champion of newly independent Ukraine and endorsed Barack Obama early on.

A solid work of political and diplomatic history, with much insight into modern geopolitics.

Kirkus Star

Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America

Luo, Michael | Doubleday (576 pp.)

$35.00 | April 29, 2025 | 9780385548571

Giving voice to the first Asian Americans.

An editor at the New Yorker, Luo says that the impetus for writing this book was a random encounter on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in the fall of 2016, a few weeks before the presidential election. While he was standing outside a restaurant with his family, a woman passed them, then turned around, yelling, “Go back to China!” That incident prompted Luo to write “An Open Letter to the Woman Who Told My Family to Go Back to China,” which appeared on the front page of the New York Times, generating an outpouring of reader response. When anti-Asian violence surged across the country in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Luo finally decided to write a narrative history of the Chinese experience in America. Such books of

history are, of course, legion, and Luo relies on many of these, in addition to original archival research, to craft his own narrative. What distinguishes it from the others, however, is that Luo’s book, though sweeping in scope, is also microscopic when it comes to stories. He writes about, for instance, not only Yung Wing, the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university (Yale, class of 1854) and later a prominent diplomat, but also many minor characters who have hitherto remained anonymous in the annals of history. Whether it is the 1871 Chinese massacre in Los Angeles or the brutal killing of Chinese in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885, we now know, thanks to Luo’s meticulous digging, the names and stories of some of the survivors of these infamous race riots. Readers interested in American history, not only Chinese American history, will savor these pages. An estimable and vital work of history that honors the Chinese American experience.

I Lived To Tell the Story:

A Memoir of Love,

Legacy, and Resilience

Mallory, Tamika D. | Black Privilege Publishing/Atria (304 pp.) | $28.99 Feb. 11, 2025 | 9781982173494

Fighting for a cause.

Growing up in Co-op City in New York, Mallory was often in trouble, skipping school, breaking curfew, and dating a series of dangerous men and boys, including “a high-stakes robber.” Giving birth to her son Tarique gives her the momentum she needs to start living more responsibly. In an attempt to provide for her child, she takes a job answering phones for a lawyer “in the movement,” a job that changes her life. Working her way up the ladder, she eventually becomes executive director of the National Action Network, a group whose rallies she had attended since childhood. As she rises through the

ranks, Mallory finds herself co-chairing the Women’s March, a decision that exposes her to accusations of antisemitism. The stress of the situation culminates in a trip to rehab, where Mallory overcomes an addiction to pills. She returns to work, this time co-founding an organization called Until Freedom that becomes involved in protests around the killing of Breonna Taylor during the Covid-19 pandemic. By the end of this journey, Mallory learns to care not just for her community but also for herself, concluding, “I was born fighting for freedom and I will die fighting for freedom—but this time freedom will include me.” This busy life story is full of passion, vulnerability, and light. At times, the sheer volume of events the author describes eclipses the emotional weight of certain moments. Overall, though, this is a deeply felt account. A Black female activist’s gripping memoir.

Libraries of the Mind

Marx, William | Princeton Univ. (192 pp.) $24.95 | May 20, 2025 | 9780691267425

Renew that library card. This deftly written book reflects on the history of how we organize knowledge, classify books, and give meaning to our lives through reading. Marx, a professor of comparative literature at the Collège de France, traces the development of libraries from antiquity to the present. He illustrates how all acts of cataloging are really acts of interpretation—that is, what you place from first to last tells us about what you think is important. The Dewey Decimal Classification, for example, runs from computers, information, and general works (the 000s) to history (the 900s), in essence taking us from the abstract to the concrete. European and Asian libraries catalog things differently, sometimes focusing on years of acquisition or even the size of books. Libraries establish canons: collections of authors and

Didion & Co.

Four recent audiobooks offer perspectives on the iconic writer, her circle, and her times.

BY MARION WINIK

JOAN DIDION DIED in 2021, but the interest in her life and work has only increased since then. Alissa Wilkinson’s new biography comes out March 11; meanwhile, the Didionfest is well underway. One must-listen is the new audio edition of Didion’s 1968 debut essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Macmillan Audio, 6 hours and 23 minutes), read by actor Maya Hawke. Hawke finds the exact blend of unflappability, dry humor, and sensitivity that does justice to Didion’s observations about such topics as 5-year-olds on acid in Haight-Ashbury, John Wayne’s demeanor on the set of his last movie after his cancer diagnosis, and having a bit of a nervous breakdown

in Manhattan in her 20s. Hawke delivers Didion’s epiphanies—like discovering “the dismal fact that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others”—with just the right note of ironic self-deprecation. For some readers, there are essays we know almost by heart—for me, it’s “Goodbye to All That” and “On Keeping a Notebook”—and the pleasure of hearing them read aloud is something like a believer listening to liturgy. If you really can’t get enough, go back and listen to Diane Keaton’s 2012 recording of the collection, also very good.

Lili Anolik is known for her podcast about the Bennington College “brat pack” (Donna Tartt, Jonathan Lethem, Bret Easton Ellis) and Eve’s

Hollywood, her 2019 biography of Eve Babitz, an essayist, collagist, and party girl who was friends with Didion and her husband. Anolik now brings her gossipy, digressive, hold-that-thought style to a book that aims to show that Babitz and Didion’s relationship was central to the writings of both. While Didion & Babitz (Simon & Schuster Audio, 12 hours and 34 minutes), read by the author, may not convince you, it’s fun to watch her try. Be forewarned: True believers will surely be rubbed the wrong way by some of her wilder assertions about Didion—in discussing The Year of Magical Thinking, for instance, she asserts that the author “crawled over the corpses” of her husband and daughter to reinvigorate her career!

To form your own opinion of Babitz’s oeuvre, check out I Used To Be Charming (Brilliance Audio, 14 hours and 41 minutes), read by Brittany Presley. Babitz’s writings about posing nude with Marcel Duchamp, sleeping with Jim Morrison, and the spectacle of San Franciscans visiting Los

Angeles, struck the Kirkus reviewer as “zesty essays by a sly observer.” Agreed. But let’s also agree that Babitz was not remotely trying to offer the kind of goose-bump-producing insight and rhetorical power Didion was after in every sentence.

Cory Leadbeater spent the last portion of Didion’s life as her full-time personal assistant, living for several years in her apartment— nearly as close to her, he points out more than once, as if they were married. At the same time, he was writing fiction, coping with his addictions and obsessive suicidal ideation, and dealing with the awful fact that his father was serving time in prison for fraud. Didion patiently read every word Leadbeater wrote, offering constant encouragement. But her real gift to him was this story. As read by Charlie Thurston, The Uptown Local: Joy, Death and Joan Didion (HarperAudio, 6 hours) is a moving and well-written memoir of an unusual relationship that got both parties through very difficult times.

SEEN AND HEARD

New Memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert Coming This Fall

The author will write about addiction and loss in All the Way to the River.

Elizabeth Gilbert will write about addiction and loss in an upcoming memoir, People magazine reports. Riverhead will publish the author’s All the Way to the River in the fall.

Gilbert’s first book, the short story collection Pilgrims, was published in 1997; she followed that up with a novel, Stern Men and a nonfiction book, The Last American Man

She became a literary sensation in 2006 with the publication of her memoir Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, which spent more than three years on the New York Times bestseller list and spawned a hit movie, Eat Pray Love, starring Julia Roberts.

All the Way to the River will tell the story of Gilbert’s relationship with Rayya Elias, who, like Gilbert, struggled with addiction. Elias died in 2018 after a battle with cancer.

Gilbert announced her memoir on Instagram, writing, “This book is about the darker side of that spiritual, emotional, and physical hunger—in its more extreme forms known as addiction—and how lost we can become in the endless search for connection and satisfaction. And it is about the pathway out of that desperation, through the liberation of a more nourishing way of life.”

All the Way to the River is slated for publication on Sept. 9.—M.S.

Elizabeth Gilbert

For a review of Eat, Pray, Love, visit Kirkus online.

IN THE NEWS

Author and Activist Cecile Richards Dies at 67

The longtime president of Planned Parenthood wrote a memoir, Make Trouble.

Cecile Richards, the author and activist who served as the president of Planned Parenthood for 12 years, has died at 67, the Texas Tribune reports. The cause of death was brain cancer. Richards, a native of Waco, Texas, was educated at Brown University and worked as a labor organizer before joining the successful Texas gubernatorial campaign of her mother, Ann Richards, in 1990. She founded the nonprofit Texas Freedom Network in 1996 and became president of Planned Parenthood in 2006. She stepped down from the organization in 2018 and, the following year, founded Supermajority, a political action group. Last November, former President Joe Biden honored Richards

with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2018, Gallery Books published Richards’ memoir, Make Trouble: Stand Up, Speak Out, and Find the Courage To Lead, co-written with Lauren Peterson; a critic for Kirkus called it “a memoir that makes palpable the immense influence of an organization that has improved so many women’s lives.” A young readers’ edition of the book, adapted by Ruby Shamir, was published the following year. Richards’ admirers paid tribute to her on social media. On the platform X, former Sen. Claire McCaskill posted, “She was an amazing woman.…Cecile fought for women’s rights. Hard. Millions of women benefited from her courage and determination. Cecile Richards made her mom proud. RIP.”—M.S.

For a review of Make Trouble, visit

Kirkus online.

Cecile Richards

writings that matter to a culture. And we, too, in our own lives, make such catalogs and canons. Marx argues that we all create libraries of the mind. We look back and remember the books we’ve read and, in the process, shape a view of the world. Recent developments in digital literacy also work in this way. Marx provocatively asks us to think of Wikipedia less as an encyclopedia than as a library. How it links its entries together, how it offers additional external references, and how it organizes its articles into groups all say something important about how the Wikipedia project is a conception of not just what to know but how to know. Marx’s purview takes us from the ancient Greeks to modern Europe, from Asia to South America. In the end, he argues for the enduring value of imaginative literature in all societies. His lesson: “True engagement with literature demands humility, openness, and a readiness to be transformed by the unknown.” An eloquent plea for reading by a true scholar of world literature.

Motherhood and Its Ghosts

Mersal, Iman | Trans. by Robin Moger Transit Books (160 pp.) | $17.95 paper May 6, 2025 | 9798893380170

On becoming a mother after growing up without one. Mersal’s mother died in childbirth while Mersal was still a child. As an adult, the Egyptian poet and essayist gave birth to her sons in the “First World,” an experience that makes her revisit her relationship with her mother and prompts her to ask: “What if your mother died before you could form a memory of your relationship with her? What if a mother’s absence or disappearance is the point of reference you turn towards, or fight against, when you become a mother?” Following this thread, Mersal investigates the idea of the “hidden mother,” the name Victorian photographers gave to mothers who propped up their young children into photographic poses while hidden beneath

bedsheets or who were scraped out of images after doing their artistic duty.

Next, Mersal provides readers with excerpts from her journals about her son Youssef’s multiple mental health diagnoses, which include anxiety, bipolar depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder and result in his registration in a residential facility in Maine. The author ends this short book with an examination of grief surrounding her mother’s death, focusing on her maternal grandmother’s response to losing a child. “It is to understand Youssef, if only a little, that I write this book,” she concludes. Gracefully written, if at times disorienting, the book creates unexpected meaning from interwoven timelines. A mother’s insightful memoir about motherhood, mental illness, and loss.

How Things Are Made: A Journey Through the Hidden World of Manufacturing

Minshall, Tim | Ecco/HarperCollins (320 pp.)

$30.00 | May 6, 2025 | 9780063434653

Diving into manufacturing and the modern supply chain.

“Throughout every day of your life you will be wearing, consuming, being transported or sheltered by, communicating through or being restored to health by manufactured products,” writes Cambridge University scholar Minshall. Yet, he adds, how these products come into being is “largely invisible” to most consumers. Minshall aims to make at least some of the processes visible, and he uses everyday objects to illustrate their complexities. One is toilet paper, which, at a basic level, requires different kinds of wood pulped and then glued together and cut onto rolls at the rate of 14,000 rolls an hour, then serviced by an army of haulers, shippers, clerks, data analysts, and logistics specialists until it arrives on the shelf: “The whole system to make this product requires the brains and brawn of thousands of workers,

millions of dollars of investment and the movement of materials and partly finished goods over thousands of miles.” That this product is so essential, Minshall adds in passing, explains the perfectly rational hoarding of toilet paper that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, which in turn exposed the many snags inherent in the supply chain, another subject on which he sheds useful light. Move from toilet paper to a more complex product, and the obstacles multiply by orders of magnitude; who knew how many countries were involved in the production of an Airbus-320 plane, all of whose parts—ideally—are perfectly made and assembled? Moving wings from Wales, landing gear from Canada, horizontal tailplanes from Spain, and so forth to the central assembly plant in France involves a massive carbon footprint, and Minshall concludes his illuminating study with how manufacturing might be more efficient and environmentally friendly, in part by keeping at least some of it as local as possible.

Readers interested in the hidden workings of the world will be well pleased with Minshall’s explorations.

Holler: A Graphic Memoir of Rural Resistance

Nalamalapu, Denali Sai | Timber (172 pp.) $29.99 paper | May 13, 2025 | 9781643265230

When citizens fought the construction of a pipeline in Appalachia. Growing up in coastal Maine, Nalamalapu felt an intense pull to do good. “My mom and her dad,” the author writes, “encouraged me to learn about why injustice happens and how to fix it.” This drive led the child of South Asian American immigrants to the climate justice movement, which, in 2021, had them joining the effort to block the construction of a proposed mountain valley gas pipeline in Appalachia. By the time Nalamalapu became a part of the movement, local citizens had spent a decade trying to halt its

Leaving Vietnam—and

trying to come to terms with his father’s mysterious death.

THE MIGRANT RAIN FALLS IN REVERSE

construction. The author of this graphic memoir profiles six activists whose work preceded her involvement in the movement, including Indigenous seed keeper Desirée Shelley, nurse Karolyn Givens, photographer Paula Mann, single mother Crystal Mello, and high school science teacher Becky Crabtree. Her science class, Crabtree says, “is my quiet resistance to those people who put money above everything.” In the end, Nalamalapu and their peers lose the fight, and the sight of the pipeline scarring her beloved mountains puts the author into a depression that leaves them bedridden for weeks. The author writes, “It was impossible to see a path forward. And yet…what choice did I have? To give up on the soft mountain breeze and warm, worn hands of a place and people who have come to define a part of me?”

Full of heart, this beautifully illustrated book tells a devastating story.

A poignant portrait of an Appalachian environmental movement.

The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse: A Memory of Vietnam

Nguyen, Vinh | Counterpoint (272 pp.)

$27.00 | April 15, 2025 | 9781640096738

A Vietnamese Canadian writer and educator searches for his lost father. In 2019, when his beloved academic mentor died suddenly, Nguyen was pitched back into the maw of an earlier loss, realizing that “for almost three decades, I’d managed to avoid coming to grips with my father’s mysterious death

while seeking asylum.” Nguyen’s father spent years in a forced labor camp, returning home only to face the fall of the South Vietnamese government a few years later. At that point, Nguyen’s mother took the kids and escaped by boat to Cambodia, then Thailand, where they spent several years in a camp before emigrating to Canada. “I don’t know why he stayed behind. I’ve never been able to muster the courage to ask my mother.” In the course of his lyrical, sorrowful memoir, Nguyen does not actually learn anything more about his father’s life and death, but describes travels and imaginative projects inspired by his longing. At one point, he found himself binge-watching action serials from his Vietnamese childhood. “I want all the words to crowd my mind again. I’d happily erase Deleuze and Derrida to let them in.” He wonders at his own trajectory—a person who had no formal education until the age of 10, later becoming a professor—and includes details about his current life as a gay man in Toronto. The memoir embraces its inconclusiveness through imagery— blurred images seen through slanting rain—and direct statements: “All the things that have troubled me—that my father is dead, that he died in unknown circumstances, that he might not actually be dead, that his afterlife lingers, that I have to live some of this life for him—all that, all this, will continue to trouble me until my time is up.” Poignantly embodies a life marked by an unsatisfiable longing.

The Raider: A New England Runaway, the Chinese Communists, and the Birth of U.S. Marine Special Forces in World War II

Platt, Stephen R. | Knopf (544 pp.) $32.00 | May 13, 2025 | 9780525658016

Unlikely story of a senior U.S. Marine officer who turned far to the left over a lifetime of service. Like fellow Marine General Smedley Butler, who declared,

“War is a racket,” Evans Carlson strayed far from military protocol over his decades as a warfighter. Among other contributions to Marine and military culture, he introduced the slogan “gung ho,” borrowed from his years in China; he was also, notes biographer Platt, beloved of his enlisted charges, having come up through the ranks. For all that, Platt notes, and for all his heroism, especially during the island-hopping years of World War II, Carlson was “all but disowned by his service.” No Marine structure, from a mess hall to a training facility, let alone a whole base, bears his name. There’s a reason: Carlson embedded in China, having convinced Franklin D. Roosevelt that it was in the U.S. interest to know more about the rising civil war between the Communists and Nationalists, as well as warning that Japan was striving to become the dominant Pacific power. The admonition was overlooked, but from his time in other theaters such as Nicaragua, Carlson was convinced that the Marines would have to learn guerrilla warfare, and, against much resistance higher up, he formed a commando unit that he dubbed “Raiders,” forerunners of today’s Special Forces. Among his innovations was the decentralized three-man “fire team” that Marines still use today. Among others were regular talks with his men on social and political issues—a practice learned from spending time with Mao Zedong’s army. For this and his growing alignment with the political left, despite leading “the [Pacific] war’s first victorious ground

For more books about Vietnam, visit Kirkus online.

mission,” the heavily decorated Carlson was essentially forced out of the Corps, dubbed by the Baltimore Sun as its “black sheep,” and is forgotten today. Students of World War II in the Pacific, as well as Marine Corps history in general, will find this engaging.

Hope: The Autobiography

Pope Francis with Carlo Musso | Trans. by Richard Dixon | Random House (320 pp.) $32.00 | Jan. 14, 2025 | 9780593978771

Personal story of Pope Francis. Pope Francis’ Life: My Story Through History (2024) acted as a basic set of memoirs, but this newest work is a more in-depth look at the life of the pontiff. Francis, born as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, dives deep into his family story, memories of his youth, years of struggle and conflict in Argentina as a church leader, and finally his role as head of the Roman Catholic Church. Readers will find this autobiography replete with intriguing and sometimes surprising and even disturbing stories from the pope’s life. Francis’ worldview was shaped by a concern for the poor and the displaced; his father was an Italian immigrant, and his mother was also of Italian descent. He references war as the great evil and tragedy of humankind, returning to the theme again and again. Francis does not hide his own mistakes or peccadilloes, nor does he boast of his own accomplishments. His is a modest and humble story, centered less on himself than on the myriad of people he has encountered through the decades. This includes many people who have suffered, through political oppression, warfare, disease, and more. This makes Francis’ life story quite moving at times. Nevertheless, the work has a choppy feel, both in diction and in organization. The pope tends to wander from one topic to another and often writes in pithy, moralistic declarations. Toward the end, he veers off from

Intriguing and surprising stories from the pope’s life.

HOPE

autobiography to his views on humanity and life itself. He upholds the book’s title with this statement: “For we Christians, the future has a name and this name is hope.” Hope is indeed another recurring theme, even in the midst of the world’s evil and dysfunction, which he has seen firsthand. Though unevenly written, Francis’ work is honest, interesting, and of historic value.

The American Game: History and Hope in the Country of Lacrosse

Price, S.L. | Atlantic Monthly (448 pp.)

$30.00 | May 20, 2025 | 9780802164735

Heritage and privilege on the playing field.

Native Americans invented lacrosse centuries ago, but in recent years, the game has been plagued by serious problems. Price, a former Sports Illustrated staffer, meticulously explains the sport’s decidedly uneven reputation. Over a 17-year period ending in 2018, the number of people who play lacrosse increased by more than 200%. Simultaneously, the game’s image crashed. After a Duke lacrosse party in 2006, three players were falsely accused of rape; though the media response included many inaccuracies, it surfaced incidents of racist behavior by some team members. In 2010, a University of Virginia men’s lacrosse player murdered a UVA women’s player. Meanwhile, numerous players of color have recounted racial harassment from white opponents—thus the perception that lacrosse grooms bigoted bros. On a parallel track, Price explores the game’s

history. To generations of Haudenosaunee—a traditional name the Iroquois reclaimed in 2021—lacrosse has been a “Medicine Game” that helps participants “deal with personal strife,” Price notes. Remarkably, in 1880, amid allegations of corruption, Canada “barred the Iroquois from their own game.” Price also charts the varying fortunes of lacrosse at America’s historically Black universities, part of a broader effort to make the game more inclusive. A Haudenosaunee team’s ongoing efforts to navigate the bureaucracy around international tournaments, including the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, is a powerful reminder of the sport’s lineage. If the Haudenosaunee’s pending Olympic bid is successful, the troubled sport would have a big chance to improve its public standing. Price is a diligent reporter but not always a concise writer, making this book longer than necessary. There’s no need, for example, to explain to readers that Nike is a “sports apparel giant famed for its edgy marketing.” A thorough look at a sport’s storied past, troubled present, and perhaps promising future.

A Training School for Elephants

Roberts, Sophy | Atlantic Monthly (400 pp.)

$30.00 | April 22, 2025 | 9780802164865

Going deep into Africa. By the end of 1875, King Leopold of Belgium, like many other Europeans, had become interested in the African Congo and its natural resources. In addition to the formal International

African Association, whose mission was to “civilize” Africa, Leopold organized a shadow effort led by Henry Morton Stanley—the reporter who had “famously tracked down Livingston.” For a very public expedition, Leopold hired an Irishman, Frederick Falkner Carter, to lead from Dar es Salaam to Lake Tanganyika a caravan that included four trained Indian elephants and their mahouts, or trainers. Carter’s mission was twofold: to determine the feasibility of using elephants as transport across challenging terrain and to establish the foundation of a training school for African elephants. The ensuing journey saw the deaths of the overworked, undernourished elephants along with multiple missteps and abuses. Roberts, a British journalist and writer, excavates this story from archives across Europe and Africa while retracing Carter’s route, believing that “[t]he path the elephants took would be my passport into a region’s oral memory.” Roberts’ journey results in a broader story as she observes the continued political and environmental impacts of colonialism while discovering more context for Carter’s trip. In spite of Roberts’ interrogation of colonialism, her thoughtful approach to geographic and ethnic group naming, and her critical account of Carter’s journey and Leopold’s motivation, there is something uncomfortable in centering so much of the book around her own experiences as a British woman traveling in Africa in search of answers. Roberts misses the irony of positioning herself as the main character in this effort to remedy historical erasure.

A little-known episode of colonial African history paired with a conceptually problematic personal account.

Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece

Romm, James | Norton (352 pp.) $31.99 | May 13, 2025 | 9781324093183

There’s no talking sense into tyrants.

“Back from Syracuse?” quipped a colleague when Martin Heidegger resigned his rectorship at Freiburg in 1934. Plato’s legendary attempt to influence the political affairs of the most powerful state in the Hellenic world failed spectacularly and became shorthand for why a philosopher might attempt to shape a regime and how the regime shapes the philosopher. That Plato made three trips to Sicily to meet Syracusan tyrants was accepted fact in antiquity. Yet the best source for biographical detail is the Platonic letters whose authenticity is disputed. Romm, a professor of classics at Bard College, finds key letters authentic and deploys them to mark out a pathway into the Republic “by way of its political themes and its connections to Plato’s life.” On his first visit, Plato befriended Dion, brother-in-law of the tyrant Dionysius, in whom he saw philosophical potential. Yet he was disgusted by the sexual excess and daily gorging at the “Syracusan tables.” Back in Athens, having barely escaped with his freedom, Plato continued to develop his political philosophy when, 20 years later, the exiled Dion urged him to return to advise the young Dionysius II. Hoping to change the world, Plato twice more went to Syracuse to educate the tyrant in just rule. But the tyrant proved himself a poseur, and court intrigue again put Plato’s life in peril. Upon completing his education in the Form of the Good, the Republic ’s philosopher-king reluctantly returned to the cave to engage in the affairs of men. Romm speculates that Plato’s impotence in the face of decades of political violence in Syracuse and the abject failure of Dion’s reign soured his views and led

to increased political realism in his later works. Those who, like Platonist Harold Cherniss, believe “a work of art exists independently of its author” will be skeptical, but Romm delivers on his promise of “intriguing possibilities.” A gripping, provocative, and deeply researched account of Plato’s failed experiment in enlightened autocracy.

The Living Mountain

Shepherd, Nan | Scribner (176 pp.) | $16.99 paper | March 18, 2025 | 9781668066591

Nature’s pitiless grandeur. Shepherd, a novelist, wanted to understand the “essential nature” of the Cairngorm Mountains, near her home in Scotland, but recognized that it might be “a tale too slow for the impatience of our age.” Though such feelings couldn’t sound more current, she penned them during World War II. After fleeting attempts to publish back then, she set this book aside until 1977, when a university press published it; she died in 1981. In this slightly expanded American edition, Shepherd’s perspective, which prioritizes sensory observations over geological particulars, loses none of its resonance. More hiker than climber, she begins on a lichen-lined plateau, going vertical amid “tangles of ice” on “rose-red” cliffs. Looking at a loch far below, she’s “on a mighty shelf, above the world.” Shepherd doesn’t soft-peddle nature’s ruthlessness. An eagle hunting for food is “the very terror of strength”; to stand inside a cloud is to confront a frightening void. Neither does she ignore interesting historical facts; Cairngorm forestland was first cut in the 19th century, when Scotland needed wood during the Napoleonic Wars. Mainly, though, Shepherd focuses on qualities that are beyond measure. Why do plant species largely eradicated by glaciers flourish in the Cairngorms? Did those combative stags she spotted— their antlers interlocked and unable to free themselves—battle to the death? The

answers elude her, and she’s OK with that. Though very short, this book still feels padded, with a long introduction by Robert Macfarlane, first published in a 2011 Scottish edition, and a new afterword by Jenny Odell. Macfarlane, who spent part of his childhood in the Cairngorms, deems this a classic with few peers. While this might be hometown boosterism, there’s no denying that Shepherd’s prose reaches considerable heights. Long shelved by its author, an ode to a mountain range’s mysteries proves timeless.

Kirkus

Star

The Dissident Club: Chronicle of a Pakistani Journalist in Exile

Siddiqui, Taha & Hubert Maury Trans. by David Homel | Arsenal Pulp Press (270 pp.) | $27.95 paper April 22, 2025 | 9781551529530

Speaking truth to power in a repressive regime. Siddiqui grew up like many boys around the world—he dreamed of superheroes, played soccer with friends, and took an interest in girls. Not every kid, however, has a father who becomes radicalized in his religious beliefs, a man who throws away his son’s comic books and is incensed upon learning that there are girls in his classroom—both sure signs of Satan’s presence, he says. As for soccer, best not to play it during afternoon prayers, when the Muttawa—the religious police— hunt you down in police cruisers and, if they catch you, beat you with sticks and shave your head to mark you as someone who has broken religious laws. That is, unless you happen to escape by hopping over a wall and hiding in what you learn is the empty compound of none other than Osama bin Laden. Such is Siddiqui’s upbringing in Saudi Arabia as the free-spirited child of Pakistani Muslim parents who moved to the

kingdom in the 1980s in search of a better life. Siddiqui chronicles his eventful life story in a fast-paced graphic memoir that jumps from the author’s early years in Jeddah to his journey of becoming a prominent journalist in Pakistan who is critical of the Islamic republic’s oppressive military rule. There’s a lot of heavy subject matter in the book—Siddiqui’s life is threatened, and colleagues are killed—but he can be very funny, as when recounting a youthful infatuation that can’t bode well: “Oh, shit! I’m falling in love with a Shiite!” Or when his ever-critical father shares some news with his wife: “You hear that?” he bellows. “Your son won a TV prize! Shame upon us!” Credit also goes to Maury, a former French military officer whose lively and expressive artwork graces these pages; it’s the artist’s first work published in English. A Pakistani journalist’s rousing look back at years of strife.

This Is Your Mother: A Memoir

Simpson, Erika J. | Scribner (224 pp.) $27.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9781668024034

A debut memoirist explores her relationship with the powerful but thwarted mother who dominated her life.

Simpson’s mother, Sallie, was a born survivor.

The sickly daughter of sharecropper parents, she rose above her circumstances through education and a teaching career she paused for motherhood. By the time Simpson was born, Sallie had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and become a divorced single mother of two. With sensitivity and uncompromising candor, the author tells the story of how her mother struggled to raise her children while coping with ovarian, breast, and blood/spinal cancer. Each new diagnosis brought “an endless loop of psychological torture [that taunted her] family to guess when she [would] go.” Illness also made it difficult for

Sallie to keep a job and forced her and her daughters to “shift…from apartments to hotels.” Her mother’s faith in God and belief in miracles, coupled with the exceptional street-hustling skills that Simpson calls “reverse Robin Hooding”—“in which you challenge the poor to give to the poor if they’re working for the rich”—helped keep the family minimally fed and sheltered during hard times. Sallie’s tenacity became the backbone of the “scriptures” of survival that she handed down to Simpson. Her own quest for freedom from the American “underbelly” took her down paths where race, poverty, and Sallie’s continued spiral into destitution threatened the success she ultimately earned. As it examines entangled family dynamics rooted in faith and loyalty, this poignant memoir reveals the lifelong impact, for good and for ill, of the ever-powerful mother-daughter bond. A searingly honest book about surviving America at the thorny intersection of race, class, and gender.

Shamanism: The Timeless Religion

Singh, Manvir | Knopf (288 pp.) | $30.00 May 20, 2025 | 9780593537541

A wide-ranging study of a putatively premodern way of knowledge. Anthropologist Singh writes extensively of fieldwork among the Mentawai people of Indonesia, whose shamans undertake healing rituals, knowing “the plants for treating fungal infections and the songs for calling souls to feverish bodies.” Once the object of much anthropological study, shamanism was co-opted by the problematic mythographer Mircea Eliade and the New Age guru Michael Harner. Both got it wrong, by Singh’s lights, the latter by turning it into “a bite-size bundle amenable for Western consumption.” This denatured, homogenized view of shamanism—in some views mumbo-jumbo, in other

views “primeval wisdom,” and mostly very different from the practices of the Tungusic people whose language is embedded in the name—turns it into formulas (hallucinogens here, spirit journeys there) that are ideal for flimflammery. Yet, in a broader view— and here a solid background in anthropology will help the reader—it’s also fallen victim to a certain essentialism: This practice is industrial, this is agricultural, this is scientific. Nonsense, Singh suggests, stretching the boundaries of his field: When evangelists pray over Donald Trump, they’re practicing (perhaps black) magic, and hedge-fund wizards speculate no more scientifically than a so-called witch doctor seeking a cure for spirit possession, in that “they fill very similar niches.” If traditional shamanism is in decline around the world because of what Max Weber called disenchantment, there are still plenty of people willing to engage in its “moral ambiguity.” As for hallucinogens, Singh dismisses the notion that magic mushrooms are the preferred shamanic key to the otherworld (beer is much more prevalent, tobacco even more so). He also questions anthropology’s vaunted relativism: “A power of anthropology…is in turning the strange familiar and the familiar strange, yet this reversal requires a comparative approach.”

A provocative treatise, of much interest to students of culture, religious belief, and social science.

Break the Frame: Conversations With Women Filmmakers

Smokler, Kevin | Oxford Univ. (296 pp.)

$34.99 | May 22, 2025 | 9780197619766

Interviews with more than two dozen female filmmakers from a wide range of genres. In 2017, a report by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that “every major Hollywood studio systematically

discriminated against hiring female directors,” even though “the graduating classes of America’s top film schools are 50/50 male/female.” Moreover, Smokler was surprised to discover that “articulate, well-heeled, filmgoing friends” were uninformed about women’s contributions to cinema, such as not knowing that Greta Gerwig was an accomplished director well before Barbie. In this entertaining corrective, Smokler, a writer and documentary filmmaker, interviewed 25 writers, producers, and directors—all of them Americans who “have at least one film or television series a reasonably avid movie watcher would have heard of or seen”—and asked them “to focus on the stories of their triumphs that we can all learn from and share.” Among the participants are Barbara Kopple, “the Mother Courage of American documentary filmmaking”; Julie Dash, “the first black woman to direct a feature film in general release in America”; and Chris Hegedus, whose enormous contributions to documentaries would “raise the level of innovation in nonfiction cinema that had already seemed to be at its apex.” As is often the case with books like this one, some interviews are more insightful than others. For the most part, the exceptional talent interviewed here provide valuable perspectives on the art of filmmaking. There are many amusing anecdotes, as when Jessica Yu, director of the short subject Breathing Lessons, a documentary about a polio-stricken man who lived his life in an iron lung, says the biggest change in her life after she won her Oscar was that “I gained a bit of professional identity from doing that and your family stops asking ‘what is it exactly that you do?’”

A welcome spotlight on the considerable achievements of female filmmakers.

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

Spinney, Laura | Bloomsbury (336 pp.)

$29.99 | May 13, 2025 | 9781639732586

Tracking the linguistic predecessor to languages now spoken by billions of people across the globe.

Spinney’s goal is to explain the “Big Bang of the Indo-European languages,” the series of events that led Proto-Indo-European to stem into languages of antiquity and ultimately into the Spanish, Farsi, and English we can recognize today. Her meticulous research synthesizes the work of archaeologists, linguistic historians, and, crucially, geneticists who have sequenced ancient DNA. Findings from these fields have built a case for the speakers of Proto-Indo-European having been the Yamnaya people of the steppe region north of the Black Sea, the world’s first fully nomadic pastoralists. The text tracks the probable migratory paths of the Yamnaya from modern-day Ukraine across Europe and Central Asia, their intersections with other ancient societies and cultures, their governance and trades, and the way that those meetings spurred and cultivated new branches of Indo-European. The methods for reconstructing the Proto-Indo-European language involve a complex system for comparing lexicons, grammatical rules, and theories on sound laws; while Spinney includes and attempts to translate these processes, they often seem merely a side story to the vivid

An entertaining corrective on women in film, from writers to directors.

Exploring Water Worlds

SEEN AND HEARD

Brooke Shields Book Reveals Post-Surgery Surprise

In her memoir, the actor writes that a surgeon performed a procedure on her without her consent.

In her new memoir, Brooke Shields writes that a doctor performed a vaginal rejuvenation procedure on her without her consent, Us Weekly reports.

The actor writes about the surgery in Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed

To Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman, published in January by Flatiron. A critic for Kirkus wrote of the book, “Though the reliance on research sometimes veers into the silly.… Shields’ engaging candor generally saves the day.”

In the book, Shields said that she discussed with her gynecologist getting a labial reduction, which can ease discomfort and pain in the genital region. She underwent the procedure, and at a checkup afterward the doctor who performed the surgery told her that he “threw in a little bonus.”

Shields writes that the surgeon said, “I was in there for four hours, and you know what I did? I tightened you up a little bit! Gave you a little rejuvenation!”

“I was horrified, but also at a loss,” she writes. “I didn’t want to sue this man—or maybe I did want to, but I didn’t feel I could—because I didn’t particularly want talk of my lady parts, once again, on the front page of every paper. This man surgically altered my body without my consent.”—M.S.

Brooke Shields

Memoir by Jeremy Renner Coming This Spring

The actor will write about his snowplow accident in My Next Breath.

Jeremy Renner will tell the story of the snowplow accident that nearly killed him in a new memoir, People magazine reports.

Flatiron will publish the actor’s My Next Breath in the spring. The press says the book is “not merely a gruesome account of what happened to him; it’s a call to action and a forged companionship between reader and author as Jeremy recounts his recovery journey and reflects on the impact of his suffering.”

Renner, known for his roles in films including 28 Weeks Later, The Hurt Locker, and The Town, was severely injured in 2023 while trying to stop a snowplow rolling downhill

For memoirs recommended by our editors, visit Kirkus online.

SEEN AND HEARD

from hitting his nephew. He suffered chest trauma and nearly 40 broken bones, and he was hospitalized for more than two weeks.

“Jeremy’s memoir is a testament to the human spirit and its capacity to endure, evolve, and find purpose in the face of unimaginable adversity,” Flatiron says. “His writing captures the essence of profound transformation, exploring the delicate interplay between vulnerability and strength, despair and hope, redemption and renewal.”

Renner announced his memoir on the social platform X, writing, “I found this wonderfully cathartic, and a great honor to deep dive and share with you accounts of life, death, and all things in between.”

My Next Breath is slated for publication on April 29.—M.S.

Jeremy Renner

theoretical detail with which she shades the movements, relationships, and mythologies of Indo-European ancestors. The text is organized around the evolutions of individual branches of Indo-European, which can be confusing as time weaves in and out of prehistory with different migrations and intertwinements. But this back-and-forth underscores the stakes involved in how we understand such massive dissemination and transformation and the tensions they fuel, indeed; Spinney concludes, there is a potential reflecting pool for the trajectory of Proto-Indo-European in our current moment, as global languages confront the primacy of English, shared written text through 21st-century media and technology, and new migration patterns. A smart, dense, detailed account.

Went to London, Took the Dog: The Diary of a 60-Year-Old Runaway

Stibbe, Nina | Pan Macmillan (352 pp.)

$18.99 paper | May 6, 2025 | 9781035025312

A sabbatical diary.

As a younger woman, the author nannied for a glamorous media couple living on Gloucester Crescent, an address made famous by Alan Bennett’s memoir The Lady in the Van. There, as an ingenue, she mingled with the literati and wrote a series of letters to her sister, comically unaware of her milieu. Love, Nina was widely acclaimed and adapted for TV by Nick Hornby. Now, 20 years, two children, and a failing marriage later, she revisits the scene. No surprise: Things have changed. We are still treated to celebrity sightings and pub quizzes with Nick. We visit literary festivals and her children, now at university in London, and meet her playwright landlord, busily producing The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel . Since this is a diary, we get the passing scene:

An engineer of much of the anti-federal sentiment that now courses through politics.

BUCKLEY

The queen dies, and Liz Truss comes and goes as prime minister; there are more personal concerns such as chicken bones in the street, the placement of mats in a Pilates class, the dangers of the wrong swimming lane, incontinence, and questions like “Why is lipstick just for women?” The first half of the book has a chirpy charm, and we root for a 60-year-old woman, albeit a rather privileged and self-regarding one, seeking her place in the world. We get tips on hand lotion and marmalade and lovely pottery from the Forest of Dean. And, since this is a sabbatical after all, she eventually returns to her husband in Cornwall, sadly resigned to being too old and too poor to start again in London. In shorter form, perhaps selected entries, the book is harmless. However, we’ve signed on for the whole year, and the year grows long. Chatter for the chattering class.

Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America

Tanenhaus, Sam | Random House (1040 pp.)

$40.00 | June 3, 2025 | 9780375502347

Comprehensive biography of the conservative stalwart who held great sway over Republican presidents. William F. Buckley, whom former New York Times books editor Tanenhaus met in 1990 while working on a biography of Whittaker Chambers, was a man of ironclad conservative principles—up to a point. As a teenager, precocious and brilliant, he was a champion

among the prep-school set of the isolationist America First movement. He opposed civil rights, championed white supremacy, and advocated a poll tax and intelligence testing. At Yale, infamously, Buckley badgered faculty members who were insufficiently religious—and even sicced the FBI on one—while decrying “the tendency by some teachers to utilize the classroom as a soapbox from which to impose upon their students not the great ideas of great scholars, but their own.” He was a committed McCarthyite (“McCarthy’s egghead,” one newspaper called him), a supporter of the John Birch Society until he wasn’t, and an engineer of much of the anti-federal sentiment that now courses through American politics. In short, although he styled himself a Yankee patrician, he was a neo-Confederate at heart. Yet, with the magazine he founded, National Review, Buckley could also change his mind; as Tanenhaus notes, whereas Buckley had once criticized Israel for “dredging up Holocaust ‘luridities’ such as ‘the counting of corpses and gas ovens,’” he became sympathetic to Israel, even suggesting that it be made an American state. On a timely matter, Tanenhaus observes that Buckley supported the Panama Canal Treaty, believing that “Panama had become a distraction from the true test of American power and resolve… to continue the struggle against global Communism.” Given the present Trump administration’s apparent resolve to retake the canal, it’s illustrative of how far Buckley’s conservatism lies from today’s Republican Party. Monumental and instructive, albeit likely to find its chief readership among the last of the conservative old guard.

Kirkus Star

King of the North: Martin Luther King’s Freedom Struggle Outside the South

Theoharis, Jeanne | The New Press (400 pp.) $30.99 | March 25, 2025 | 9781620979310

MLK above the MasonDixon line.

For decades, biographers have focused on Martin Luther King Jr.’s successful leadership in the South while suggesting that his Northern activism failed because it lacked direction and local support. Theoharis, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, upends this narrative by painstakingly documenting King’s relentless and impassioned battles against Northern discrimination and police brutality, an effort that had its origins in his experiences as a graduate student in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (2013), Theoharis also presents a fully developed picture of Coretta Scott King’s activism, both in tandem and apart from her husband, whom she met as a student in Boston. Neither of the Kings forgot the racism they encountered as students in the North, and they worked with local organizers to address it throughout their lives. Yet time and time again the same white Northern politicians who praised King’s civil rights work in the South either fell silent or became combative when King turned his attention to the systemic racism of the North. Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley did everything in his power to stop civil rights progress in the city and defended his white neighbors who “threw rocks, eggs, and firecrackers” at civil rights marchers as “fine people, hard-working people.” The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and other mainstream news outlets often ignored or actively refuted King’s accusations of Northern racism, creating a documentary history that has shaped King’s legacy ever since. By looking beyond these sources,

Theoharis depicts a complex, radical King whose fight against Northern racism alternately inspires and infuriates. A powerful must-read that sheds new light on King and the Civil Rights Movement.

Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson

Tourmaline | Tiny Reparations (320 pp.)

$30.00 | May 20, 2025 | 9780593185667

A queen’s legacy. Drawing on interviews and archival sources, Tourmaline, an artist, Black transgender activist, and Guggenheim Fellow, celebrates trans icon, sex worker, and activist Marsha P. Johnson (1945-92). Born Malcolm, she grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where she first tried on her sister’s and mother’s clothing at age 5. In high school, she escaped to New York City on weekends, finding a thriving community of trans people in Times Square and the West Village. She said, “That’s what made me in New York, that’s what made me in New Jersey, that’s what made me in the world: when I became a drag queen, I started to live my life as a woman.” She finally moved to New York in 1963 and changed her name to Marsha. It was a tense time to be queer: Cross-dressing and homosexuality were criminalized, making trans people victims of persecution and violence. In 1969, this oppression erupted in the Stonewall Riots, at which Marsha stood in the forefront of defiance. She joined the Gay Liberation Front and co-founded STAR: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, dedicated to advocating for young trans people. Tourmaline charts Marsha’s transition, which involved hormone replacement therapy, and her successful career as an entertainer. With makeup, beaded jewelry, flowered crown, and glitzy fashion, she cut a memorable figure. Her

“groundbreaking commitment to queer glamour and performance,” Tourmaline writes, “paved the way for Black gender-bending, sexually transgressive superstars like Prince and RuPaul.” She was a caring friend, devoting herself “to small, daily acts of beauty,” but she was also troubled: Besides recurring depression, she was HIV positive and suffered from chronic pain from a bullet in her back that could not be removed (a client—a shame-filled taxi driver— shot her after their encounter). Her death at age 47 may have been suicide or murder. In a well-researched biography, Tourmaline makes a persuasive case for remembering her. A warm homage to a pioneering activist.

Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur

Van Nguyen, Dean | Doubleday (304 pp.)

$29.00 | May 6, 2025 | 9780385550024

Still he rises.

“Crucial to understanding Tupac Shakur,” writes Nguyen, “is knowing that he grew up in the rubble of 1960s radicalism.” The music journalist and cultural critic’s narrative moves confidently within the many strands underlying familiar aspects of the rapper’s rise, backed by research and candid interviews. He starts with his mother, Afeni, and her involvement in Black political activism: “As a Black Panther, Afeni’s life had structure and purpose.” She was acquitted in a New York case against a group known as the “Panther 21,” but Tupac’s early years were colored by the Panthers’ fracturing into violent splinter groups, culminating in his stepfather’s involvement in a deadly robbery. As a youth, particularly when attending the Baltimore School for the Arts, his talents were evident, leading to early connections in the hip-hop scene. Nguyen argues that quick celebrity obscured these radical roots in favor of a

self-conceived “Thug Life”; by 1993, “Tupac’s life was in an increasingly violent spiral,” his “increasing propensity for violence…a difficult thing to understand,” though the connections to his own murder remain evident. Final chapters examine Shakur’s afterlife as “hip-hop’s most recognizable icon,” ubiquitous in the Black Lives Matter movement and conflict zones from Libya to Sierra Leone, as well as the conspiracies linking his killing to Biggie Smalls’ murder and police corruption. Nguyen documents the uneven legacy of Shakur’s posthumous releases, controlled by Afeni, who “threw everything into raising her son as a chosen child destined for leadership.” What would have become of Shakur had he lived? “It’s entirely possible that a middle-aged Tupac would have been softened, centrist, less serious,” he writes. “But I think it more probable that like many of his surviving Panther forebears who never lost sight of, or faith in, a better tomorrow, he would have continued to use his voice to stand with the masses, the downtrodden.” Fresh interpretations of a foundational hip-hop narrative.

The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions

Vaudo, Ersilia | Trans. by Vanessa Di Stefano | Norton (224 pp.) | $23.99 April 29, 2025 | 9781324089278

A history of astrophysics, focused on a short list of fundamental discoveries.

Vaudo’s revolutions are familiar to most amateur followers of science. In chronological order, they are Isaac Newton’s formulation of the law of gravity; Albert Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity; Big Bang theory; and antimatter. Each of these discoveries is put in historical context, with some biographical data on the scientists who made the discoveries. The book also gives credit to the other, sometimes less famous, figures who contributed—often significantly—to

the discoveries. This is especially true of the Big Bang and antimatter, which emerged from the work of several theorists and researchers. We learn about their professional rivalries, such as Newton’s feuds with Robert Hooke. Readers will also appreciate the author’s serving up a wealth of details related to the scientists or their discoveries—the presence of a chunk of wood from Newton’s apple tree aboard the International Space Station, or the fact that the potassium in a banana may decay and create tiny amounts of antimatter. While it’s nearly impossible to discuss ideas such as the existence of more than three dimensions without a certain amount of math, Vaudo manages to keep the equations from overwhelming the text. A concluding chapter speculates on what the next major breakthrough is likely to be. Vaudo suggests that the questions posed by dark matter and dark energy—which apparently make up far more of the universe than “normal” matter and energy—will provide the material for the next revolution. Until those issues are worked out, the current book provides as good an overview of the state of the science as any reader could wish for.

A lively and up-to-date survey of the key ideas of astrophysics.

Peace Is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O’Brien

Vernon, Alex | St. Martin’s (560 pp.)

$36.00 | May 27, 2025 | 9781250358493

Comprehensive life of author Tim O’Brien, one of the great laureates of the Vietnam War.

“All you bastards are going to die in World War III.” So promised a drill sergeant when O’Brien, having lost a student deferment, was called up to Army boot camp. He could have chosen another service branch—enlisting, say, in the Navy, which offered safer odds—or defected to Canada, as, according to biographer and fellow vet (of the Iraq War) Vernon, O’Brien contemplated doing. Yet he complied, a mediocre soldier at first who

“performed his tasks without enthusiasm but also without grumbling.” A kid from small-town Minnesota with an unhappy childhood, O’Brien did a lot of growing up in “the tropical killer-dreamscape,” as he later called Vietnam. As Vernon notes, O’Brien returned with a lifetime’s worth of themes and stories to write about, and his work proves as much: The Things They Carried is standard reading in colleges around the country, far more so than any other contemporary book—and, Vernon writes, “at 9.3 ounces, The Things They Carried was one of the things some soldiers carried in Afghanistan and Iraq.” Similarly, Going After Cacciato, about the chase for a deserter in country, is hailed as a kind of Catch-22 for the Vietnam era, while In the Lake of the Woods brings aspects of the war back home. For all that, somewhat mysteriously, “O’Brien resents being known as a war writer,” even though he warned Vernon that he is not quite first-tier enough otherwise to merit such a study, which might be dismissed as “of minor importance.” Though Vernon does not lift O’Brien out of the category of interpreters of the Vietnam War, he does do solid service in recounting O’Brien’s life and broader work.

A well-considered work of literary biography of a writer ranked among Hemingway and Crane as a chronicler of combat.

The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission To Infiltrate the West

Walker , Shaun | Knopf (448 pp.) | $32.00 April 15, 2025 | 9780593319680

On the hunt for Soviet and Russian spies from Lenin’s time to our own. It’s the stuff of TV drama (The Americans) brought to real life: From the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian spies were sent abroad to gather intelligence. Many were posted

The man and woman who posed as a Canadian couple—but were Russian spies.

THE ILLEGALS

as diplomats, which meant that counterintelligence agencies could easily keep track of them; others went abroad as journalists, academics, businesspeople. But early on, writes Guardian international correspondent Walker, the “father of Russian intelligence,” a man named Meer Trilisser, was putting “illegals,” Soviet spies posing as natives of the countries in which they were working, to work. Trilisser himself, “posing as a specialist on Gothic architecture…traveled to Berlin, ostensibly to attend an academic conference,” but used the occasion to connect with an undercover agent. In time, writes Walker, “the Soviets were far ahead of their adversaries when it came to espionage,” emboldened enough to begin to insert illegals, once almost exclusively male but eventually including women, into countries under cover so deep that their children didn’t know they were spies. Such was the case with Don Heathfield (né Andrei Bezrukov) and Ann Foley (née Elena Vavilova), whom the FBI arrested in June 2010, posing as a married Canadian couple working in Boston, having taken their identities from real Canadians who had died in infancy. Elena/Ann styled herself as a soccer mom, “but once the kids were tucked away in bed, she crept into a back room and decrypted radio messages from Moscow.” Both, working for first the KGB and then Russia’s new SVR, were traded for Western spies imprisoned in Russia. There are surely more illegals out there, Walker concludes, especially since after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, “ordinary” Russians traveling abroad are subject to greater scrutiny than before.

A fast-paced tale of real-world spycraft that will have you wondering whether your neighbors are who they say they are.

On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe

Webster, Jamieson | Catapult (272 pp.)

$27.00 | March 11, 2025 | 9781646222414

Breathing as both biological necessity and metaphor for human interconnection. Presenting both insightful and challenging prose, Webster, a clinical psychoanalyst and an author (Disorganization & Sex), carefully examines breathing through multiple lenses, beginning with vivid detail of giving birth to her second child before weaving through her experiences as an asthmatic teenager, a deep-sea diver, and a Covid-era palliative care therapist. The book’s thematic sections (“First Breath,” “Anxiety,” “Asphyxiation,” “Last Words”) create an intellectual framework for exploring these interconnected experiences, although sometimes struggling to maintain their connecting threads. While her strong foundation in psychoanalytic theory, particularly Freud, provides depth to her analysis, it occasionally overshadows her original insights. The text moves between personal narrative and scholarly discourse, creating a complex intersection of lived experience and theoretical exploration, though at times other writers’ thoughts compete with her own voice. The author’s most compelling moments emerge when she connects theory to direct experience, particularly in her thoughtful reflections on providing palliative therapy during the pandemic and her nuanced observations about losing and regaining the capacity to speak. Her exploration of Eastern spiritual practices, while self-conscious,

raises important questions about cultural appropriation and authenticity. The narrative boldly attempts to bridge personal memoir with academic discourse, achieving moments of profound insight even as it sometimes gets tangled in its theoretical underpinnings. In examining our relationship with breath in an age of climate crisis and pandemic anxiety, the book offers valuable perspectives on how personal and collective experiences of breathing intersect with broader social and environmental concerns. Though its dense theoretical framework occasionally obscures rather than illuminates its core insights, the work succeeds in highlighting the often overlooked significance of this most fundamental human function. An ambitious meditation that struggles under its theoretical burden, never quite finding its natural rhythm.

On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy

Wells, Ira | Biblioasis (184 pp.) | $15.95 paper | June 3, 2025 | 9781771966634

Don’t burn this book!

For as long as there have been books, people have wanted to censor them. From Roman emperors through popes and kings, from temperance evangelists to Moms for Liberty, there has always been a book police. Civic and religious groups have worried about exposing children to potentially harmful ideas—even if those ideas promote inclusion and diversity. By contrast, university professors and intellectual elites see weapons in old terms for racial discrimination and gender difference. Ira Wells wants a middle ground, where we recognize that not all books are right for everyone. He recognizes that notions of appropriateness, obscenity, offensiveness, and blasphemy change over time. Literature cannot be

separated from the social worlds in which it is written and read. And yet, Wells also wants a world in which there are works of lasting value. Book banning, he writes, “thrives in an intellectual culture in which art is not analyzed for its inevitable political assumptions but reduced to them….It also thrives when people fail to articulate why reading imaginative literature matters.” In the end, though, this book is really less about literature or even free speech than it is about public libraries. “Libraries have long provided vital intellectual infrastructure to liberal democracies,” he writes. These days, they serve a broader social function, often providing classes in language and citizenship, workshops on literacy and finance, and internet access for those who cannot afford it at home. Wells wants a world in which a well-informed public can access and judge books on their own and thus can appreciate, and argue with, the literary past: “Expressive freedom is the condition that makes both art and democracy possible.” That seems like a reasonable position. Unless you don’t believe in art and democracy. A thoughtful, conversationally written reflection on why banning books damages the fabric of social belonging.

The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt From Alexander the Great to Cleopatra

Wilkinson, Toby | Norton (352 pp.)

$37.99 | April 8, 2025 | 9781324052036

Seven Cleopatras and 15 Ptolemies who ruled until the Romans took over. Egyptologist Wilkinson, author of 13 books on his specialty, begins his latest with Alexander the Great’s 323 B.C.E. death, after which three of his generals made themselves kings of Macedonia, the Seleucid Empire (the Middle East and west Asia), and Egypt. There follows a

A land of murderous dynastic quarrels, rebellions, and unsuccessful wars.

THE LAST DYNASTY

compelling three-century history of the colorful Hellenistic period. Of the generals, Egypt’s Ptolemy I was probably the most competent. Sensibly, he adopted Egyptian religious and bureaucratic customs, cultivated the priesthood, and portrayed himself as a legitimate heir to the pharaohs. His son and grandson (Ptolemy II and III) extended the kingdom’s borders, secured its prosperity, and fostered scholars, establishing it as a great power with its capital, Alexandria, rivaling Athens as a center of learning. One problem is that Greeks followed them to Egypt in great numbers, forming a privileged minority that provoked increasing resentment. Another is that Rome had grown powerful by Ptolemy III’s 222 B.C.E. death, and his successors did not measure up. The arrival of the first Cleopatra in 194 B.C.E. did not improve matters. Although she exerted considerable power (Egypt, unlike Greece, had no objection to female rulers), the nation was wracked by murderous dynastic quarrels, rebellions, unsuccessful wars, and increasing pressure from Rome. The seventh and best-known Cleopatra ruled 51 to 30 B.C.E. and dealt successfully with powerful Romans (Pompey, Caesar, Marc Anthony) before choosing the wrong side in Rome’s civil war. Ancient histories emphasize rulers, wars, and gods because that’s the evidence that survives in inscriptions, monuments, and artifacts. With its tomb obsession and desert climate that preserves organic materials, ancient Egypt is a glorious exception, with mountains of surviving papyri from rubbish dumps and necropolises. Wilkinson takes advantage to deliver a detailed account of its bureaucracy, culture, and daily life. Hellenistic Egypt in expert hands.

Alterations

Winrock, Cori | Transit Books (120 pp.)

$17.95 paper | May 6, 2025 | 9798893389012

Writing from an eddy of loss.

Award-winning poet Winrock creates a haunting meditation on grief, on being caught in an obsessive circularity of thinking and feeling, and on wishing, achingly, to undo a painful narrative. The memories to which she returns again and again are the loss of her unborn twin child and her fear of losing the surviving twin, born prematurely, who spent 10 weeks in the NICU, fragile and vulnerable, before she was healthy enough to go home. Brief, lyrical sections read like prose poems and are punctuated, literally, with the symbol +, indicating a variant: “an expansion,” or pause, or choice, that can change the meaning of a passage. Attending to variants, sentences themselves can be repurposed, when a word or phrase substitutes for another one. Winrock’s themes recur in a wide range of allusions, including Emily Dickinson’s elliptical poems, Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon , with its twinned images; Gertrude Stein’s The World Is Round , with the famous circularity “A rose is a rose is a rose”; and women’s work of sewing—the painstaking revision involved in hand-sewing spacesuits for astronauts, for example, or making, altering, and undoing bridal gowns to repurpose them, even into burial garments. Winrock sees Dickinson as a sewer: Look, she

writes, at “the way she chose to stitch her poems—leaving audible pinholes in their fabric—morse code notes poked straight through the pages.” Sewers can convey and remake history. “Listen closely to any worn garment,” Winrock writes, “and you will find fine lines that mark details of construction + patterns of wear + indications of more than one wearer.” Sometimes gowns can be “stripped back to their nearly pre-stitched state.” That state, for Winrock, is the miraculous alteration for which the mourner yearns: an elsewhere, before anguish. A radiant evocation of longing.

Earthly Materials: Journeys Through Our Bodies’ Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations

Wood, Cutter | Mariner Books (256 pp.)

$28.99 | April 29, 2025 | 9780063048607

Cheerful accounts of the human organism. Like all animals, humans extract energy from their surroundings. We consume other forms of life and sometimes mix it with inorganic matter (i.e., water, oxygen), convert it into a useful product, and usually return it or its residue back into the environment. Journalist Wood, author of Love and Death in the Sunshine State, delivers a dozen idiosyncratic essays on these physiological elements from the fundamental (blood, milk, breath, tears) to the noisome (feces, urine, vomit). When he writes as a journalist, interviews researchers, and often becomes a subject of their studies, the result is popular science (mucus, hair), history (urine—an obsession of alchemists and physicians; traditional beliefs about menses are beyond bizarre), or racial politics (blood) mixed with a sprinkling of diversionary anecdotes. In many cases, the anecdotes swamp the educational

material, but readers will share the author’s fascination. The milk chapter features a mother caught up in a massive scheme to sell stolen infant formula, and the one on semen mostly recounts masturbation and internet pornography. Vomit is taken up with the author’s experience at a New Age religious ceremony in which participants consume a psychedelic known to cause violent emesis; Cutter is largely spared and has a wonderful time, but this is not the case with his companions. Elsewhere, he provides more than many readers will want to know about adolescent approaches to flatulence. Bill Bryson’s The Body was the best popular work on human physiology. Mary Roach’s books contain the most jokes. Wood has written perhaps the most quirky, but it’s a subject with a universal appeal, so no matter how far he wanders, readers will likely follow. A highly personal examination of the highly personal.

Kirkus Star

Ancestors: Identity and DNA in the Levant

Zalloua, Pierre | Random House (288 pp.) $31.00 | April 29, 2025 | 9780593730904

Exploring our complex genetic and cultural heritage.

Zalloua, a Lebanese-born population geneticist, uses the ancient crossroads of the Levant as his touchstone, demonstrating not only how the world’s arbitrary geographical divisions tell

only a small part of humanity’s origin story, but how the very concept of East versus West is equally artificial and misguided. “Do not look for DNA to tell you who you really are and where you belong. It is a fallacy!” says Zalloua, a scholar at Khalifa University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Zalloua skewers the commercial fad of genetic ancestry testing as grossly oversimplified, its purveyors using such terms as “origin,” “ethnicity,” “identity,” “heritage,” and “race” interchangeably, “with little or no attention given to the complexities and dynamics that underlie these concepts.” Writing with economy and authority, Zalloua believes this disregards the vastly more important cultural attributes that constitute the core of someone’s heritage. An identity is a “basket of memories and collectibles” continually added to and carried wherever one goes, an ever-evolving concept shaped by events, exposure, and interactions. There are no tests that can define “origin.” The author argues that while we cannot ignore genetics, we must look beyond it to the forces of migration and the intermingling of cultures, among other factors at play. His intermittent forays into detailed genetic markers and terminology can get a bit heavy going for the layperson, but Zalloua can also be profoundly personal, writing with verve and feeling, even as he provides capsule histories of African and eastern Mediterranean communities and startling evidence that upends many of the most treasured assumptions about our cultural identities. A survey of population studies that is insightful, persuasive, and unfailingly humane.

“Do not look for DNA to tell you who you really are and where you belong.” ANCESTORS

EDITORS’ PICKS:

First Love Language by Stefany Valentine (Penguin Workshop)

Danilo Was Here by Tamika Burgess (Harper/HarperCollins)

Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World by Dorian Lynskey (Pantheon)

Going Home by Tom Lamont (Knopf)

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat. by Colin C. Campbell

When I Hear Spirituals by Cheryl Willis Hudson, illus. by London Ladd (Holiday House)

Four Women by Norman Shabel

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

Fully Booked

Between the sheets, on the page: A gay icon’s scintillating sex memoir delivers. BY MEGAN LABRISE

EPISODE 409: EDMUND WHITE

On this episode of Fully Booked, Edmund White joins us to discuss The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir (Bloomsbury, Jan. 28), “an irreverent and unapologetically provocative scrapbook of an aging author’s sex life” (starred review).

White is the celebrated novelist, memoirist, playwright, and essayist the New York Times calls “the paterfamilias of queer literature.” He is the author of many exquisite books, including the novel A Boy’s Own Story, the biography Genet, the informative guide The Joy of Gay Sex, co-authored by Charles Silverstein, and the memoir Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris. He is the recipient of many major awards, including the Lambda Literary Visionary Award, the National Book Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. He lives in New York with his husband, the writer Michael Carroll.

Here’s a bit more from our starred review of The Loves of My Life: “Despite admitting he falls short in the male equipment category, that has never stopped White from enjoying sexual escapades with a wide variety of boys and men around the globe across his 84 years. Heady flashbacks of his first experience lusting over a classmate and wrestling partner in fifth grade give way to unreciprocated dalliances with Cincinnati ‘hillbilly hustlers’ as a teenager in the 1950s. Acknowledging the power imbalance and social disapproval, White is frank about his long history as a customer of male escorts; he prefers the quality, efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and accommodation they provide. He shares varied romances—some fleeting, some enduringly romantic—and a few faux-curative interludes with female partners.…In crisply written episodes laced with a wry sense of humor about his own shortcomings and social foibles,

The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir

White, Edmund Bloomsbury | 256 pp. | 27.99

Jan. 28, 2025 | 9781639733729

White remains a talented, carnally flagrant raconteur whose memoir thumps with the palpably racing heartbeat of life, sex, love, and unbridled desire.”

White and I join in enthusiasm over the forthcoming publication of The Loves of My Life. We discuss his publisher’s reaction to the concept, the role numerous sexual partners played in his life, and the challenges of writing about love and jealousy. He reflects on his early sexual experiences. We talk about the portrayal of desire in the movie Queer —and the book it’s based on, by William S. Burroughs. White touches on the distinction between realist sex writing and pornography, his evolving identity as a gay writer, and his admiration for Toni Morrison. The conversation concludes with his thoughts on the saddest and sexiest words in the English language, as well as his future aspirations.

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

Children's

HOME RUN HITS FOR BASEBALL FANS

MARCH 18 MARKS the start of Major League Baseball’s 2025 season. Over the last decade, reporters at the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the New York Times have lamented the sport’s dwindling popularity among young people. Accordingly, MLB has made efforts to entice younger fans, from implementing its Play Ball initiative to tweaking the rules to pick up the pace of games. MLB might also do well to look to the world of kid lit. Several recent middle-grade novels offer compelling perspectives on the great American pastime— books sure to have even nonathletes heading to the stadium, buying some peanuts and Cracker Jacks, and rooting for the home team.

For Cato, a Black 12-yearold growing up in Jim Crow–era North Carolina, every element of life is ruled by segregation, even baseball—until he and his teammates find themselves preparing for a game against the all-white Marlins. Amid racist attacks roiling the town, Cato slowly learns the truth about the death of his father, a pitcher for the Negro Baseball Leagues. Both actionpacked and thoughtful,

Sandra W. Headen’s Warrior on the Mound (Holiday House, 2024) draws from actual events for a rich look at history.

Pop culture has long portrayed artists and jocks as strange bedfellows—a trope that’s countered in the late Patricia MacLachlan’s posthumously published Painting the Game (McElderry, 2024), a spare yet potent story that follows 11-year-old Lucy as she learns to throw a knuckleball. She’s cheered on by her father, a minor league pitcher, and her mother, a painter who compares her artistic endeavors to the effort that goes into perfecting a pitch—an insight that highlights the beauty and grace of the game.

Softball becomes an anchor for twins Jac and Aggie after they move to Los Angeles and join a makeshift team of neighborhood kids. A modern take on A League of Their Own, Robin Benway’s The Girls of Skylark Lane (Harper/ HarperCollins, 2024) features deftly rendered characters who support one another through crises big and small; friendship and sisterhood are at the core of this tenderly told tale.

Set in 1990, after the U.S. invasion of Panama, Tamika Burgess’ Danilo Was Here (Harper/HarperCollins, Jan. 21) centers on a young Black Panamanian athlete recruited to play in California. After traveling to the U.S., Danilo searches for his father, who emigrated to America seeking work but recently stopped calling. Burgess offers a remarkably nuanced depiction of the game as Danilo falls out of love with baseball, largely because of his disillusionment with his father, a passionate athlete who almost went pro. Danilo’s trajectory will speak to kids dealing with complicated emotions around sports—especially those feeling pressure to perform.

Timothy “Pumpsie” Strickland, the Black tween protagonist of Andrea Williams’ Inside the Park (Harper/HarperCollins, Feb. 4), ends up trapped overnight in the Nashville Wildcats’ stadium. What initially seems like a dream for the hardcore baseball fan swiftly turns frightening as he realizes he may not be alone. Williams balances thrills with introspective moments as Pumpsie contends with feelings of inadequacy and the pressures that paralyze him whenever he steps up to bat.

Mahnaz Dar is a young readers’ editor.

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

EDITOR’S PICK

A small group of middle schoolers creates a club to learn about making and sharing comics in this collaboration by two noted cartoonists.

Makayla and Howard are friends with complementary skill sets. Makayla, who reads Black, is full of story ideas, and Howard, who has brown skin and spiky black hair, loves to draw. Their shared interest in the graphic novel series Battle Princess Kishimoto and an impromptu lunchtime brainstorming session inspire their own comic collaboration, but they have so many questions that they don’t know where to start. With school librarian Ms. Fatima as their guide, the

Cartoonists Club is born. The after-school club soon gains two new members— white-presenting Art is ready for a new adventure (they just love making things!), and Lynda, who has brown skin and hair, is artistically talented but unsure of herself. The resulting introductory how-to guide, presented from the perspectives of the characters, celebrates the art of visual storytelling and is also instructive for readers. From drawing facial expressions and using body language to convey feelings to unraveling the mysteries of the comic lexicon, readers learn the process of creating and sharing comics right

The Cartoonists Club

Telgemeier, Raina & Scott McCloud | Colors by Beniam C. Hollman | Graphix/Scholastic

288 pp. | $24.99 | April 1, 2025 | 9781338777222

alongside the characters. Telgemeier and McCloud simultaneously explore making new friends, overcoming self-doubt, and embracing a growth mindset to practice and improve. Hollman’s bold color palette enhances the

hand-drawn and digitally created illustrations.

Highly imaginative and cleverly conceived. (behind the scenes, glossary, comics jobs, book creation process, resources, comic and cartoon art museums) (Graphic fiction. 8-13)

A heartfelt lullaby weaves love and memories into a gentle bedtime story.

ABUELITA’S SONG

Good Knight

Ackerman, Sara Holly | Little, Brown (40 pp.)

$18.99 | May 13, 2025 | 9781523527861

A child knight delays bedtime as the rest of the castle winds down for sleep. Each page finds the little knight seeking a way to postpone sleep. “Five more minutes!” shouts the youngster, and when the parent knight offers to read the little one a story, the child asks for two bedtime reads. The parent chases the youngster around the castle, past sleeping hounds, a dozing dragon, and slumbering Sir Horse-aLot. Adults will chuckle in sympathy as this caregiver attempts to ready the child for sleep, while kids will love the little knight’s evasive moves. Making use of rich vocabulary (apothecaries , soot ), the text hits just the right note, capturing the flavor of a medieval castle (“Troubadours stop strumming lutes. / Nobles end their dance”) while also setting an appropriately soothing tone. The tale flows well when read aloud, with smooth rhymes; adults and kids alike will be eager to make this a bedtime staple. Depicting a vibrant castle full of action, the illustrations imaginatively blend Middle Ages hallmarks with more modern elements. The knights are tan-skinned, with red hair mostly concealed beneath their helmets, while the castle’s other inhabitants vary in skin tone. When the knights finally remove their helmets at book’s end, both are revealed to have long hair; the younger knight’s tresses are adorned with pink bows.

A fantastic bedtime read, both lyrical and playful. (Picture book. 4-6)

Sea in My Cells

Alary, Laura | Illus. by Andrea Blinick

Pajama Press (32 pp.) | $18.95

May 6, 2025 | 9781772783421

Inside every one of us is a piece of the ocean.

Alary and Blinick offer a child-friendly look at the connection between people and the sea around us, pointing out the importance of water in our world. Exploring these big ideas in carefully crafted free verse, Alary begins by stating that our bodies, like every living thing, are made up of cells comprised of water, which contains the “parts that make your body work.” She then provides a simple explanation of the water cycle. Seawater evaporates, becoming vapor in the clouds. Rain falls from the sky; some of this water runs through pipes to our homes so we can drink it when we’re thirsty. Then, “All day long you / breathe it out / sweat it out / cry it out / pee it out!” That same water eventually returns to the sea. “All the water there is, / is all that ever was.”

Blinick’s charming illustrations star an energetic red-haired, light-skinned, bespectacled protagonist, a dog, and four friends, nicely differentiated by clothing and by hair and skin color. Their activities are realistic at first— kicking a soccer ball, doing somersaults—though they grow increasingly fantastical as the children let their imaginations soar while learning about the science of water.

Adding to the whimsy, on one spread, underground personified animals also go about a very humanlike daily life. An appealing package that conveys an important message. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 4-7)

J vs. K

Alexander, Kwame & Jerry Craft Illus. by Jerry Craft | Little, Brown (240 pp.) $16.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9780316582681

Two boys equally blessed with both talent and ego vie for supremacy in their school’s annual “creative storytelling competition.”

J is “by far the best artist in the entire fifth grade”; K has “become known as the best writer in the entire fifth grade.” Naturally, each one is determined to crush it in The Contest, and each decides an illustrated story is the way to go. The competitive boys try to undermine one another by passing along fake tips for success, each hoping to destroy his opponent’s story. K advises J to “write what you DON’T know” and to use sixth-person narration. “J’s Secrets to Drawing Really Good” are just as catastrophic and include drawing with your nondominant hand and inserting mistakes to keep readers engaged. Creative hijinks ensue. Craft and Alexander have become known on social media for the jocular trash talk they heap on each other; J and K are their fictional child avatars. As an internet bit doled out in small doses, their frenemy-ship is amusing; as a sustained story about storytelling, it’s thin on both character and plot development. Authorial interjections exhort readers to look up 75-cent vocabulary, often used in barbs directed at each other; the latter feel like in-jokes more than playful attempts to engage young readers. Kids may enjoy spotting references to popular children’s authors among the characters’ names, and budding authors and illustrators will benefit from the advice. J and K are

both Black; their classmates and teachers are racially diverse. An insubstantial story that offers a prosocial message. (Fiction. 8-12)

Brave

Alvitre, Weshoyot | Kokila (32 pp.)

$18.99 | April 15, 2025 | 9780593531600

An Indigenous boy feels pride and joy in having traditional braids.

“Braids are brave,” begins Alvitre’s (Tongva) book about hair, heritage, and resilience. The child, who narrates, explains that his long golden-brown hair is both a source of ancestral honor and a target for bullying by unkind classmates. The boy draws strength from his father, grandpa, and great-grandpa, who all lived through different eras of discrimination and cultural genocide. In the face of these traumas, the narrator’s father emphasizes the child’s right to wear his hair long. Alvitre’s striking, cartoon-style illustrations fill the page, relying on rich colors and details to connect multiple generations of the protagonist’s patrilineal family. Some of the story’s examples of bravery may put off some readers. In one instance, the narrator praises his grandfather for suppressing emotion—“They cut his hair. He did not cry. He showed no fear”—which hews close to “boys don’t cry” messaging. Still, Alvitre’s poignant narrative primarily focuses on encouraging younger generations of Indigenous children to “feel loved and comfortable with who you are”—particularly for the courage that they demonstrate when confronting anti-Indigenous prejudice. This story has much to teach Native and non-Native kids alike about the painful history of assimilation and the power of familial affirmation. A tender tale woven with themes of resilience, courage, and love for Indigenous men. (Picture book. 4-8)

Abuelita’s Song

Amescua, Gloria | Illus. by Mariyah Rahman Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.)

$19.99 | May 20, 2025 | 9781665957519

Songs from the heart shared with family create lasting memories.

On a moonlit night, a new mother cradles her infant son. The baby snoozes peacefully in her arms, and when he stirs, she soothes him back to sleep with a lullaby of her own creation. This sweet song becomes a cherished bedtime tradition throughout his childhood. Years later, the boy has grown into a man, and he sings the song to his two daughters one sleepless night. The tune brings back warm memories of his mother’s love and lulls his children to sleep. When his mother—the girls’ Abuelita—visits after having been away for years, the children surprise her by singing the lullaby. Moved, Abuelita joins them, and together they sing the song each night. She calls it “la canción de mi corazón”— the song of my heart—expressing how it connects the family across generations. The story’s softly rendered illustrations, featuring stars and swirling patterns in the bedtime scenes, capture the magic and emotional resonance of the song. In an author’s note, readers learn that Amescua originally wrote the lullaby for her own son and later sang it to her grandchildren, adding a personal dimension to the story. This simple yet deeply sincere tale would make a wonderful addition to any bedtime story collection. Characters are brownskinned and Latine.

A heartfelt lullaby bridges generations, weaving love and memories into a gentle bedtime story. (glossary, lyrics, music notation) (Picture book. 3-7)

A House Full of Animals

Amiratashani, Fatemeh | Illus. by Ghazaleh Bigdelou | Clavis (32 pp.) | $19.95 April 15, 2025 | 9798890630698

An imaginative little girl turns ordinary items into a menagerie of friends.

With Dad out shopping and Mom busy at work elsewhere in the house, the child has the oppor tunity for some delightfully uninterrupted playtime. She gets to work, inviting her pals Mr. Elephant, Miss Woodpecker, Mr. Hedgehog, Mrs. Peacock, and Mr. Giraffe. These animals, quite real to the girl, are actually creations fashioned from inventively repurposed household materials. Mr. Elephant’s trunk is a paper-covered vacuum hose; Mr. Hedgehog’s spikes are pins in a pincushion. It’s not until her parents return that the spell is broken; the objects must be returned to their places until the girl has more time to play. The illustrations, relying on a limited palette of soft, muted browns and pops of more vibrant colors, depict weathered and tattered items coming to life. The animals’ stripes are the blue lines of notebook paper; bright red accents can be found on the girl’s dress and the tops of the straight pins. The uncomplicated text conveys the simplicity and joy of childhood play. Little readers will enjoy looking for the household objects in the illustrations and will eagerly jump in and imagine. The child is light-skinned. Highlights the boundless potential of a child’s creativity, no toys or tablets required. (Picture book. 4-8)

A fantastic bedtime read, both lyrical and playful.

An orphan struggles to keep her place at a girls’ school in 1904 London.

THE SECRETS OF LOVELACE ACADEMY

Afia in the Land of Wonders

Araujo, Mia | Scholastic (304 pp.)

$24.99 | April 15, 2025 | 9781338856729

A curious teen in a world inspired by West African kingdoms from the 10th through the 16th centuries runs away in search of adventure and finds herself in an unexpected world.

Sixteen-year-old Afia and her twin sister, Aya, are about to participate in the coming-of-age ceremony that will allow them to enter their family’s business as crystal merchants. Aya is dutiful, but Afia wants to see the world, even though her family feels it’s too dangerous to explore. When Afia meets Bakame, a shape-shifting boy, she flees the ceremony and joins him on a voyage beyond her familiar Dafra community. Bakame astonishes Afia when he tells her about Queen Ukiwa and her palace in Ijábù, “the land of wonders.” When Afia meets the Queen, she’s in awe—finally, she’s having experiences like those in the books she’s read. But Afia’s impression of the Queen changes dramatically after she witnesses her terrible cruelty. She’s determined to leave Ijábù, and her only ally is Ojike, a spirit of a boy who’s wearing a carved cat mask. He proposes a bargain: If she helps him overthrow the Queen, he’ll assist her in finding her way home. This clever, lushly illustrated fantasy is influenced by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland The dramatic action features twists and surprises, and Afia is a compelling protagonist whose sibling

relationship is an essential part of her character arc.

An intriguing story that explores self-discovery in a fantastical setting. (sketchbook) (Fantasy. 9-12)

The Vanished Kingdom: The War of the Maps

Auxier, Jonathan | Amulet/Abrams (448 pp.)

$19.99 | April 29, 2025 | 9781419753947

Series: The Vanished Kingdom, 3

Though life is less thrilling now that its citizens are protected from “pirates and sea dragons,” the island of Hazelport holds multitudinous marvels and irregularities.

Temperamental insects, talking birds, and a bottomless crack in the rocks stoke the imagination, but a man, someone who is “in his every aspect average,” takes notes and measurements—and performs the most gruesome of magic tricks. “The trick is: No more magic.” Surely this cannot stand—not in the swashbuckling world of Peter Nimble and Sophie Quire. Indeed, soon worlds collide, and Peter (who presents white), Sophie (who’s dark-skinned), and a ragtag assemblage of unlikely characters become separated, each caught in a complex and circuitous war of ideals. This final entry in the Peter Nimble series (which has been reissued as The Vanished Kingdom) is ripe with all the action, adventure, intensity, and wordplay of the first two stories. Auxier excels at connecting complex plot points and trusting his readers with darkness, nuance, and thorny concepts, creating complicated and morally ambiguous landscapes. At its heart, this work is

about growing up, exploring the wonder found in the mundane beauty of humanity, and the fantasy of childhood giving way to the practical magic of science and progress. The author’s ambitious attempt to bring multiple characters and worlds together pulls focus away from the action and the book’s overarching beauty, however. Intricate, magical spot art opens each chapter.

An action-packed end to a wonder- filled trilogy.

(author’s note) (Fantasy. 10-14)

Bob and Dob:

A Tale of Tattling

Avery, Sean E | Candlewick (32 pp.)

$18.99 | May 20, 2025 | 9781536236040

Bob and Dob are brother birds with distinctively different personalities. Adventurous Bob pushes boundaries and takes chances. Dob is a “dobber” (Australian slang for a tattletale) who watches his brother’s every move and delights in reporting his misdeeds to their mother. Bob begs him to stop, and finally Mother has also had enough and demands that he no longer inform on his brother. Delighted at this reprieve, Bob sneaks away to search for worms. But Dob has again followed him and sees a crocodile closing in on the unsuspecting Bob. Dob’s attempts to get help are stymied by his mom’s injunction against his tales. Now he must use his storytelling skills to save Bob from the croc’s jaws. His ploy works, Croc is humiliated, and Dob can now tell the tale of his heroism. Avery presents the events in carefully manipulated vignettes, employing a narrator’s description as well as word bubbles containing characters’ statements placed within the illustrations, which depict Bob as blue, Dob as red, and Mother as an imposing purple. Their every expression is captured by slight changes in their beaks, pupils, or eyebrows, indicating joy,

consternation, or anger. Little ones will love reading this story and returning to find new details. Though the word dobber isn’t defined, its meaning is clear in context.

A thrilling tale with a gently conveyed moral. (Picture book. 4-7)

Kirkus Star

Frank’s

Red Hat

Avery, Sean E | Walker US/Candlewick (32 pp.)

$18.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9781761600661

In this Australian import, a freethinking penguin struggles to find an appreciative audience for his ideas.

One day, Frank wears a scarlet red hat, an accessory that stands out in his mostly black-and-white habitat. When he finally convinces fellow penguin Neville to try out the hat, Neville’s eaten by a killer whale (an act mostly depicted off the page). Understandably, the other penguins refuse to don chapeaux of their own, no matter how many different designs Frank tries. Just when Frank is about to give up for good, he finds excited recipients among the seals and decides that he won’t “let a few nervous penguins” prevent him from pursuing his passion. Frank and the penguins are darling in their own cartoonish way, with tiny triangle beaks set between their big eyes and eyebrows that extend above their faces. The starkness of the landscape serves as the perfect canvas for the bright pops of color in Frank’s various creations. All little ones should hear—and see—this message of discovering the right audience for one’s work rather than changing one’s output to please others. Frank serves as a bold example.

A worthwhile, heartwarming, and beautifully conveyed lesson to do what makes you happiest. (Picture book. 5-7)

Bored Panda

Bender, Mike | Illus. by Chuck Dillon

Random House (40 pp.) | $18.99

April 29, 2025 | 9780593433607

Some of Panda’s peers engage in artistic pursuits in lieu of screen time. When the power to his tablet goes off, Panda, utterly and dramatically at a loss for amusement, sets off into the woods at his mother’s suggestion. There he encounters Porcupine, who’s about to start a painting and who’s quite keen on boredom: “It means anything is possible!” Next, he meets Owl, who is taking photographs, and Beetle, who’s “rolling up some fresh dung for a sculpture.” Though the other animals all invite Panda to join them, he walks on, “dangerously close to being bored to death,” until a lively outdoor art exhibition catches his eye. Porcupine’s paintings, Owl’s photographs, and Beetle’s dung sculptures are all on display. For Panda this is an inspiring revelation. He stops to notice things with enthusiasm on his return home and arrives ready to be bored a bit longer. While Bender’s simple, somewhat purposeful storyline is basically an exhortation to put down the devices, the illustrations are bright and energetic, and the humor is pitched to a young audience. Panda’s right eye is surrounded by dark fur, similar to the logo for the content-aggregating website Bored Panda. It’s a nice twist that this bored Panda is seeking out some real-life entertainment.

A worthy message in a visually lighthearted wrapper. (Picture book. 4-8)

A worthy message in a visually lighthearted wrapper.

BORED PANDA

The Secrets of Lovelace Academy

Benedict, Marie & Courtney Sheinmel

Aladdin (304 pp.) | $17.99

April 22, 2025 | 9781665950213

A n orphan leaves her oppressive orphanage’s squalor and struggles to keep her place at a girls’ school in 1904 London.

Lainey Philipps’ intellectual curiosity, born from her voracious reading habits, garners the attention of Lady Anne Blunt, who offers her a place at Lovelace Academy. Lainey, whose mother was Jewish, loves the academics but is ostracized and belittled by her posh classmates. After her roommate’s lies threaten her enrollment, Lainey learns of the Lovelace Society, a secret group that supports women scientists. The members have a file on scientist Mileva Einstein (co-author Benedict also wrote 2016’s The Other Einstein). Lainey believes that if she can help Mileva with her research, she won’t be expelled. With resources borrowed from a friend, she makes her way across Europe to the Einsteins’ residence in Switzerland. Unexpected obstacles provide conflict during her journey as she encounters classism and the consequences of mistaken impressions; side characters in this story arc display more nuance. Occasionally, the authors toss out heavy-handed moral messages and canned platitudes that clash with the bleaker look at conditions at the time for orphans, women, and other minorities (such as Lainey’s friend with dyslexia and a character who’s from an unspecified nomadic people). Refreshingly, the text doesn’t elevate cerebral pursuits over caretaking in its message of equality— emotional bonds and shared support are shown to aid in academic advancement—but, disappointingly, the secret-society plot fizzles out.

A story in which themes and historical information outshine the character development. (Historical fiction. 8-12)

Horror enthusiasts will be delighted at this nod to the master of suspense.

FEATHERED FIENDS

Chomp-O-Rama: The Strange Ways That Animals Eat

Birmingham, Maria | Illus. by Kyle Reed Owlkids Books (32 pp.) | $18.95

April 15, 2025 | 9781771475501

In this companion to Snooze-O-Rama (2021), Birmingham and Reed return with a lively comparison of human vs. animal eating habits.

The book begins with a light-skinned child opening a lunchbox as a group of animals peer curiously at the food on display. Birmingham invites readers to “join these hungry beasts and see the wild ways they gobble up grub.”

Following the format of the previous book, each spread depicts a youngster in action—in this case, chowing down. A page turn reveals an animal who does something different—or similar. “While you slurp some soup,” the author tells us, “a butterfly gulps turtle tears.” And “while you sometimes use a knife to cut up your dinner,” a sea otter relies on a stone to crack open clams or sea urchins. These animals feed, share, and store their respective foods in intriguing and often surprising ways. The information is clearly presented, and Birmingham draws clever parallels between wildlife and people. Stylized depictions of the animals are presented on brightly colored full-bleed pages, which contrast effectively with the vignettes portraying cartoon kids and adults, set against plain white backgrounds. Birmingham closes with a final spread noting that all beings need to eat and explaining the differences among carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores. Human characters are diverse; one uses a wheelchair.

Appetizing fare for the informationhungry. (suggested reading) (Informational picture book. 6-9)

Feathered Fiends

Boisvert, Jocelyn | Trans. by David Warriner Orca (96 pp.) | $12.95 paper | Feb. 11, 2025 9781459839892 | Series: Orca Shivers, 4

A family’s summer vacation turns from boring to terrifying in an instant when nature attacks. Fifteen-year-old Daphne and her family are driving along a backwoods road to reach their campsite when out of nowhere, a bird crashes into the windshield. When Daphne’s veterinarian father stops to examine it, another bird launches itself at his head, wounding him. Anxious to resume their trip, the unnerved family comes to a grim realization—their car is stuck in the mud. What’s worse, a thunderstorm looms menacingly on the horizon. More and more birds arrive, injuries mount, and all efforts to escape prove futile as the winged attack relentlessly continues. Aware of the risks (and against her family’s protests), Daphne courageously darts away from the car toward a nearby town for rescue as thunderclaps ring out, but will she succeed? What fate awaits her stranded family if she fails? Who else will be ensnarled in the aggressive aerial assault? A tribute to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, Boisvert’s short, action-packed novel translated from French will grip readers as each frighteningly surreal scene unfolds. Black-and-white stock illustrations interspersed throughout become increasingly sinister, ramping up

the suspense. Attentive readers will recognize the double meanings behind some pictures as foreshadowing. Physical descriptions are minimal.

Young horror enthusiasts will be delighted at this nod to the master of suspense. (author’s note) (Horror. 9-13)

When the Air Sang

Bontje, Laura | Illus. by Sarah Whang Annick Press (40 pp.) | $18.99 April 8, 2025 | 9781773219660

Insects enchant a young nature explorer. One spring, brown-skinned Annie discovers something new: periodical cicadas. She follows their lives with the help of her greatgrandmother, grandmother, and pregnant mother. Much waiting is involved, which frustrates Annie. First, holes appear in the ground. Next, insects emerge, climb trees, shed their shells, and unfurl their wings. A few days later, they begin to sing, calling out from the trees. Annie wants to get closer to observe them, but she isn’t yet big enough to manage climbing a tree. Still, “some things are worth the wait”—a realization the child comes to with the help of her loving family. Seventeen years later, she climbs cicada-filled trees with a younger sibling. Bontje’s clear, expressive text provides the basic facts about the cicada life cycle, supplemented by helpful backmatter that offers a timeline of the insect’s life. Whang’s cozy illustrations include photos of Annie’s great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother as children, helping readers follow along as the story moves back and forth in time and the older family members recall the cicadas of their childhoods. Along the way, this multiracial family prepares for the new baby—a narrative device that nicely underscores the theme of the cyclical nature of life.

An appealing demonstration of the rhythms of the natural world. (selected sources) (Informational picture book. 4-7)

The Last Comics on Earth: A Song of Swords and Stuffies: From the Creators of the Last Kids on Earth

Brallier, Max with Joshua Pruett | Illus. by Jay Cooper & Douglas Holgate | Viking (240 pp.) $14.99 | April 29, 2025 | 9780593526811

Series: The Last Comics on Earth, 3

A quartet of young comics creators send their costumed alter egos back to the land of Apocalyptia to face a new and fuzzy threat: Get set for the AWWpocalypse!

Pressured by the success of a competing comic (presented in a monochrome frame story), the Last Kids go for “weirder” and really deliver in this latest series entry. A switch to full-color art kicks off an episode that’s highlighted by exciting developments involving erupting sharkcanoes, donuts, googly eyes, and a team-up with the plushy yet awesomely named Laser Blade Hero Squad. Then there’s the fiendish scheme to subject all the monstrous residents of Apocalyptia to horribly transformative cutie blasts. As in the previous volumes, the action pauses frequently to tout (made-up) merch (with the Savage Beard Marker, you can “draw your very own beard on your very own face! Or somebody else’s very own face!”), and a collection of readers’ letters brings up the end. Through betrayals, sharp banter, and epic battles with adorably button-eyed evildoers, everything goes very wrong. Still, despite having all their superpowers cute-ified, the fearsome foursome can be depended on to leave their foes “glazed and dazed” in the end. Why? Because even though light-skinned barbarian Savage Aloner is the featured superhero this time around, with plenty of personal quests and tests to face, it’s teamwork with his companions and other diversely hued allies that leads to ultimate victory. A cuddlefest of heroic proportions. (Graphic fiction. 8-13)

Kitty Camp

Brockington, Drew | Abrams (40 pp.)

$18.99 | April 29, 2025 | 9781419771965

A youngster psyched about attending summer camp rolls with the punches upon arriving at a camp for cats.

The narrator, who has pale skin and long dark hair, leaps onto the bus with a huge smile but quickly discovers something’s amiss—the bus is filled with felines! Everyone pulls up at Kitty Camp. No matter: “I LOVE KITTIES!!!!” Though the cat counselor’s speech bubble reads only “Meow meow meow,” the kid understands and heads to Arts and Crafts, but these felines are more interested in batting at string. Unfortunately, the cats don’t want to do anything that this eager camper has been looking forward to, like hiking or swimming. The disappointed protagonist want to go home…until the child discovers an activity everyone loves: building and playing in a “superfort” made of cardboard boxes! Just like that, everything turns around: “Kitty Camp just took a little getting used to.” This companion to 2022’s Puppy Bus (featuring a cameo from that book’s protagonist) stands alone, and it’s a fun twist on many first-timers’ experiences at summer camp, where everyone is likely to realize that reality doesn’t always match up with one’s expectations. Brockington’s goofy cartoon art is rife with hilarious details; the expressions on the parents’ faces when their kid hacks up a hairball are priceless. Pure feline fun. (Picture book. 4-8)

Return to Sender

Brosgol, Vera | Roaring Brook Press (320 pp.)

$17.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9781250292186

Award winner Brosgol’s latest is a wish-fulfillment tale that follows Oliver Bakh, a long-haired fifth grade boy whose life is upended.

After Oliver’s father, a cook who emigrated from the

country of Georgia, passes away, Oliver and his mom, who presents white, bounce around among relatives’ homes. Financially strained and emotionally overwhelmed, Oliver’s mother falls into a deep depression, leaving him to take on responsibilities far beyond his years. Just when things seem hopeless, their luck takes an unexpected turn: Oliver’s 96-year-old great-aunt Barb dies, leaving them her Manhattan apartment. Oliver and his father dreamed of opening a restaurant together, one built around their love of traditional Georgian food. Now Oliver has cherished memories, his dad’s recipe book, and a small, frozen batch of his special khinkali, or dumplings. Their new home comes with a magical mail slot that communicates via typewritten notes and grants wishes, but each wish comes with unpredictable consequences. Oliver’s wishes are small at first, but as he navigates the competitive environment of his new private school and befriends Colette, a spirited fourth grader who’s eager for adventure, his wishes grow bolder. With each one, the consequences spiral further out of control. The story’s playful yet darkly humorous tone is enhanced by blackand-white illustrations that add depth and meaning to the fantastical elements. The absurd situations, unexpected twists, and colorful, exaggerated villain add to the tale’s appeal.

A vividly told narrative. (Fantasy. 8-12)

You’re Out of Luck, Alina Butt

Butt-Hussain, Ambreen | Orca (240 pp.) | $14.95 paper | May 13, 2025 9781459841628 | Series: Alina Butt, 2

Set in the early 2000s, this novel sees a young Pakistani British immigrant learning the art of gratitude. For once, Alina Butt isn’t nervous about starting school. This year, she’s part of a tight group of friends whom she’s confident will support her through seventh grade—that is, until they fail to save her

a seat, instead opting to sit next to a red-haired girl named Sophie. Turns out, Alina’s friends spent the summer hanging out with Sophie while Alina’s strict parents made her stay home. When passport issues prevent her from going on a class trip to Paris, her parents plan a family vacation to Pakistan as a consolation prize. Still, Alina remains convinced that she’s “the unluckiest girl in the world”—a feeling compounded by the realization that the family will have to leave England in one year due to visa problems. But while in Pakistan, she begins to appreciate what she has. Alina’s insightful, humorous, and candid voice lends this steadily paced book a conversational quality. Alina’s reframing of the idea of luck feels authentic and nuanced and is aided substantially by Sophie’s insights about her father’s disability. Alina’s moments of gratitude feel heavy-handed, however, and the first third of the book, focusing on preparation for the Paris trip, is somewhat disconnected from the rest. Still, this is a fast-paced, compelling read. Sophie presents white; the previous book established that Alina’s friend group is diverse.

A funny and frank tale of selfdiscovery. (Fiction. 8-13)

Ollie in Between

Callans, Jess | Feiwel & Friends (256 pp.) $17.99 | April 8, 2025 | 9781250331342

Twelve-year-old

Ollie is determined to discover what it means to be a woman. The more Ollie learns about puberty, the less they understand; they don’t feel like a girl, but they don’t want to be a boy, either. As seventh grade goes on, they’re suddenly seen as too much of a girl for their hockey team but not enough of a girl for their best friend. When a teacher assigns a personal essay on “what it means to grow up,” Ollie uses this prompt as an opportunity to interview women, including their older sister, a

An authentic look at the fears of gender-nonconforming queer youth.

OLLIE IN BETWEEN

friend’s mom, and teachers—but they only become more confused. When a classmate invites Ollie to join a queer book club, they finally begin to feel comfortable in their own skin. But Ollie knows that the world isn’t always kind to queer people. And how can they be themself when they don’t fully understand what that means? This book covers timely topics, such as transphobia and the importance of representation in books and media. Ollie, whose late mom was Persian and dad is white, embarks on an authentic, well-developed journey of finding themself and trying to understand their identity, all while balancing their fears of rejection. This book also emphasizes the queer joy of finding accepting people and discovering the strength to speak your truth.

An authentic look at the fears of gender-nonconforming queer youth and the challenges they face. (author’s note) (Fiction. 10-14)

The One and Only Question

Charles, Norma & Andrea Charles Illus. by Ken Daley | Groundwood (32 pp.)

$19.99 | March 4, 2025 | 9781773069654

A Black child frets about the possibility of racist bullying at his new school. As Zeke prepares for his first day, he’s consumed with worry that someone will call him a racial slur— something that happened at his old school. His day isn’t off to a promising start—a clothing stain forces him to put his favorite shirt aside, the bus driver looks unfriendly, and no one on the bus

speaks to him. His teacher scolds him when he gets restless during class, and lunch is an unappetizing “soggy sandwich.” But later, when the kids race around the track, a boy named Jay compliments Zeke on his athletic prowess and invites him to join the basketball team. A different bus driver gives Zeke an enthusiastic greeting on the way home; at last, Zeke relaxes and begins to feel comfortable. Writing in terse prose that effectively conveys the protagonist’s tension, the authors—a mother and daughter—draw from personal experience for a look at the toll that racist bullying can take on young people. They demonstrate how isolating it can feel to be targeted due to one’s race. Daley’s warm, expressive art makes a tough topic feel more accessible. The book ends with a note from co-author Norma Charles and advice on dealing with racism, aimed at both children and adults. Zeke’s community is diverse. Sensitively presented guidance for helping young people make sense of bigotry. (Picture book. 4-8)

Mysteries of the Human Body: Weird and Wonderful Anatomy Explained

Chowdhury, Azmain | Illus. by Daniel Nelson | Neon Squid/Macmillan (48 pp.)

$17.99 | June 3, 2025 | 9781684495047

A doctor digs into 20 common body myths and misconceptions, from why wet skin wrinkles up to whether brains can truly freeze and hearts can break.

Chowdhury offers plenty of unusual revelations: There actually is a “broken

heart” syndrome, called “takotsubo cardiomyopathy,” and it’s not water but nerve impulses to local blood vessels that cause fingertips to wrinkle. The author takes each of his topics as an opportunity to describe a broader anatomical feature or process in simple but not reductive language. Readers get a refresher on the heart’s chambers as well as insight into the cardiac effects of physical or emotional stress, and a look at eye colors leads to notes on genes and mutation (because until 6,000–10,000 years ago, all human eyes were brown). Anyone who has marveled at the placebo effect or the mystery of déjà vu or contemplated why humans, dogs, chimps, and even unborn babies yawn will come away both enlightened and more aware than ever that our bodies are rich in unexplained wonders. Nelson’s free-form gatherings of body parts, fanciful spot images, and diversely hued human figures add notes of whimsy and loud color.

Absorbing insights into what makes us tick. (Informational picture book. 7-10)

The Queen Bees of Tybee County

Chu, Kyle Casey | Quill Tree Books/ HarperCollins (320 pp.) | $18.99 April 15, 2025 | 9780063326958

Bee who you’re meant to bee.

Derrick Chan, a Chinese American basketball player, is stuck spending the summer after seventh grade with his paternal grandmother in Heritage, Georgia (“the most boring place on earth”), after financial problems prevent him from attending basketball camp while his widowed father is out of town working. There Derrick befriends goth roller skater Ro and photographer Giles. He also discovers a talent for fashion and later becomes a stand-in for an absent contestant at Tybee County’s Queen Bee Junior Pageant, thanks to Grandma Claudia’s

connections to the event and his ability to quickly pick up the dance routines. Derrick’s time with Grandma Claudia opens new doors that allow him to explore his sexuality, discovering unexpected feelings for his best friend and fellow b-ball player, JJ. The book tackles a lot of issues from sexuality to race (Giles is cued Black; Derrick feels isolated in his largely white environment), and while the messaging is positive, the uneven pacing undermines the connections readers should make with Derrick. In its slow moments, the plot meanders around a mysterious rift between Grandma Claudia and Derrick’s father while speeding through both Derrick’s budding friendship with Ro and Giles and his coming out. This debut by Chu, a founder of Drag Story Hour who performs as Panda Dulce, will satisfy readers looking for a light, feel-good story. Readers seeking substance may be frustrated by the two-dimensional characters and saccharine resolutions. Original and encouraging, but inconsistently executed. (Fiction. 8-12)

Don’t Cause Trouble

Chung, Arree | Henry Holt (256 pp.)

$22.99 | $14.99 paper | April 22, 2025 9781250887290 | 9781250887306 paper

Being a firstgeneration American makes school more challenging for a plucky tween boy. Ming Lee faces middle school with his usual bowl haircut (administered by his mom), the embarrassment of thrift store shopping for back-to-school clothing, and a fervent wish to just get through it all unnoticed. His other deep desire is a pair of Air Elevates sneakers—much too costly for his extremely frugal Chineseimmigrant parents to ever buy him. After initially being assigned to an ESL class (even though English is his first and only language), Ming is placed in Honors English. He makes two new friends, Vikrum (who’s cued Indian)

You Be Teacher

Clark, Karla | Illus. by Gabby Zapata Feiwel & Friends (32 pp.) | $18.99 May 6, 2025 | 9781250358844 | Series: You Be

Be prepared to have fun when you enter Ms. C’s room.

Digitally edited gouache and oil pastel illustrations feature eyepopping colors in what appears to be a lively preschool or kindergarten classroom. (The students are learning their ABCs and still take an afternoon nap.) Even Ms. C dresses to dazzle with big green glasses, bright clothes with geometric designs, and pink hoop earrings. Well-chosen rhymes throughout the story add to the spirited fun. The class learns about colors, numbers, and shapes and creates art inspired by the seasons. Ms. C zips up jackets, calms a child about to have a meltdown, and bandages a boo-boo, all before noon. But when Ms. C announces that she’s tired and invites the children to

>>> and Marcus (who’s Black). The trio support each other through Halloween hilarity, Ming’s crush, basketball mishaps, and school candy sales turf wars. But the real test of friendship comes when Ming, in a desperate move after his sneaker fund is stolen, involves his buddies in a bungled shoplifting attempt. In the aftermath, Ming learns about the power of family, religion, friends, and self-acceptance. His parents, grappling with their own tribulations around finances, racism, and familial duty, gain insight into Ming’s situation, improving their family bonds. In this graphic novel inspired by the author’s life, Chung inserts humor and love beside moments of pain and frustration in a way that meshes stylistically with the straightforward dialogue and clean, simple drawings. This humorous and heartwarming glimpse into an immigrant family’s experiences entertains and educates. (author’s note, how to make a graphic novel) (Graphic fiction. 9-12)

THE KIRKUS Q&A: SAADIA FARUQI

The author’s powerful new novel tackles a heavy subject, and a personal one: mental illness.

BY LAURA SIMEON

IN HER LATEST NOVEL, The Strongest Heart , Saadia Faruqi tells the story of Mohammad Mirza, a Pakistani and Italian American boy whose abusive father is struggling with untreated schizophrenia and whose inattentive mother is working overseas. Mo and Abbu leave Queens to live in Houston with Naila Phupo, Mo’s paternal aunt, and Rayyan, his cousin. Although Mo navigates difficult changes, he also forges new ties that sustain him, even as Abbu’s mental health deteriorates and Mama remains oblivious to his need for her. This gut-wrenching book treats an important and painful topic with honesty and compassion. Faruqi spoke with us over Zoom from her home in Houston; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?

I think the title says it all: The Strongest Heart. When things get really bad, somebody tells [Mo], “The strongest heart is the one that’s still beating.” I hope that readers take away a message of courage and resilience. This book is for anybody who faces adversity, who’s not in control of their own life, who’s scared or worried or anxious.

Mo’s love for Desi folktales works so beautifully; the retellings offer readers breathing room from the heaviness. Was this

element part of the novel from the beginning?

The folktales weren’t in my mind when I started writing. I outline my books in a very detailed manner, but once I started writing, I realized that Mo’s life was just too sad in a lot of ways. I didn’t know how to proceed, so I did what I usually do when I get stuck: put my work aside and read other books just for enjoyment. That always helps spark my imagination. One of the books I read was Everything Sad Is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri. It’s interesting because it weaves stories of older times into the main story.

It’s very different, structurally, from a lot of books we read in the West. I thought maybe [I could use] some stories from ancient South Asian kings, like the Mughals, so I did a deep dive but couldn’t find something that would appeal to a younger reader. I kept researching because I realized that I needed something to break the flow of the story. I don’t remember how I came across a folktale from India in my research, but I started remembering stories I’d heard as a child in Pakistan.

Mo has built up a tough, self-protective shell. The book would have been so different if you’d made him instantly likable.

I was thinking of myself and how prickly and difficult I was as a child. This book is inspired by my own childhood, my relationship with

my dad, and living under his control when he was severely mentally ill. I was that child. I wasn’t a nice kid. I wasn’t a lovable kid. I was prickly and difficult. [When] you’re a child, you have to protect yourself from physical or emotional danger. So that’s how Mo had to be. I could have made him cute and cuddly, but I always try to relate to my main characters because then I can write a more authentic and realistic story. I know what it’s like to be Mo.

Mo’s being 13 feels just right developmentally for telling this story.

I knew this book was going to be edgy, so I wanted to write a character who’s older than in most of my middle-grade novels. When we’re younger, a lot of things are black and white, but as you get older, you start to

see the gray. It was important for me to write a book that showed all the complexities of mental illness because I didn’t understand anything that was going on in my house until I became an adult, immigrated to the U.S., and went to therapy. I started seeing my dad, to whom I’d almost [completely] stopped talking, in a different light. He passed away, and I had a lot of regrets. So it was important for me to show those nuances. I think if I’d understood [those things] when I was Mo’s age, my life might have been better.

Given how personal it is, was this story incubating for some time?

I didn’t ever think that I’d write this. I had other stories in the back of my mind for years. For example, The Partition Project—I wanted to write about the Partition [of India and Pakistan] for a very long time. Even Yusuf Azeem Is Not a Hero: At the time of 9/11, I knew that someday I’d write a story around it, but it took me 20 years. But I never thought, Oh, let me just put all my ugly thoughts and feelings on paper for everybody to read. I also didn’t think anyone would be interested, because in my life, if I wrote it the way that things [actually] happened, there would have been no resolution. When I did decide to write this book, I thought, I can make this something interesting, with an ending that has hope

Mo’s race and religion aren’t among his challenges. This wasn’t a story where any aspect of identity was the actual problem. I have

written books like that. Kids in middle school face those problems every day—they can be hugely divisive, and kids can be cruel. The problems aren’t going away; us writing about them should also not go away. But Mo’s identity as a Muslim is a help, not a hindrance. His identity as a South Asian is, too,

because he leans into the folktales from his culture, just like he leans into the stories he’s told at the mosque. This is a story about mental illness, which doesn’t discriminate between culture or religion or race.

What touched me most was how seemingly small,

This is a story about mental illness, which doesn’t discriminate between culture or religion or race.

The Strongest Heart

Faruqi,

Saadia

Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins | 384 pp. $19.99 | March 4, 2025 | 9780063115859

ordinary gestures by people like the imam, the school librarian, and Naila Phupo had a profound, positive impact.

I also feel that that’s the best part of the story. That’s what makes it hopeful. That’s what makes it uplifting. I had amazing people, like my grandmother. I had my siblings, whom I was very close to, but none of them were helpful in the way that I really needed, which was to take that burden of fear and worry away or help my father become better. I didn’t plan for Naila Phupo to have a big role, but I needed to give Mo a path forward and [offer] a more hopeful message to the reader, something that I didn’t get as a kid: adults who could say, “It’s not your job to take care of your dad.” It’s a reminder to seek out people you trust who can help you be strong.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I want to remind readers that the way that Mo’s father is depicted is based on my own real-life experiences with my dad, who was diagnosed with mental illness, which may have been schizophrenia. We lived in Pakistan decades ago; there was almost no awareness of mental illness, and he avoided going to the doctor. This isn’t an informational text; this is something that’s true to my life experience, but not necessarily anybody else’s, even someone who’s living with schizophrenia.

Laura Simeon is a young readers’ editor.

be the teacher, they confidently step up to the role. It’s clear that Ms. C loves her students, and they love her right back. She gives her students “an A for a job well done,” and readers will give this book high marks for its energetic portrait of a fun-loving, compassionate classroom headed by a creative teacher. Brownskinned Ms. C’s small, racially diverse class includes a student who uses a wheelchair, one who relies on forearm crutches, and one wearing what appear to be noise-canceling headphones. A playful story championing a caring learning community that empowers all its members. (Picture book. 3-6)

K Is in Trouble Again

Clement, Gary | Little, Brown Ink (216 pp.) $14.99 | April 15, 2025 | 9780316468848 Series: K Is in Trouble, 2

A talking beetle, a goat, and a possible new friend help the hapless K weather more surreal misadventures.

Accompanied by pithy dialogue and a narrative that’s pointedly printed in a typeface called “KafkABC,” Clement’s sparely drawn panels depict a solitary, Buster Keatonish schoolboy in a chain of pickles and odd situations. Fortunately, whether he’s suddenly snatched off a Ferris wheel by a trapeze artist, stranded in a barn far from home with a goat who eats his train ticket, left forgotten in a huge, empty school infirmary, or snagged by the back flap of his swimsuit on the edge of a high diving board to the amusement of crowds below, relief eventually arrives. The assistance is often of an unexpected sort, however—the same goat, for instance, trots up to free him by eating the buttons on his bathing suit. Sometimes there are bright spots, like the friendly (if nameless) farm girl who helps him find a train back home and later comes to visit. Since these sorts of random events are commonplace for K, he seems less perturbed than the towering grown-ups in his life, all of

whom, parents included, apparently find him annoying and frequently wind up shouting at him. Readers who sometimes feel themselves blown like leaves in existential winds will relate. The cast, all in dress and settings from the late 19th or early 20th centuries, is light-skinned.

Amusing, if sometimes unsettling, exercises in absurdity. (Graphic fantasy. 9-12)

Cats Love Books, Too

Coco, María | Bloomsbury (32 pp.)

$18.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9781547613687

Felines as bibliophiles— who knew?

Kitties have inspired and starred in many stories, but did you know they love books very much, too? An unseen narrator asks children if they know why that is. Could it be the “scratchiness” of their covers? Do the characters and plots resonate with them? Perhaps they enjoy being transported to faraway places? Maybe cats love books for the same reasons people do: “Books make us feel at home. Wherever we may be. That is why we all love books!” Adults sharing this understated and thoughtprovoking but playful story should encourage children to offer their own opinions about why we all love books; little ones will likely be glad to volunteer their ideas. Interested children may even want to collaborate on a picture book written and illustrated expressly for cats. The bright acrylic illustrations have a childlike whimsy, depicting colorful, cavorting cats in situations that will be familiar to

any feline fancier: raking their claws across a book, lying across the pages of an open book, and perching on their owners’ heads during read-alouds. Some characters have paper-white skin; others vary in skin tone. One child is depicted in a wheelchair. Endpapers feature cat ID collars with unique cat names. An upbeat ode to books featuring cats aplenty—what more could readers ask for? (Picture book. 4-7)

So Cold!

Coy, John | Illus. by Chris Park Minnesota Historical Society Press (32 pp.) $17.95 | Nov. 10, 2024 | 9781681342948

Fun in subfreezing conditions. It is exactly “twenty-three below zero,” Dad announces. Mom leaves, reminding father and son (who narrates) to dress warmly. Donning outdoor garb, the young protagonist also adopts a new nickname: “Freezeman.” Outside, the pair take part in a series of activities, some of which they set up the night before. They watch a helium balloon shrink and popped soap bubbles shed a thin skin. The child uses a frozen banana to hammer in a nail. Boiling water flung from a cup forms a snowy mist; hot maple syrup dropped into snow becomes a candy treat. Back inside, the balloon regains its shape; father and child enjoy the maple candy, along with some hot chocolate, before a roaring fire. The visuals capture the joys of winter. Blocky, printlike art shows the angular figures with berry-blue and pink hair, while clothing, cars, and houses, depicted in neon hues, seem to

Pun-tastic introductions to kelp and other residents of ocean shallows.

BARNACLE BAY

glow. Sometimes the editorial hand slips, however: The narrator describes putting on a scarf, though the accessory is never depicted. The book doesn’t address safety concerns about venturing out in such extreme weather. The characters’ pale faces are bare, the wind chill is forgotten, and their outdoor time isn’t measured. Still, the joy of winter comes through clearly; many readers will be eager to duplicate the pair’s experiments.

Captures the delight of a frigid day. (information on the activities mentioned) (Picture book. 4-8)

Kirkus Star

Big Family Beach Day

Crews, Nina | Greenwillow Books (32 pp.) $19.99 | May 20, 2025 | 9780063390225

What could be better than a family day at the beach?

Narrator Maya, a child of color with light-brown skin and Afro puff pigtails, explains it all to readers: “When you go to the beach with your cousins, aunts, uncles, grandma, and mom and you’re doing something really fun, everyone gets involved.” Maya’s sentences are like the day itself: full of family and excitement, breathlessly racing from sand to surf and back. Crews’ story and art take place entirely in double-page spreads that mostly teem with Maya’s relations, a boisterous, multi-racial and -generational crew. The author/illustrator uses the gutter to balance her compositions, distributing family members across the tableaux. The few scenes that focus specifically on Maya and darker-skinned cousin Leo, who together get to make “all the decisions” this year, are all the more effective for Crews’ variations in perspective. In a rare close-up, they joyously stir up a “TIDAL WAVE!”; in another, they appear in quadruplicate, dancing in and out of the waves in a striking, mirrored overhead view. Even when

Maya and Leo’s play results in a scolding, the love that binds this family together is as warm as the summer sun. This outing appears to be a once-a-year celebration, which distills and concentrates its importance: With a ritual as special as this one, of course lunch “will be the best sandwich, ever.” Pure joy. (Picture book. 4-8)

Rock

Croza, Laurel | Illus. by Matt James Groundwood (44 pp.) | $19.99

March 4, 2025 | 9781773069487

A seagull furiously admonishes a rock.

Landing on the beach, the bird bites the rock, hurting its beak. Enraged, it berates the rock: “You are too small. I see you as a pebble.” The bullying quickly escalates to bleak existential threats, with the potential for evoking tears or even nightmares in sensitive children. The bird tells the rock that if it were thrown into a lake, it would be lost forever, never finding its way home, and if it does return, it will be thrown away again and again until it’s “just a speck” that risks “disappearing completely…Forever gone.” The rock is unperturbed, simply repeating “I am a rock” at intervals. The bird’s wildly disproportionate wrath is cut off only when a tan-skinned child waves it away. Wordlessly, the youngster places the titular character into an artful arrangement of other rocks in the sand, reaffirming its worth, depicted by James’ bold acrylics and inks. Still, this conclusion isn’t nearly enough to outweigh the harsh tone of the text. Because the bird addresses the rock as “you,” readers and listeners will experience the bird’s cruelty as though it is directed straight at them. Though the author attempts to convey an underlying message about maintaining a strong sense of identity as a bulwark against bullies, many children may be too distressed to uncover it. Dismaying, with little payoff. (Picture book. 5-8)

Barnacle Bay

Curll, Jana | Greystone Kids (76 pp.) | $14.95 | April 22, 2025

9781778401022 | Series: Little Habitats

Pun-tastic introductions to kelp, sea stars, shellfish, and other residents of ocean shallows.

“You can run, but you can’t tide!” quips a sea star on the title page—giving fair warning of what’s in store as a crabby purple shore crab offers newly arrived Larva a tour of the local seafloor as the newcomer searches for a site to settle down. They make “best fronds” with a clump of indignant kelp who oust a garbage-strewing human snorkeler by tickling the interloper’s feet. Later, the pair meet a “clam-edian” with a “fine shell-ection” of other bivalves, then pause for closer looks at the behavior and anatomy of plankton and echinoderms. They also experience “tentacle difficulties” with “Friends ‘N’ Anemones” and take occasional timeouts for further goofy wordplay before watching night fall. “The moon is full of themselves tonight.” “Don’t worry, it’s just a phase.” There’s informational purpose behind all the drollery that swirls through Curll’s banter and cartoon panels; readers will readily absorb a substantial dose of nutritious facts. Ultimately Larva literally fastens on a suitable rock and changes into a barnacle, after which the two join their button-eyed community beneath a rushing wave in collectively waving goodbye to viewers.

A steady flow of slap-happy seafloor pun-ditry. (Graphic nonfiction. 8-10)

The Crayon Stub

Cutler, Marcus | Putnam (40 pp.)

$18.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9798217003334

An artist with few resources but a lot of moxie attempts to create a masterpiece. This humorous book follows a large black cat and a small gray one who have a siblinglike rapport and are both shaped like fat kidney beans with rather stubby tails and simple but expressive facial features. Vowing to “draw something TOTALLY SPECTACULAR and become WORLD FAMOUS,” the bigger cat grabs a fresh sheet of paper and a box of crayons. But our hero is horrified to find the stub of a red crayon in the box— and nothing else. Astute viewers may notice bits of color on the white fluff surrounding the smaller cat’s mouth. More and more clues mount as to the missing crayons’ whereabouts. Meanwhile, the bigger cat emotes dramatically about the crisis. Colorful speech bubbles show Big Cat’s grandstanding, egocentric sentences and Little Cat’s unvarying response of “mew.” Geometric art rendered in a crayonlike texture portrays giggle-worthy scenes as the cats ruminate together and then end up in a chase sequence after the little one swallows the crayon stub and the paper. The denouement—not for the squeamish, but very funny—is a testament to creativity and a sly wink about “art.” Funny feline feats. (Picture book. 4-8)

An Elephant in Our City

Dammermann, Friederike | Clavis (32 pp.) $19.95 | March 25, 2025 | 9798890631459

When an elephant appears in the city, Ben’s parents fret, though the young boy knows why the pachyderm is there. It’s an odd sight, an elephant on a bicycle in the middle of a busy street. As

Ben’s parents gaze down on the scene from above, they begin to wonder why the elephant is there in the first place. They imagine silly scenarios that involve the elephant going shopping, doing a cannonball into a swimming pool, and blowing everyone away with a giant sneeze. All the while, Ben is quietly preparing to leave, because he knows exactly why the elephant is in town: “for their ice cream date, of course!” Translated from Dutch, the matter-of-fact text is paired with whimsical artwork; readers see the large gray elephant looking bewildered while squished on a bus, then joyfully jumping into a swimming pool. The splash looks like a delightfully realistic spray across the page, the sneeze a splotchy mess. Children will enjoy the silliness of a wild animal cohabitating with people, especially one that feels larger than life. Leave it to adults to worry and wonder while young Ben simply enjoys the elephant’s company. Ben and his parents have pale skin; background characters vary in skin tone. A simple story of boundless imagination and a child’s willingness to believe. (Picture book. 3-5)

When a Book Begins

Dashielle, Alegra | Illus. by Daniela Alarcon Paw Prints Publishing/Baker & Taylor (32 pp.)

$18.99 | March 18, 2025 | 9781223187884

Verses to brighten gloomy times, even for a forgetful flower, a cranky crow, and a depressed pastry.

Dashielle offers sweet relief for both readers and the subjects of her poems, from a holeless buttermilk doughnut feeling as “flat as a pancake”

to a lost and confused flower suffering an identity crisis (“Am I a tulip? Or maybe a poppy? / Am I original or maybe a copy?”)—and for anyone else who’s likewise down, such as the sad-looking, dark-skinned child in the opening illustration. For that youngster, at least, riding in a car with a reckless canine driver who howls out the “Bow Wow Blues” elicits a smile. Alternatively, and more feasibly for many, finding that clouds are good listeners lightens the mood of a grumpy crow in one poem, keeping busy indoors in another staves off boredom when “rain reigns” outside, and a glance into a mirror pool along with a hug from Mom is just what that little flower needs to become properly (and literally) grounded. The poet’s generally simple language and unforced rhymes lend readability to the verses, and in Alarcon’s illustrations, a racially diverse cast of children and adults mingles cozily with scenes of flora, fauna, and (as mentioned) pastry…all with human faces. Sensitive, sympathetic, and imaginative. (Picture book/poetry. 6-8)

Kirkus Star

Where Are You, Brontë?

dePaola, Tomie | Illus. by Barbara McClintock | Simon & Schuster (48 pp.) $19.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9781534418509

For this posthumously published work, dePaola draws one final time upon close personal experience to pen a picture book, this one an ode to his beloved dog Brontë.

An engaging tale that sheds light on the efforts of community helpers.

PUPS TO THE RESCUE!

Speaking in the first person, dePaola walks readers through the early days of Brontë’s life, from the moment he picked the pooch up at the airport to the pink collar the dog wore. As Brontë ages, he loses his sight but remains loving. And when the dog does at last die, dePaola moves through his grief, eventually finding comfort in the knowledge that “I knew you were right there, still with me, in my heart forever.” The story evokes other tender tales by dePaola, also inspired by moments in his life. Meanwhile, images throughout the book are peppered with references to dePaola’s books, like a spaghetti dinner attended by a guest reminiscent of the protagonist of the Caldecott Honor–winning Strega Nona . Tasked with illustrating the title after dePaola’s passing, McClintock pays tribute to his art while also managing to retain her own particular style. The love between man and dog is palpable in every spread. And while the book will speak to children who have said goodbye to pets of their own, it will also aid readers in grieving for the author himself.

A gentle delight, simultaneously honoring both the dog dePaola lost and the artist we lost in turn. (Informational picture book. 4-8)

Kirkus Star

Wheetle: A Little Wagon With a Big Heart

Derby, Cindy | Roaring Brook Press (40 pp.)

$18.99 | April 22, 2025 | 9781250325501

A determined young vehicle learns a lesson in self-care. Wheetle, a cheerful red anthropomorphized wagon whose handle resembles a face, greets the day with vim and vigor, ready to help out the other residents of the forest, all the while looking forward to “his favorite morning of the year,” circled on his calendar. He carries “slimy things and fragile things…along the roughest road, up…and down the big hill,”

despite the presence of a squeaky wheel that gets progressively worse as the week goes on. When the circled date arrives, Wheetle enthusiastically starts his journey, only for his wheel to break while he’s assisting yet another friend. Thankfully, those he has helped along the way band together to carry him up the hill “just in time to see all the suns come up.” Caldecott Honor–winner Derby explores the fine line between being selfless and being taken advantage of; children and adults alike will readily relate. Her mixed-media collage art relies on warm yellows, oranges, blues, and purples to glorious effect, depicting a world that readers will easily lose themselves in. Wheetle himself is utterly expressive, his frustration, disappointment, and, at last, unabashed happiness coming through clearly. Derby’s text has a pleasing rhythm and contains charming details, from the many items Wheetle ferries to the “bottle-cap bow tie” he dons before setting out on that special day. An empathetic, gorgeously wrought look at striking a balance between helping others and setting healthy boundaries. (Picture book. 4-7)

Fire Pups to the Rescue!

Desimini, Lisa | Christy Ottaviano Books (40 pp.) $17.99 | May 20, 2025 | 9780316576871

Dogs get fired up about their jobs. Children interested in the vital work that firefighters do will be fascinated by this easy-to-understand book that offers a reassuring perspective. Created with paper collage and paint and finished digitally, the illustrations provide insight into the work of four adorable, eager, helmeted Dalmatian puppies named Spot, Zippy, Wink, and Pip as they use their remarkable sensory skills to aid their human partners. Readers will learn how the highly efficient two-legged firefighters and the fire pups help humans and nonhumans alike at the scene of a fire:

The firefighters expertly battle a blaze and evacuate human residents, while the pups do equally crucial work bringing family pets to safety. The fire pups receive special training to learn to carry out their tasks and offer friendly cheer to their firehouse partners. Readers will especially appreciate the onomatopoeic sound effects incorporated into the text, representing, among other things, firehouse-bell clangs and blaring sirens. The firefighters are racially diverse. Backmatter offers information on the history of fire dogs and notes that while Dalmatians no longer run along horse-drawn fire brigades as they once did, they “still have a place of honor at the firehouse.”

An engaging tale that sheds light on the efforts of community helpers. (fire safety tips) (Picture book. 4-7)

Minh and the Magic Grains of Rice

Trans. by Bac H. Tran | Chronicle Books (52 pp.) $17.99 | May 20, 2025 | 9781797213330

In this Vietnamese import, an ungrateful boy is transported to a magical land where human-size grains of rice teach him the importance of this staple food.

One evening, Minh refuses to eat his rice and even accidentally knocks a bowl of the food to the ground during a tantrum. Afterward, he sees three grains of rice stand up and dust themselves off. “We don’t deserve this. Let’s go!” one of them says. Minh follows them into the bushes. On the other side, he discovers a wondrous landscape: a sunny day with clouds and mountains, fantastical trees, and human-size rice grains fully clothed in traditional Vietnamese outfits. One of the grains recounts the legend of the Creator and the Pearly Grain, then tells Minh that to return home, he must find the Pearly Grain by sowing a rice crop. Minh spends time helping both rice and human characters sow, tend,

harvest, and dry the crop, learning much in the process. Finally, the Pearly Grain appears from a sack of glowing rice grains, and Minh crawls back through the hedges to arrive home, hungry and grateful for his bowl of rice. Some of the dialogue is awkward, and the lesson feels a bit heavy-handed at times. Still, the information is sound, and the digitally rendered cartoon art is engaging, relying on colorful yet muted tones and incorporating fantastical landscapes and kawaii characters. Solid info and cute characters help this primer on rice go down easy. (information about rice and Vietnamese culture) (Picture book. 3-7)

Put Your Shoes On

Dunbar, Polly | Candlewick (32 pp.) $18.99 | June 17, 2025 | 9781536242973

Peek inside the mind of a youngster given a seemingly simple task. Josh, a tanskinned tot with a mop of brown hair, is playing with toys. An adult has an all-too-familiar request: “Josh. JOSH. Josh, love. It’s time to put your shoes on.” The shoes, however, mere steps away, remain untouched. As the pleas continue, Josh’s imagination begins to soar. Squiggly, colorful confetti markings cue readers that something fantastical is beginning. The unseen adult continues to patiently explain, “We’re in a hurry because it’s Aunt Nelly’s BIRTHDAY PARTY.” Josh’s inner thoughts now show a smiling cake and delightfully misshapen stars. Josh imagines all the other party guests, equal parts scribbly and pointy (and wearing fabulous shoes), until—oh no—the request isn’t so patient anymore. A big blue monster yells: “JOSH! PUT. YOUR. SHOES. ON!” Josh, immediately ripped from the colorful wonderings, quickly complies. But after a quick hug, the confetti sparkles come back. An author’s note lovingly explains that the drawings for all the imaginative parts were created by Dunbar’s two sons,

It’s always a rollicking adventure when a food item bounds out the door.

THE RUNAWAY PANCAKE

collected while they were growing up. The bright renderings infuse the work with joy even when Josh is scolded; with love and empathy, Dunbar captures both a child’s irrepressible imagination and a parent’s frustration. Readers will enjoy following the doings of a tiny caterpillar on each page. A leaving-the-house battle that all can relate to. (Picture book. 3-6)

The Runaway Pancake

$18.99 | April 8, 2025 | 9781782509318

It’s always a rollicking adventure when a food item bounds out the door. As this Dutch import opens, a family comprised of a grandmother, a father, and seven children are getting ready for breakfast. When Dad pours the pancake batter into the sizzling pan, each child vies to get the first one, until the youngest tot whispers, “Can I eat it, dear, kind, clever, sweet, funny, lovely, handsome Dad?” Dad laughs. But when the pancake is flipped, it bounces out the door. “Ha! No one’s going to eat me,” it calls out. “I’m far too fast. Catch me if you can!” Thus begins the chase. As the pancake speeds past a series of animals—among them a rooster, a fox, a badger, and a duck—all dash after the tasty treat. But a clever wild boar gets the last laugh (and the last gulp). Like the classic tale “The Gingerbread Man,” this cumulative story relies on repetition and rhythm, with the boastful titular foodstuff listing all the creatures pursuing it: “Seven hungry children, a rooster and a fox

couldn’t eat me—I’m far too fast.” Bright, cheery patterns adorn the indoor scenes; once the chase moves outside, the landscape transforms from autumn crispness to shadowy woods, heightening the drama. A recipe for “deliciously crispy pancakes” is appended. Members of the family vary in skin tone. Children will gobble this one up and ask for more. (Picture book. 4-7)

Olivia Wolf and the Trip Through Time

Fragoso, José | Colors by Violeta Cano Trans. by Cecilia Ross | NubeOcho (80 pp.) | $14.99 paper | April 29, 2025 9788410406131 | Series: Olivia Wolf, 3

A young werewolf and her pals find themselves on yet another adventure—heading back in time to ancient Egypt.

Olivia and her friends, who reside in Monstrocity, a city populated by both humans and paranormal creatures, are excited for their school’s science fair. Mario the mummy shows up late and looking ill. After he faints, he’s brought to Dr. Jekyll, the school physician, who diagnoses him with Nile fever. No cure exists in modern times; he’ll have to travel back to the days of the pharaohs and gaze into the magical eye of a statue of the sun god Ra. Luckily, Vane, a brown-skinned “mad scientist,” has fashioned a time machine out of a tube slide for her science fair entry. So the friends journey back to ancient Egypt. The companions’ other science projects come in handy—literally. In one scene, Greta (a green-skinned Bride of Frankenstein–esque creature) uses a contraption

Fisscher, Tiny | Illus. by Sophie Pluim Trans. by Polly Lawson | Floris (28 pp.)

comprised of several hands, designed to help with speed-reading, to plug the Sphinx’s ears. Translated from Spanish, this latest installment in the graphic novel series features illustrations with saturated colors and lots of action that keep the energy level high. Readers interested in ancient Egypt will appreciate a brief glimpse of Mario’s pyramid home back in Monstrocity as well as the dramatic antics of the ancient gods the kids meet on their trip back in time. Friendship and innovative thinking win the day in this dynamic tale. (Graphic fiction. 7-9)

Edie for Equality: Edie Windsor Stands Up for Love

Genhart, Michael | Illus. by Cheryl Tuesday | Lee & Low Books (40 pp.) $20.95 | May 20, 2025 | 9781643795829

Edie Windsor stands up for LGBTQ rights. A young Edie is attracted to women, but only upon moving to New York in 1951 is she able to be her authentic self. Though Edie and Thea fall in love and get engaged, they know their marriage would be illegal. Edie and Thea are white and Jewish and have both faced unfairness based on their religion and sexuality, which fuels their activism. Decades later, Edie and Thea go to Canada to get married legally. When Thea passes away, Edie is left with a broken heart and a large inheritance bill—spouses can legally inherit property without paying taxes, but the U.S. government never recognized Edie and Thea’s marriage. Edie sues the U.S. government, hoping to defeat the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as being between a man and a woman. Her case reaches the Supreme Court, which, in 2013, determines that DOMA is unconstitutional after all. The story breezes past Edie’s childhood, focusing on her relationship with Thea and the Supreme Court case. Despite some

pacing issues, the importance of Edie’s story is conveyed effectively. Expository blocks of text feel at odds with colorful pop art illustrations that might appeal to a younger set. Detailed backmatter offers context and interest, some of which may have benefited from inclusion in the story. Not without its flaws, but a solid picture-book biography of an unforgettable hero for queer rights activism. (timeline, additional information and historical context, author’s note, selected bibliography) (Picture-book biography. 9-11)

The Bigfoot Field Guide to Campers: And Other Mysterious Creatures

Gigot, Jami | Kids Can (36 pp.) | $19.99 May 6, 2025 | 9781525312632

Big foot turns out to possess a big heart—and a low tolerance for cognitive dissonance. Who are these “mysterious creatures,” “so dangerous, and so treacherous,” who compel a sasquatch to fear them above everything? Why, us humans, of course—because we take over lands that don’t belong to us, urinate in the sasquatches’ gardens, and contaminate water simply by swimming in it. But in this handy guide addressed to fellow cryptids, Bigfoot explains how to identify the small threats by sight (“hairless limbs and faces”), by smell (especially farts), and by their “ear-piercing” sound. Though Bigfoot warns that humans are to be avoided at all costs, this directive isn’t so easy to follow. Playing dead is impossible when an intrepid, light-skinned young camper starts tickling the protagonist’s feet, and the child’s granola bars prove irresistible to Bigfoot. When the youngster, unable to remember the way back to the other campers, hides a teary face in the beast’s warm fur, it becomes clear that little humans aren’t exactly as myth has portrayed them. The book’s cautious advice diverges radically and amusingly from what we see in the

illustrations and from what Bigfoot experiences. Childlike artwork in subdued colors with crayonlike strokes suggests authentic authorship by the big furry narrator, who never looks menacing and becomes more cuddly as the story progresses.

A humorously deadpan lesson in perspective. (Picture book. 4-9)

The Right Call

Greenwald, Tommy | Amulet/Abrams (272 pp.) | $18.99 | April 15, 2025 9781419772856 | Series: Game Changer, 2

A gifted young pitcher proves better able to handle the pressure to succeed than his father does in this companion to Game Changer (2018) Greenwald again addresses themes of violence in youth sports—but this time, he focuses as much on how inflated expectations can lead to ugly conflicts between parents and officials as on the danger of injuries to athletes. Fifteen-year-old Cal Klondike, who presents white, is thrilled to be a dominating pitcher for the Walthorne Baseball Academy team. But he winds up quitting baseball after a scary shoulder injury requires rehab, and then, a few months later, his intense, pushy dad assaults and seriously injures umpire Henry Goshen. The tale unfolds through a mix of news stories, text exchanges, emails, free verse reveries, and trial and interview transcripts, and readers will easily follow the events and Cal’s changing emotional landscape. Following the assault, the storyline settles into exploring the developing relationship between Cal and, surprisingly, Mr. Goshen, a retired Vietnam vet who bears no animus toward Cal’s father. The umpire believes that people shouldn’t be judged by their best or worst days, and he wisely urges the angry teen to forgive his sincerely repentant parent. Along with a shared setting, some characters from the earlier

novel’s supporting cast return, notably sensitive guidance counselor Mr. Rashad, who gently nudges Cal toward both articulating his feelings and perhaps even rediscovering his love for the game.

A thoughtful exploration of a concerning issue. (author’s note, further reading) (Fiction. 10-13)

Adventures Unlimited: The Land of Lost Things

Griffiths, Andy | Illus. by Bill Hope Feiwel & Friends (320 pp.) | $17.99 April 8, 2025 | 9781250367358 Series: Adventures Unlimited, 1

The search for a misplaced rabbit’s foot leads two adventurers into encounters with a bull who’s lost his temper, much missing treasure, and many, many single socks.

Clad anonymously in custom-made adventure suits that cover them head to toe, the never-named narrator (“Me”) and sidekick (“You”) drive their supposedly “uncrashable” adventure car through an interdimensional hole into the truly crowded place where all lost things go. There they run into both a tree and treasure hunter Johnny Knucklehead. Johnny, whose head is a giant clenched fist, had been reported lost in the jungle. This meeting is just the beginning of a long series of random encounters during which even the plot is lost (and then found again), Johnny is reunited with his mirror twin, Jimmy, and a lost lucky charm is recovered—only to become a bargaining chip after the adventurers are captured by a peg-legged rabbit pirate. Unlike that elusive plot, Griffiths has no trouble at all keeping firm hold on his intention to keep chortling readers entertained from start to final high-five. Hope’s lively cartoon illustrations add visual action and sight gags to every page, and along with tacking on instructions for a personal homemade adventure helmet, he even takes over

A clear view into an extraordinary achievement from a legendary architect.

THE GLASS PYRAMID

occasional two-page spreads for an intricate map, montage, or mini comic. Give a hand, or two, to this surreal, headlong romp. (Fantasy. 7-10)

Carousel Summer

Gros, Kathleen | Quill Tree Books/ HarperCollins (304 pp.) | $15.99 paper | April 8, 2025 | 9780063057685

Lucy’s small-town Ontario summer is rocked by newcomers and a town conflict. With her best friend, Katia, away at camp, Lucy thinks summer will be boring. But then Toronto artist Ray arrives to rebuild the town’s old carousel, along with her daughter, Anaïs. Lucy, who’s not the girly girl her single dad hopes for, is drawn to the new arrivals, especially after she confirms that butch Ray is a lesbian. Soon, Lucy and Anaïs’ friendship develops into something more, and a radical haircut tears a serious rift between Lucy and her dad. Meanwhile, disputes rage among townspeople over selling land to a condo developer. Lucy’s grocer father needs the money from selling his store, but others worry that locals will be priced out. What will the town council decide? Lucy’s growth into her true self is sensitively portrayed, and kids in Lucy’s position sorely need Ray’s eloquent and comforting words and explanations. Lucy also finds support in her big brother, and she hopes that Katia—whose delightful letters paint a fun picture of camp—will accept her, too. The developer plot feels overtly educational, with teacherly dialogue explaining different sides of the

controversy. Despite some thoughtful points, young readers might find the conflict’s presentation of limited interest. Main characters appear white; there’s some racial diversity in secondary and background characters. The colorful, blocky, and somewhat static illustrations feature expressive faces. A thoughtful coming-out story interwoven with a town’s gentrification worries. (author’s note) (Graphic fiction. 9-13)

Kirkus Star Nightsong

Han, Sally Soweol | Bloomsbury (40 pp.) $18.99 | May 27, 2025 | 9781547615063

In this Australian import, a boy discovers magic in the soundscape of a starry, summer night. Eager to go home, Lewis colors listlessly while his mother has tea at her friend’s house. His boredom follows him on the bus ride home until a flat tire forces the passengers to disembark. Softly textured compositions, filled with pattern and detail, are rendered in black and white. Warm colors highlight the objects, flora, and fauna that are making noise and the words identifying the sounds—the “WHOOSH!” of an orange curtain catching the breeze, the “CRUNCH!” of Mom biting into a chocolate chip cookie—leading to ever-changing, captivating scenes. Against the quiet of a starlit black sky and a pastoral setting, a firefly encircled in yellow catches the boy’s eye and ear with its “ZZZZZZ.” He follows the insect,

climbing over a fence and walking through a glade of trees until he comes to a creek. All the while he notices the sounds of leaves rustling, frogs croaking, and water burbling. As the author describes it, “The night sounds become a song.” Sonorous sentences and compelling images capture the enchantment of a natural nocturnal setting and a child’s wonder at experiencing it through multiple senses—perhaps for the first time. Lewis and his mother have skin the white of the page; other characters are depicted in various shades. Mesmerizing—and sure to inspire listeners to attend to the symphonies in their own environments. (Picture book. 3-6)

The

Glass Pyramid: A Story of the Louvre Museum and Architect I.M. Pei

Harvey, Jeanne Walker | Illus. by Khoa Le Atheneum (40 pp.) | $19.99 | May 27, 2025 9781665953337

A tour through the process, pitfalls, and ultimately successful 1989 debut of I.M. Pei’s redesign of the Louvre.

Chosen by France’s president for the project, the Chinese American architect initially keeps his commission secret, worried that the French will block the involvement of an outsider. Pei visits the Louvre repeatedly, noting drawbacks that visitors to the museum and staff alike encounter and pondering solutions. He studies Versailles’ gardens, focusing on their geometric forms, light, and water features. Harvey acknowledges Pei’s Chinese influences, highlighting childhood visits to Buddhist mountain retreats and his family’s ancestral garden in Suzhou. The French public’s initial resistance is overcome through Pei’s press interviews, an in-situ, life-size mock-up of the bold design, and the Paris mayor’s approval. The courtyard’s 71-foot-tall glass pyramid,

whose clear panes allow views of the existing edifice, is a portal leading visitors logically to the museum’s three wings. Pei’s bold design embodies both his sensitive approach to functional public spaces and his modernist vision. Harvey’s narrative features clear exposition, interspersing intriguing details about the discovery of an ancient subterranean castle and moat and the installation and cleaning of the pyramid’s 673 glass panes. Le’s illustrations deftly juxtapose old and new: childhood scenes in pre-urban China, Pei’s notably sleek buildings, and the contrast between the pyramid and the Louvre’s centuries-old facades. A clear view into an extraordinary achievement from a legendary architect. (information on architects, biographical note, STEM connections, selected sources, video resources) (Picture-book biography. 4-8)

Batter Up for the First Day of School!

Hegedus, Bethany | Illus. by Nomar Perez | Viking (40 pp.) | $18.99 May 13, 2025 | 9780593526637

It’s the season opener for twins Hank and Erin, avid baseball fans ready for the first day of school. The youngsters’ bedroom contains a bat propped up by the foot of the bed, pennants on the wall, and a planner marked “Game Day” alongside a “Back to School” reminder. Although Hank and Erin aren’t exactly raring to go, once they have breakfast and set off for school, they get into the groove. It helps that everything seems to be baseball-themed, starting at home with their parents’ call for the “sluggers” to awaken and continuing through a series of “morning drills” (brushing their teeth and combing their hair). And it doesn’t stop when they arrive at Grand Slam Elementary—the day is broken up into innings, a spilled container of milk at lunch is a “foul ball,” and their savvy teacher refers to the classroom as a dugout, with sporty rules and

Lizard Boy 2: The Most Perfect Summer Ever

Hill, Jonathan | Colors by Allie Drake Walker US/Candlewick (288 pp.)

$24.99 | April 8, 2025 | 9781536216479

In this follow-up to 2022’s Tales of a SeventhGrade Lizard Boy, Tommy and his friends plan the perfect summer, but it gets derailed when protests against aliens and the paranormal begin.

Lizard boy Tommy Tomkins and his family are finally adjusting to the human town of Eagle Valley after being displaced from Elberon, their home in the center of the Earth. Tommy has made some great human and nonhuman friends who understand him and how it feels to be different. With Dung Tran having to return to Vietnam soon, Tommy and his friends decide to create the “Most Perfect Summer Ever!!! Bucket List,” with activities including attending the county fair, watching baseball games, going hiking, and having an epic sleepover. The summer starts off well, but when Tommy’s lizard face appears in local resident Danny Cohen’s online video, he worries about his family’s secret being revealed. When his Sasquatch friend’s grandfather accidentally transforms in public, Cohen’s once-harmless videos incite protests against aliens and

>>> expectations clearly laid out (“Be kind to every player”; “when you hit the field, safety first”). When the kids are called up to the blackboard for a spelling exercise, they initially get it wrong (“It’s a swing and a miss!”) before triumphing: “And the crowd goes wild!” The fast-paced text and lively digital paintings give the book energy to spare. For these youngsters, it’s a promising start to the school year, er, season—hot diggity dog! The curlyhaired tots and their parents are tan-skinned; their classmates are diverse. All the bases are loaded for a great back-to-school read. (Picture book. 5-7)

Unplug for a Silly Storytime!

MARCH 7-8, 2025 (sundown to sundown)

“…Much-needed encouragement to look up and see the world!”

—Kirkus Reviews

“…Pure silliness… sure to be popular with the early elementary set”

Celebrate the Global Day of Unplugging with Paw Prints Publishing and Unplug Collaborative 503c pawprintspublishing.com

—School Library Journal

“...begins with...such basics as atomic structure, elements, and electricity before recapping watershed events in our planet’s history...From there, it’s on to a history of technology...”

—Kirkus Reviews

Pitch-Perfect Tales forMusiciansAspiring

Cheryl Willis Hudson;

London Ladd

Marta Pantaleo;

Cartoonist Jules Feiffer Dies at 95

The artist was known for his long-running comic strip and his books for children.

Jules Feiffer, the legendary cartoonist who illustrated The Phantom Tollbooth and wrote several children’s books of his own, has died at 95, the Washington Post reports.

Feiffer, a New York native, began his art career at 16, when he was

hired as an apprentice by comic book pioneer Will Eisner. In 1956, Feiffer launched his own comic strip, Sick, Sick, Sick, at the Village Voice; it would later be renamed Feiffer and run in the New York City weekly newspaper for more than four decades.

In 1961, he provided the illustrations for Norton Juster’s children’s fantasy novel The Phantom Tollbooth. He would return to children’s literature in 1993 with the book The Man in the Ceiling;

several more books for young readers followed, including A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears; I Lost My Bear ; I’m Not Bobby!; and Rupert Can Dance. His 1999 book, Bark, George, was one of his biggest hits; he followed it up with a sequel, Smart George, in 2020. His most recent children’s book, the graphic novel Amazing Grapes, was published last September.

Feiffer was also known as a screenwriter, penning the scripts for films including Carnal Knowledge and Popeye. His graphic novels for adult readers include Tantrum, Kill My Mother, and Cousin Joseph.—M.S.

For reviews of Jules Feiffer’s books, visit Kirkus online.

Jules Feiffer

monsters. Facing widespread hate, Tommy and his friends try to find a way to support their families and the town’s other outsiders. This dynamically illustrated, full-color graphic novel explores friendship, intolerance, empowerment, and community through comedy and meaningful conversations. Many characters’ storylines present reflective insights into immigrant and refugee experiences, as well as their opinions on assimilation vs. keeping their home cultures alive. Tommy and his middle school friends’ enthusiasm, feelings, and ideas are relatable as they grapple with heavy social issues. Funny, thoughtful, and inspiring. (Graphic science fiction. 8-12)

Summer Is Here: A Bear and Mole Story

Hillenbrand, Will | Holiday House (32 pp.)

$18.99 | May 13, 2025 | 9780823457823

Series: Bear and Mole

Mole is up to bat! Summer means baseball, and these animals—whom readers may recognize from previous Bear and Mole books—are ready to play. Mole gets his bat out of its bag, rubs dirt on the handle, tugs on his cap, and heads to the baseball diamond, ready to hit a home run! “You’re a natural,” encourages Bear. But the Ump has some doubts and places a ball on a tee for Mole. Mole takes his first swing…and misses. Strike one! Bear offers some advice, and Mole tries again. Strike two! The Ump lends Mole a pair of glasses, and this time, the ball travels “UP-UP-UP” till it’s “GOING, GOING, GONE!” Mole runs the bases backward for “an opposite direction home run.” The animals celebrate a good game with ice cream and highfives. With minimal text (which budding readers can attempt), this is a charming tale. Engaging use of sound effects makes the book a good option for read-alouds. Hillenbrand’s art often dominates the page with dramatic depictions of movement, while strong shading and textures elevate the images. The overall

roundness of the cast (and the diminutive curves of the smaller animals) makes them endearing. Youngsters feeling a bit nervous to step up to the plate will take heart from Mole’s journey: Though he has a rocky beginning, he’s supported by BFF Bear each step of the way.

A winsome, sporty tale, especially resonant for athletic newbies. (Picture book. 3-7)

Good Boy

Hirsch, Andy | First Second (208 pp.) $22.99 | $14.99 paper | May 20, 2025 9781250291967 | 9781250291950 paper

A nervous boy and an excitable canine bond through dog training.

Charlie’s a good kid…though he barfs whenever he’s anxious, and he’s almost always anxious. As the story starts, he’s spiraling over whether he’s packed a toothbrush for a class trip, and he vomits before even getting on the bus. That incident keeps him home, but, as he despairs while recovering on the sofa, his mom arrives home with a surprise: Ralph, a rescue dog who might be able to help Charlie with his anxiety. Though Ralph is prone to mishaps and hasn’t quite mastered potty training, Charlie embraces him immediately and eagerly assumes responsibility for his care. But it’s not quite enough, and when Charlie’s parents wonder if he’s up for handling the high-strung pup, Charlie marches Ralph straight to training classes. Eventually, Charlie realizes that agility competitions may offer him the opportunity to face his anxiety head-on. At times, the book loses focus, with

Charlie’s anxiety getting lost amid the info dump about agility training—course design, terminology, competition rules, and the psychology of pet–owner bonding. Still, Hirsch’s bubbly, actionfilled illustrations offer visual interest while remaining easy to follow; dog lovers and kids dealing with similar issues as Charlie’s will appreciate this one. Charlie is tan-skinned; his dog-training peers are diverse in terms of age and skin color. An energetic and educational dog’s tale. (Graphic fiction. 8-12)

In the Forests of the Night

Twelve-year-old orphan Ellis becomes ensnared in an evil plot. After Ellis’ best friend, Lora, disappears from Clearwood Home for Orphans, the only clue is Lora’s bookmark, upon which she’d written the phrase “The Forests of the Night.” Soon after, Ellis is assigned as guardian to new resident Pip, who doesn’t speak. Both girls feel a strong connection to the massive Ghost Tree—the fossilized remains of the only tree that didn’t rot away in the Blight. Ellis even hears the tree talking to her. After she and Pip see a huge, birdlike creature pecking at the tree, the girls are sent away to a summer camp, where kids are forced to mine an energy source that powers evil scientist Mother Dear’s creations. Dealing in “bio-hybridization, paleo-genetics, robotics, [and] artificial intelligence” as part of her plan to rule the world by replacing nature, Mother Dear must

A compelling, immersive, and wholly empathetic musing on home.

OLD BLUE IS MY HOME

destroy the last natural space on Earth: the forests of the night. If Ellis and Pip can’t get there first, all will be lost, but luckily, they have the Ghost Tree on their side. The book’s very slow first half lays a minimal foundation for the book’s overall mystery. Persistent readers may feel rewarded in the second half, which features more clarity and exciting plot elements. Ellis has little agency throughout, mostly doing as she’s told, which makes for a largely unengaging narrative. Most characters are cued white. A promising idea mired by unclear worldbuilding, murky stakes, and an unsatisfying ending. (Fantasy. 9-12)

Kirkus Star

Old Blue Is My Home

Judge, Lita | Abrams (40 pp.) | $18.99 April 8, 2025 | 9781419771521

A blue van is home for a young child. Old Blue is both a cozy living space and an opportunity for adventure, keeping the family safe as they roam the country from town to the mountains and beyond. Scenes of the family playing cards in the back of the vehicle while it rains outside and eating soup around a cozy campfire are depicted in soft, impressionistic watercolors, dominated by blues, golds, and oranges. It’s clear that the young protagonist, who narrates, feels sheltered here. Yet the child also longs for a “forever home,” especially when ostracized by classmates for this unusual living situation. The youngster finds comfort snuggling with Mama and exploring nature. Leaning into imaginative play, the child truly feels peaceful. An especially moving spread depicts the child cross-legged on the roof of the parked van, hair blown back by the wind, arms outstretched: “I’m never lonely when I imagine I belong to the wind.” Expertly capturing a child’s perspective, Judge’s matter-of-fact text is tinged with deep emotion—this is both a paean to a temporary home and a wish for more. Her sumptuous illustrations

glow with warmth, inviting readers to linger. In the backmatter, Judge explains that the story stems from her own childhood experiences and provides information on housing insecurity, which will help adults explain the concept to children. Characters are light-skinned. A compelling, immersive, and wholly empathetic musing on home. (Picture book. 4-8)

Sadie Mouse Wrecks the House

Kalan, Elliott | Illus. by Tim Miller Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.) | $19.99

April 22, 2025 | 9780062998392

Fed up with being good, a young rodent turns troublemaker. Sadie Mouse doesn’t think it’s fair that her brother, Reggie, gets away with shirking his chores and even making more messes for her to clean up. So after Mom hands the siblings a list of jobs before leaving for the day, Sadie puts a literal, Amelia Bedelia–esque spin on all their duties. Tasked with taking out the garbage, she flings it out a window (“Garbage doesn’t get more out than that!”), and she makes the bed…into an ice cream sundae. Sadie glories in being naughty. Exhausted, she falls asleep, but when her mother returns, she’s thrilled to see a clean house—turns out Reggie’s decided to embrace his more responsible side. Most of the text is conveyed through dialogue presented in speech bubbles and featuring clever puns and wordplay (“You don’t have a bad bone in your whole body.” “Just watch. I’ve got a whole bad skeleton”). Miller’s energetic, thick-lined cartoons brim with humor as Sadie turns the house upside down—a slice of pizza hangs from a clothesline; toilet paper litters the lawn. Though Reggie learns his lesson, the book never veers on preachy as it comes to a satisfying conclusion. A funny and messy how-to for doing chores the wrong way. (Picture book. 4-8)

Benny on the Case King, Wesley | Paula Wiseman/ Simon & Schuster (288 pp.) | $17.99 April 15, 2025 | 9781665937696

In western Newfoundland, two 11-year-olds must catch a thief before the permanent closure of a retirement community—and Benny’s own home. Benny, a white-presenting boy with Down syndrome, lives in Starflower by the Sea, the retirement home his mum runs. Benny’s mosaic Down syndrome is entirely asymptomatic except for some physical differences; he’s never had any health, speech, or cognitive disabilities. Nonetheless, he’s been in special ed classes since he started school— until enough people recognized his above-average grades. Now, both thrilled and terrified, he’s about to begin his first day ever in a mainstream classroom. Benny just needs to make some friends…among kids who’ve ignored or bullied him since he was tiny. Amazingly, the new girl, brown-skinned Salma from Seattle, seems to actually like him. Salma, whose mother is from Newfoundland and implied white and whose father is from Tunisia, is a true-crime aficionado, and she’s invaluable when Benny starts investigating the inexplicable thefts plaguing the retirement home. Though the story drags at first, with extensive scene setting, once the pace picks up, the increasingly high-stakes mystery is gripping. As Benny and Salma rush to find a criminal who might leave the much-beloved seniors of Starflower homeless, they still have time to learn myriad moral lessons as they confront bigotry, bullying, and fighting. Young sleuths become best friends as they defeat scoundrels and save seniors in this page-turning mystery. (Newfoundland sayings, author’s note) (Mystery. 9-12)

The Spider Lady: Nan Songer and Her Arachnid World War II Army

Klostermann, Penny Parker | Illus. by Anne Lambelet | Calkins Creek/Astra Books for Young Readers (48 pp.) | $18.99 May 6, 2025 | 9781662680359

A self-taught scientist rose to the challenge when World War II increased demand for spider silk. Klostermann describes how a botanist neighbor encouraged young Nan Songer to pursue her deep interest in bugs—and spiders. Nan brought live specimens into her bedroom and, later, as an adult, into her whole home to study. When she learned that spider silk was used for crosshairs in surveying scopes, she wondered whether she could make a career selling silk and set out to experiment. Using hairpins and parts from an eggbeater and a toy train, she figured out how to extract the fine filaments. Further questions, and research, followed. Then war broke out. Spider silk was needed to create crosshairs for weapons. Soon thousands of spiders were living, and spinning, in her home! She needed to study the specific silk each species produced to determine which was best for crosshairs. Some problems seemed insurmountable, but she solved them with patience and ingenuity. Sidebars provide information on arachnids and identify the species Nan raised. Klostermann’s brief, engrossing text eschews typical biographical information (Nan’s birthplace, education), focusing instead on her subject’s fascinating work. Lambelet’s meticulously detailed sepia and teal art vividly depicts Nan in pursuit of her passionate vocation.

Weaves an impressive story of arachnid and human accomplishment. (author’s note, bibliography, photographs, picture credits) (Informational picture book. 7-10)

Yay!

Kulekjian, Jessica | Illus. by Zara González Hoang | Bloomsbury (32 pp.) | $18.99

April 1, 2025 | 9781547609215

An exuberant celebration of all things “yay!”

This picture book is one to be read again and again—at storytime, at home, at kindergarten or preschool graduations, and whenever children need encouragement or simply want to toot their own horns. Kulekjian’s joyful, affirming words beg to be read aloud but are also suitable for independent reading; youngsters will cheer for their reading successes with “Yays” of their own. Hoang’s playful, vibrant illustrations build on the text’s open-ended statements about trying hard, triumphing, and learning from failure. She depicts specific scenarios with a cast of characters diverse in terms of race, ability, and body type. A spread that reads “Sometimes you win” and “Sometimes you learn” on facing pages depicts a pair of children enjoying cupcakes while surrounded by baking ingredients and materials; the kids turn a queasy green on the following page after eating from a less successful batch of homemade cookies. Other scenes show children starting school, dancing ballet, climbing mountains, playing board games, running races, playing on a

Readers would be remiss to lose out on a single minute in this world.

BEETLE & THE CHIMERA CARNIVAL

jungle gym, engaging in science experiments, and wearing robes and mortarboards for a graduation. What else is there to say? Yay! (Picture book. 2-6)

A Century for Caroline

Langley, Kaija | Illus. by TeMika Grooms

Denene Millner Books/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) | $19.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9781665934725

A Black girl bonds with her greatgrandmother, who’s celebrating her 100th birthday. Dressed in a flowing yellow dress, with beads ornamenting her braids, young Jasmine hops in the car before the sun’s even risen, and she and Papa set out to visit Great-Grandma Caroline, whom Jasmine’s never met. The trip is long, but as Jasmine sits in a booster seat in the back seat, right next to her packed lunch and her floppy- eared dog, Puddles, Papa plays his favorite songs, and Jasmine reflects earnestly on how her great-grandmother’s 100th birthday means she’s also lived a long life—longer than Jasmine’s goldfish or her hamster or Puddles. Upon their arrival, GreatGrandma Caroline, ensconced in her rocking chair, welcomes her “baby girl” with a hug (“My birthday wish just came true”). She poignantly puts 100 years of life into perspective as they skip stones over the pond. According to Great-Grandma Caroline, patience, determination, and faith have been the secrets to her longevity, and her great-granddaughter relies on those same attributes as she finally gets the hang of skipping stones; the book closes with other members of Jasmine’s extended family gathering as Great-Grandma Caroline blows out the candles on her cake. Langley’s first-person narration conveys Jasmine’s youthful curiosity about her great-grandmother, while Grooms’ detailed digital art brims with familial warmth. A lesson for the ages and love across generations. (Picture book. 4-8)

A lesson for the ages and love across generations.

A CENTURY FOR CAROLINE

Cousins!: A Big Family Story

Lavoie, Laura | Illus. by Luisa Leal Roaring Brook Press (32 pp.) | $18.99 May 27, 2025 | 9781250828330

It’s never quiet when family is around! It’s time for a visit to Grandma June’s house to see…the COUSINS! The protagonist, a tan-skinned child who sports a pink bow, can’t wait to hang out with the rest of the family at their reunion. After all kinds of hugs (“cuddly,” “smooshy,” and “dangly”), the cousins get down to serious play—a sparkly, magic-filled fashion show, followed by an actionpacked baseball game that ends with a sudden rain shower. Later, the family enjoys a feast including desserts tasty enough for two cousins to fight over—a conflict that’s speedily resolved. This intergenerational gathering depicts individuals who vary in skin color and expression and who take part in many different interactions, details that invite repeat readings. Afterward, the cousins unveil their secret plan to ask Grandma June if they can have a sleepover so the fun won’t end too soon. Curled up in their sleeping bags, the cousins—and friends—tell secrets late into the night as they make lasting memories together. Lavoie’s boisterous, comic book–style dialogue injects energy and hyperbole into this tale of a close-knit family; young readers will feel part of every over-the-top moment. Leal’s vivacious, digitally created illustrations add layers of humor through a vibrant palette that uses every color of the rainbow on each page and the big, round eyes common in manga to evoke extreme emotions. A big, bustling portrait of cousin love. (Picture book. 3-7)

Kirkus Star

Beetle & the Chimera Carnival

Layne, Aliza | Atheneum (384 pp.)

$25.99 | April 29, 2025 | 9781665907484

Series: The Beetle Books, 2

Beetle and Kat return in another gloriously imaginative adventure. In this follow-up to Beetle & the Hollowbones (2020), greenskinned goblin Beetle and necromanced skeleton Kat anticipate Carnival Night, when the Great Dragons will arrive with the lighting of a magical beacon. When the dragons fail to show, Kat and Beetle seek help from another dragon, physician Evelyn Drake, and her vampire companion, Dr. Delia Darlingtonia. Involved in planning aspects of the carnival, Kat’s overbearing parents pit her against another magician in a winner-takes-all competition that could see Kat lose her own abilities. Kat grapples with balancing her family’s crushing expectations and her authentic self. Beetle has her own troubles: She feels herself changing into something unrecognizable as her goblin magic grows, leading her to great lengths to repress it. As their relationship deepens, Kat and Beetle struggle with their own comings-out and redefining their move from friendship to something more. Avoiding any second-book slump, Layne’s phenomenal sequel mixes fantasy, social themes, and an inclusive and unforgettable cast with a gentle, swoonworthy romance. The worldbuilding and magic systems are complex but accessible, brought to life with stunningly rendered, vibrant illustrations. The book opens with a brief recap for

those unfamiliar with its predecessor. This volume makes a fine jumping-in point, but readers would be remiss to lose out on a single minute in this world. A wonderful, whimsical winner. (dramatis personae, magic systems, creature guide, character designs, promo art, mini comic) (Graphic fantasy. 10-14)

Gigi Shin, Live From Manhattan

Lee, Lyla | Aladdin (192 pp.)

$17.99 | April 29, 2025 9781665939201 | Series: Gigi Shin, 2

The second installment of Gigi Shin’s story brings her to New York City for a summer art camp. Seventh grade is over, and Gigi’s tutoring club has raised enough money for the four tutors to travel to New York City for Starscape, a summer program for the arts. Gigi is understandably excited: She’ll be together with her friends, learning from her favorite graphic novelist, Christiana Moon, and seeing her aunt Yeji. Unfortunately, Gigi ends up assigned to a different dorm from her friends, and Aunt Yeji keeps flaking on their plans. Even worse, Gigi’s graphic novel class is overwhelming, and Christiana Moon is critical and dismissive of both her artwork and her ideas. Gigi perseveres, however, thanks to her indominable spirit and support from friends, family, and new boyfriend Paul, and she still finds joy in the exhilarating experience of being independent in New York City—from eating pizza to finding inspiration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She also grows as an artist with help from children’s author Mr. Hernandez, another teacher mentor, and Sohee, her South Korean roommate, who becomes a new friend. Gigi blossoms, overcoming setbacks with determination and grace. This concise story moves quickly, keeping pages turning. Gigi’s and Paul’s Korean

heritage are cued subtly, and the friends’ varied ethnic and economic backgrounds were previously established. A worthy sequel in which the protagonist matures and flourishes in an exciting urban atmosphere. (Fiction. 8-12)

Beasties

Lerangis, Peter | Harper/HarperCollins (288 pp.)

$18.99 | April 22, 2025 | 9780063285385

Central Park may not be a literal jungle, but it’s still plenty dangerous for a group of sixth graders who find themselves transformed into small animals. In a madcap romp that boils over with breathless adventures, hilarious banter, and wild plot twists, Riley Trent comes upon a mysteriously glowing pile of poop that turns him into a rat even as his uber-competent twin sister, Kate, and several other classmates are similarly changed into a random array of creatures ranging from a raccoon to a water bug. Despite having left their human clothes behind, the children are, understandably, desperate to change back. Unfortunately, the only cure seems to be exposure to a second pile of magic poop—which has gone missing. Though Lerangis has his squabbling Beasties bond over their shared predicament, and despite frictions and contrasting character types, he shows more interest in concocting ever more unlikely revelations and situations to challenge his young ensemble cast. And though all the frantic escapades and rescues in the face of deadly threats— from street traffic to animal and human foes—do lead at last to a satisfying resolution, the author saves one final sequel-portending spin for the end that readers aren’t likely to see coming. One adult character speaks in an exaggerated “Noo Yawk” accent; some names cue ethnic diversity in the cast supporting the white-presenting siblings.

A knee-slapping creature feature. (Adventure. 8-12)

Get ready to see this book sashay off shelves during Pride month.

MAKE YOUR OWN RAINBOW

Make Your Own

Rainbow: A Drag Queen’s Guide to Color

Lil Miss Hot Mess | Illus. by Olga de Dios

Running Press Kids (40 pp.) | $18.99

May 13, 2025 | 9780762487127

Colors of the world, spice up your life!

Much like that iconic Spice Girls song, sung by a quintet of beautifully adorned performers, this picture book also features a rainbow of shades and glamorously confident gals. The drag queens (and perhaps a pair of drag kings) in this tale offer an excellent message: Let’s learn about colors! Seriously, girl, let’s really learn them. Drag queen Lil Miss Hot Mess delves into a variety of hues. Readers whose favorite color is “yummy yellow” will eagerly discover citrine, maize, and mustard, for instance. The same applies across all the colors of the rainbow and a few additional shades as well. (We see you, brown!) Along the way, the divas dazzle, presenting readers with more than just a range of colors; the impressively inclusive cast features characters who vary in terms of body shape, skin tone, and physical ability. In the right hands, the book will provide countless interactive opportunities for storytellers to engage young readers, though some details may make the illustrations a little muddled for readers in large-group settings. Overall, though, the artwork is energetic and bold, with characters taking on an appropriately commanding presence. Get ready to see this book sashay off shelves during Pride month—and all year round. Fierce and fun, just like the best queens. (Picture book. 4-8)

The Gift of the Great Buffalo

Lindstrom, Carole | Illus. by Aly McKnight | Bloomsbury (40 pp.) $18.99 | Feb. 25, 2025 | 9781547606887

A daring Indigenous child embarks on a thrilling adventure.

Set in the 1880s, this tale follows young Rose and her family to the biannual Métis buffalo hunt, where hundreds of families convene in the hopes that “this hunt [will] be better than the last.” Rose’s pa is one of the captains, and Rose is eager to help him track mashkodebizhiki. When he instructs her to stay at camp, she listens at first, but after hunters go a week without finding buffalo, the intrepid child goes scouting. Rose’s resourcefulness and daring shine as she strikes out on her own and employs the wisdom of her family: remaining determined despite miles without a sign, “thanking the buffalo for the gift of their life,” and donning a wolfskin to approach a distant herd without startling them. Rose returns with the good news, to her parents’ gratitude and gentle chiding for her disobedience. Lindstrom (Anishinaabe/Métis) captures the youngster’s resolve and excitement, while McKnight’s (Shoshone-Bannock) gorgeous watercolor and graphite images bring to life elements of Métis culture, particularly in stirring depictions of life at camp. Intergenerational basket weaving, elders dancing, roaring cook fires, and children at play—all impart Métis traditions, set against the beauty of the Plains; readers will be as moved by McKnight’s illustrations as they are by Rose’s ingenuity. This reverently told story is a true gift. (author’s note) (Picture book. 5-9)

Kirkus Star

The Arguers

Luyken, Corinna | Rocky Pond Books/ Penguin (40 pp.) | $18.99

May 13, 2025 | 9781984814425

The Arguers— staffers who serve a royal family— take pleasure in bickering over even the smallest things until a crisis brings them together.

The first argument begins with a dispute over whether to detangle the king’s copious beard with a brush or a comb. From there, the Arguers find ways to disagree with one another about everything from how to decorate the princess’s throne to which spoon to use to serve noodles to the queen’s hounds. When they can’t quarrel with each other, they squabble with stones and flowers. Proud of their talents, they hold a competition to determine who’s the best arguer in the kingdom. Of course, when the contest begins, everyone’s already too busy arguing to notice. Then a storm strikes, and a bolt of lightning sets the king’s beard ablaze. Faced with a real emergency, everyone works together without a word of dissent. They form a bucket brigade, douse the flames, and trim the king’s scorched beard. Although the Arguers promptly revert back to their old ways, they’ve shown that they can cooperate when it truly counts. Luyken’s storytelling charms with whimsy and dry wit, and her illustrations steal the show with enormous, elaborate hairstyles, bedecked in bows or crowned with oversize hats. The over-the-top Regency styling, paired with a multiracial cast of characters, delights with Bridgerton -esque appeal. Thoroughly enchanting, without argument. (Picture book. 4-8)

A

Nop

Magerl, Caroline | Walker Books

Australia (32 pp.) | $18.99

March 4, 2025 | 9781761600807

A lowly stuffed bear literally rises to the occasion as he embarks on an extraordinary adventure.

“Nop was not plush in places.”

The book’s opening sentence appears under an image of a scruffy but winsome fabricated bear, in expertly rendered line art with watercolor wash. The following pages emphasize the endearing plainness of the bear and then evoke a lonely atmosphere: “In a place soft with dust, he sat and watched crumbhawks tumble…over the heaping heaps of goods, old and rumpled, at Oddmint’s Dumporeum.” There is magic afoot: Every night, tea lights illuminate the old place as its cast-off inhabitants get ready for the next morning, when customers arrive to purchase toys and other objects. Nop alone is unable to make himself look fancy enough. After Nop’s co-residents have been bought by humans, Nop fashions himself a bow tie from a bit of red ribbon and suddenly has a revelation: “A bear in a bow tie can go anywhere, someplace wonderful even!” He sews a silken contraption—a hot air balloon sans fuel—and the wind pulls him out of the window previously used by the crumbhawks (or sparrows). As he tumbles about and soars over cities below, exciting, poetic text—begging to be read aloud—and dreamlike art will continue to beguile youngsters. Though Nop takes risks, the tone is always soothing. His final, surprising destination—replete with a subtle

change from muted colors to brighter ones—supplies an ending both humorous and heartwarming. By turns thrilling and tender— a charmer. (Picture book. 4-8)

Sakina and the Uninvited Guests

Marwan, Zahra | Bloomsbury (40 pp.)

$18.99 | April 29, 2025 | 9781547613427

An unexpected museum trip changes the way a girl sees her past. Tan-skinned, dark-haired Sakina’s plans for spending the morning at the seashore are dashed by a sandstorm. So she and her mother head to the museum, where the bored Sakina observes several statues: “chubby crocodiles filled with papers,” a “blue jaguar guarding the first set of laws ever written,” and “winged lions.” Back home, she realizes that a tiny crocodile, jaguar, and lion have stowed away in her bag. Sakina chases them through the house, only to stumble upon a picture of her grandmother that she’s never before taken the time to examine. The photograph is just the start of a series of reminders that “thousands and thousands of years” exist both within the magical artifacts and within Sakina. Rendered in a gold and pastel palette, the artwork is sumptuous. While the text is lyrical, at times it feels cryptic; Sakina’s discovery that there are poems written on Crocodile’s papers leads to a sudden appreciation of her heritage, though it’s not clear why. Marwan’s author’s note, which discusses the work of 19th-century archeologists and her own experiences visiting institutions such as the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, fills in some gaps, but adults may need to help young readers parse some of the story’s elements. Though it’s never stated where Sakina lives, the backmatter and the use of Arabic imply a Middle Eastern setting. A stunningly illustrated celebration of heritage that will require some adult guidance. (Picture book. 3-8)

A soothing reminder of a parent’s unconditional love.

EVERYWHERE YOU ARE

Maybe Just Ask Me!

Mazeika, Katie | Beach Lane/ Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) | $19.99

April 22, 2025 | 9781665949897

A child faces gossip from her new classmates.

Though Mazie’s nervous about starting at a new school, she’s excited about making friends. But when she introduces herself, the other kids only stare at her headscarf and eye patch. After the wind sweeps off the tan-skinned child’s headscarf, revealing that she’s bald, Mazie’s racially diverse classmates concoct wild tales. Maybe Mazie was in the circus, and a fire breather burped on her hair. Maybe the eye patch means she’s a pirate! Mazie understands their curiosity is “only natural,” but she’s frustrated that they’d rather gossip than approach her. Finally, with her P.E. teacher’s support, Mazie makes a speech: She’s “as daring as any circus girl” and “fiercer than a pirate,” and if her classmates want to know what happened, “Maybe just ask me!” When they do, the answer depicts a doctor and Mazie, toting an IV, battling a fire-breathing dragon. Unfortunately, the details aren’t specified until the author’s note, where Mazeika explains that the story is based on her experiences with childhood cancer. Though the images contain some clues, omitting mentions of cancer from the primary text risks leaving younger readers still guessing what happened—the very behavior Mazie seeks to stop. Still, the bright, rounded illustrations sympathetically convey Mazie’s emotions, clearly depicting her sadness at her classmates’ rumors and her happiness when they befriend her after learning her story. A reminder that kids with disabilities are the authorities of their own stories. (Picture book. 4-6)

Kirkus Star

The Trouble With Heroes

Messner, Kate | Bloomsbury (288 pp.)

$17.99 | April 29, 2025 | 9781547616398

A summer spent summiting the Adirondacks allows a teenager to reckon with grief. Thirteenyear-old Finn Connelly’s summer is off to a rocky start. In addition to several incomplete class assignments—including a poetry project about heroes—he’s facing vandalism charges after an angry outburst at the local cemetery. To avoid paying thousands in fines that his family can’t spare, he reluctantly agrees to the proffered alternative: climbing all 46 Adirondack peaks over 4,000 feet by Labor Day accompanied by Seymour, the enthusiastic dog who belonged to the woman whose headstone he damaged. As Finn attempts the hikes, he wrestles with what it means to be a hero, a term often used for his deceased father, a local hockey legend, New York City firefighter, 9/11 first responder, and paramedic who died on the front lines of the Covid-19 pandemic. This verse novel is engaging and easy to follow. It encompasses varied structures, like haiku, sonnet, and found poetry. Other ephemera, such as letters, recipes, and school progress reports, create visual breaks evocative of a commonplace book. The first-person narration vividly conveys a disgruntled teenager’s feelings, including moments of humor and contemplation. The novel wrestles with loss and legacy intertwined with weighty events, challenges, and themes—PTSD, alcoholism, toxic masculinity—and their resulting

impact on Finn’s emotional well-being. The supporting characters are encouraging adult role models. Characters present white.

An adventurous work whose authentic voice celebrates the outdoors and everyday heroism. (author’s note) (Verse fiction. 10-14)

Kirkus Star

The Trouble With Secrets

Milliner, Naomi | Quill Tree Books/ HarperCollins (336 pp.) | $18.99 April 8, 2025 | 9780063311640

A Maryland seventh grader prepares to become a bat mitzvah while still worrying about typical middle school challenges. From the dramatic opening sequence, readers are deeply immersed in 12-year-old Becky’s world, infused with food, friends, and family traditions. As part of a close-knit Jewish family, darkhaired, blue-eyed Becky, a talented flutist, navigates the pressures of observant life as a rabbi’s daughter while comparing herself to her seemingly perfect siblings. From maintaining appearances, to making questionable decisions, to grappling with interfaith relationships, the depiction of loving relationships among Becky and her siblings, parents, friends, and extended family is central to the charm of the story. Becky’s kind-natured good intentions come through in her actions, such as supporting a friend or choosing thoughtful presents for her brothers. But as she discovers the dangers of idealizing those around her and makes her own flawed choices, the tension rises. Employing a dual timeline, Milliner’s sophomore novel juxtaposes poetic present-day vignettes with richly detailed chapters set in the past, together showing Becky’s insights and growth. This heart-wrenching,

emotional, compulsively readable work traces the evolution of secrets and lies. From minor omissions to catastrophic revelations, they strain relationships and test unshakable bonds, leading to tragedy but ultimately concluding with hope and a clearer path to self-awareness and understanding. A touching, intimate exploration of universal themes of trust, conformity, and the impact of family dynamics. (Fiction. 8-12)

Everywhere You Are

Monét, Victoria | Illus. by Alea Marley

Putnam (32 pp.) | $18.99

June 24, 2025 | 9780593698419

Grammy Award–winning singer/ songwriter Monét’s picture-book debut reassures the very young that their caregivers are always watching over them.

A smiling yellow star watches the equally cheerful moon; both are heavily anthropomorphized, with eyelashes for the moon and pink cheeks for the star. A page turn reveals the star, now downcast and in the corner of a mostly dark spread: “Sometimes the sky is dark and you can’t see the moon at all.” The following spread, depicting a sparkly sky with both characters back in view, reminds children that the moon is there, even when it’s not visible: “Think of me as the moon / It’s always in the sky / Just like I will forever be / a bright light in your life.” Both orbs beam. “I’ll always be your moon / You’ll always be my star / Just keep me in your heart and / I’ll be everywhere you are.” This becomes the refrain after a few more verses that continue the theme of the

moon as a metaphor for emotionally present, ever-loving caregivers. Little ones will happily repeat the words as they’re lulled to sleep. The book ends with a heartfelt dedication from the author to her daughter and to parents who balance caregiving duties with careers. Monét notes that she set out to show children that their parents’ devotion endures no matter what—a goal achieved by both text and art. A soothing bedtime reminder of a parent’s unconditional love. (Picture book. 2-4)

String Ball

Monroe, Chris | Carolrhoda (32 pp.)

$18.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9798765611517

A naughty black cat embarks on a wild adventure. When its young owner leaves for a bike ride with friends, the lonely kitten decides to play with the child’s homemade, hardened string ball. The kitten paws it, then finds itself engulfed by the huge ball. Soon the ball rolls off, escaping the confines of the house and taking the kitten with it. Monroe cleverly bisects the pages, offering images of the young cat within the ball alongside shots of the wider world outside. Over the course of the narrative, the ball is shaken, tossed, pecked, lifted in the air by a bird, dropped, and gnawed upon by squirrels. When the kitten finally relocates its owner, it manages to finagle itself into the child’s backpack and, ultimately, back home. Yet for the story to work, Monroe must, at the book’s start, shoehorn in an awkward section clarifying how to make a hardened

A satisfying tale for impatient kittens everywhere.

“string ball,” alongside its rudimentary mechanics. Aside from these instructions, this tale is told entirely through its art. The red of the string, the ball, and the broken heart of the kitten remain the only points of color in a book that’s an exercise in minimalism and visual storytelling. The primary human character has skin the white of the page. Featuring spare visuals yet extravagant in its storytelling, a satisfying tale for impatient kittens everywhere. (Picture book. 3-6)

Ray: How Light Works

Moon, Emily Kate | Dial Books (40 pp.)

$18.99 | June 10, 2025 | 9780593857984

Series: A Science Pals Book, 3

A beaming ray of sunshine illuminates the role  of visible light in energizing life on Earth. Moon brings the same refreshing combination of charm and solid fact that animated her profiles of water (2021’s Drop) and air (2024’s Puff ) to an even more fundamental subject. “I’m traveling light!” exclaims Ray, dashing through space with his fellow star-born rays. And, given that Ray is all energy, there’s nothing faster in the universe: “I am the speed limit!” Once through the Earth’s atmosphere, which filters out most of the gamma rays and other harmful parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, it’s time to light up the planet and provide it with colors, to turn on the heat, to “power the weather,” and, best of all, give plants and other forms of life the free energy required to grow. Fans of Drop and Puff will smile at cameos from the protagonists of those titles. In the vivid illustrations, bursts of light brighten deep seas and underground layers to demonstrate energy’s reach, storage, and continual flow, as well as the planetary surfaces, where light plays an essential role in making food for all. In final views, a diverse group of young campers peer into a fire and up

BRINGING A CHILDHOOD MEMORY TO LIFE

In their new picture book, Carmen Agra Deedy and Raúl Colón offer young readers a taste of home.

BY MEGAN LABRISE

Margaret Quinlin Books/Peachtree | 48 pp. $18.99 | March 4, 2025 | 9781682635681

IN CHILDHOOD, a big move can be a big deal.

“It’s very hard to adjust to a new place,” says Carmen Agra Deedy, author of The Peanut Man (Margaret Quinlin Books/Peachtree, March 4), a story inspired by her family’s flight from Cuba to the United States in the 1960s.

Like Deedy, the book’s protagonist, Coqui, spent her early years in Havana, where the nightly song of the local peanut vendor—“¡Mani! ¡Mani!”—beckoned her to the bedroom window. Forced to flee due to political persecution, the family eventually resettles in Decatur, Georgia, which feels like a world away: new school, new rules, new language, and, as Coqui is crestfallen to learn, no peanut man strolling the streets. But when her father takes her to a baseball stadium to see “Hammerin’ Hank” Aaron play, Coqui hears a cry—“Peanuts! Peanuts!”—that brings comfort and a taste of home.

Deedy’s hope for young readers is that “a child who’s traveled a long way will see that just maybe, somewhere, waiting for them, is one small moment—one thing, one person—that’s going to connect them to the place they knew and remembered. And it will help anchor them and bring them to shore.”

Illustrator Raúl Colón, who grew up in New York City and Puerto Rico, “masterfully conjures up a past that still feels immediate” in lush watercolors layered with colored pencil and lithograph crayon, according to Kirkus’ starred review. The resulting book is “exceptionally lovely, like a gentle tug at the heartstrings.”

Deedy and Colón recently spoke with Kirkus via Zoom; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you two know one another?

Carmen: My God, I was in love with Raúl’s books way before I ever met him.…

And I really love children’s books, so I want to preface with that. I don’t mean it’s something peculiar to me—if you’re in this work, you love children’s

books—however, I have particularly strong feelings that the illustrator is critical to a story, can transform a story.

For many small children, museums and art galleries are not things that will likely be in their regular outings, if ever, and their first introduction to

Raúl Colón

Carmen Agra Deedy

The Peanut Man

Deedy, Carmen Agra Illus. by Raúl Colón

Deedy: Peyton Fulford; Colón: Raúl Colón

beautiful art will come by way of a free library book. It should be as exquisite as an artist can render it.

The first time I saw one of Raúl’s books, I was smitten. The color palette is always very beautiful. There’s a dreaminess to it. There’s also the kid in me that I always trust—and I’m sure Raúl has that kid, too—who immediately knows when you’re gonna connect, right? The kid that goes, Oh man, oh man, I would love this story!

Raúl, what about The Peanut Man spoke to the child in you?

Raúl: Well, baseball was one thing. Very few women write about baseball, and I’ve had the privilege of working with two. It’s also the story of a song that I like, a famous song—of the peanut man—so those two things drew me to it. It reminded me of when I moved to Puerto Rico from New York in the 1960s. There was a guy who used to sell—not peanuts, but a pailful of what they call alcapurrias in Puerto Rico [fried pastries made from green plantains or yuca]. And he would sell this stuff, [hollering], walking down the street. I could see the pictures in my head, and that’s how I got into it.

For Coqui, you see why this memory is so significant, so vivid: She hears the peanut man’s song; she smells the peanuts; she knows how they taste. They have this lovely rapport—she’s up in the window, he’s down in the street—but they blow raspberries at one another, they play games.

For a child, the idea of a grown-up with a sense of humor is such a glorious thing.

Carmen: It was a very difficult time [when I was growing up]: There was a lot of anxiety and a lot of violence in the country, and our parents tried to shield us as much as they could. But at nighttime, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I remember being in my crib and looking out, and the peanut man would always stop and say, “Good night!” One night, my sister, who was seven years older and slept in another room—because, you know, sisters—she said, “I know a great game that you could play with him.” So I stuck out my tongue and made silly sounds. And the wonderful thing was that he played back! For a child, the idea of a grown-up with a sense of humor is such a glorious thing.

This story takes readers from Havana to Georgia. Raúl, you capture both places so vibrantly. How did you choose the palette?

Raúl: Well, Cuba is very tropical, so I had to play with

little frayed by the time that I’m listening with my dad?” It’s sort of metaphorical. It shows a little bit of what it went through and what we went through. And when I got the books, I got to that page and I did a double take. I saw that poor little bunny and I thought, Oh my God, Raúl did it! It just looks wonderful. It’s such a small detail, but it’s beautiful.

Raúl, what do you admire about Carmen’s storytelling?

colors a little more, make it a little brighter, right? Give more colors to it.

Carmen: Delicious, delicious palette.

Raúl: The golden undertone of everything I do, I left it in. That helps. So that’s how I thought of the colors—colors that you see in the tropics, the bluegreens and the greens. When she’s in Atlanta, it changed a little bit.

Carmen, do you have a favorite image from this book?

Carmen: You’re gonna make me cry [tearing up]—

Raúl: Must be the scene with Dad.

Carmen: — shut up! Nobody asked you! [Both laugh.] Yes, it’s the one where I’m listening to the baseball game with my dad…

It’s funny, because I’d asked through our respective people—I have to tell my editor, who tells his art director, who tells him—that I’d had a doll when I left Cuba. Raúl used a rabbit, which I kind of loved. And I said, “Can the rabbit look a

Raúl: I love how she gives us those little details, like [the fraying] of the doll. Those little details make it work, make the story relatable. I can take those [cues] and expand the picture, go in different directions with it. I’m sure other artists have said this, but you should never illustrate a book just by what’s written on the page. You have to take the illustrations beyond that. Carmen: Something that you don’t know about, Raúl: When I spoke to my editor, I said, “I want someone who’s able to take the story further. They can even have a secondary visual story that has nothing to do with what I’m saying. Whether it’s a balloon or a mouse, whether it’s something that is happening that you want to also include—anything goes.” I knew from your work that you would do that. That one way or the other, you would take the story and make it shine. There are so many lovely moments.

Raúl: Thank you. I always chose what I thought would work best with the story. Now let’s hope people like it as much as we do.

at a starry sky. “Every moment you live, you turn light into you !” the book concludes. “Oh! The possibilities!” A high-wattage spotlight on our most important power source. (Informational picture book. 6-8)

Beatrix Butterfly Wings

It for Once

Morris, Maren & Karina Argow | Illus. by Kelly Anne Dalton | Chronicle Books (40 pp.)

$18.99 | April 8, 2025 | 9781797235035

Series: Addie Ant’s Garden Friends

Grammy Award–winning singer/ songwriter Morris teams up with Argow, an educator and her longtime best friend, for a companion to Addie Ant Goes on an Adventure (2024), this time focusing on a butterfly with a case of the blahs.

Beatrix Butterfly can’t face her lengthy to-do list. All she can do is huddle under the covers and chide herself for her lack of industry. But when mail carrier Ellis Squirrel arrives, he advises that she forget her list and just “wing it.” Beatrix appreciates the fresh perspective. She recalls a task she’d promised to do for her friend Lewis Ladybug—gathering rose petals for an upcoming performance—and completes it. Delivering her cargo, Beatrix apologizes for her lateness. Lewis isn’t bothered and urges Beatrix to take the time to appreciate the beautiful surroundings. Beatrix does additional favors for Lewis and a mutual pal. Then, she and her friends enjoy Lewis’ “much-buzzed-about one-bug show.” Beatrix is delighted to have helped others—and to have “winged it.” The story feels preachy at times, with characters pausing to deliver grand pronouncements. Still, the authors make valuable points about not pushing oneself and to take the time to refresh oneself and appreciate one’s surroundings. The colors of plants and wildlife in the illustrations pop against the pages. Beatrix and company are wide-eyed and fetching.

A gentle tale with important messaging about mindfulness. (information on butterflies) (Picture book. 4-7)

Catty Corner Lands on Her Feet

Murphy, Julie | Illus. by Eve Farb Union Square Kids (128 pp.) | $13.99 March 25, 2025 | 9781454956471

Series: Catty Corner, 1

Catty Corner, who’s half cat, half girl, struggles when she attends school for the first time.

Until recently, Catty’s been homeschooled by her half-cat mom (her father is fully human), who teaches her subjects such as reading and string chasing, as well as the importance of following rules like “no midnight zoomies” and “no knocking over shiny things.” But when her mom gets an amazing job at the fish cannery, Catty contends with a whole new challenge: third grade at a real school. On her first day, Catty manages to break every single one of her parents’ big rules for outside the house: no hissing, scratching, or biting. She goes home crestfallen: “Today will go down in hissssstory as the worst first day of school ever.” But when her mom gives her a diary in which both Granny Tabby and Mom detailed their own difficult days as the only half cats, half girls at school, Catty slowly changes her attitude. Careful readers may wonder why Catty’s parents never socialized her with other children and why Granny Tabby’s diary wasn’t shared with her in advance of her first day of school. That said, with its pawsitively adorable puns and sweetly

spunky protagonist, this quickly paced tale will please cat lovers; young readers looking for relatably awkward school stories will find it charming, too. The text is broken up by occasional watercolorlike illustrations depicting Catty as light-skinned with ginger hair and tail; her schoolmates are diverse. Feline fanciers will snap this up like catnip. (Chapter book. 6-9)

Spirit Service

Nanua, Sarena & Sasha Nanua | Simon & Schuster (320 pp.) | $17.99 | April 22, 2025 9781665955171 | Series: Spirit Service, 1

Mourning the recent loss of her grandmother, an Indian Canadian tween and her friends become responsible for helping spirits find peace. Twelve-year-old Raveena, along with her friends Aiko (who’s Japanese Canadian), Blair (who has Greek and Italian ancestry), and Lillian (who’s cued Black), are zapped by a rotary phone that Raveena’s mother purchased from an antique shop. The phone then immediately rings with a call from a spirit, their friend Marisol’s grandmother, whom the girls help to move on. Inside the base of the phone, they find a tiny old book labeled “Guidebook for Guardians”—and after consulting with local psychic Tía Paola, Raveena and friends learn that they can serve as Guardians. The kids create a business, Spirit Service, to help people contact the deceased. They’re hoping to win their school’s business competition and earn enough to help fund the arts program, which has become a victim of

A spooky series opener with appealing camaraderie among its characters.

SPIRIT SERVICE

budget cuts. Then Grandmama calls Raveena and asks her to retrieve an item hidden somewhere in their town of Hollows’ Peak—an item that would have a tremendous impact—but the relationship between Raveena and her friends becomes strained while a greater threat grows. The evenly paced narrative artfully reveals the phone’s complicated history with its supernatural ties to the town, its founder, and a pivotal historic event. The authors deftly touch upon issues of grief and friendship before closing with some intriguing twists. An entertainingly spooky series opener with appealing camaraderie among its characters. (map) (Paranormal. 8-12)

What Happened on Thursday?: A Nigerian Civil War Story

Oyeku, Ayo | Illus. by Lydia Mba Amazon Crossing Kids (40 pp.) $17.99 | Sept. 17, 2024 | 9781662504020

An Igbo family struggles as the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) breaks out. A war that starts on a Thursday and ends nearly three years later on another Thursday tears the country apart. A young school-age child describes the day an announcement on the radio changed everything, upending the family’s idyllic existence and forcing them on a long and arduous journey to safety. “Everything seems to be upside down,” the child tells us as the family awakens in the middle of the night, flames engulfing their house. They flee, and years pass as mother, father, and the two children travel until they finally reach a refugee camp. The young narrator makes clear that they aren’t the only ones who have suffered: “All the children look like me. Lack of food has taken our health. Lack of meals has taken our breath.” Images of supplies finally arriving and the eventual end of the war conclude the narrative on a hopeful note. The understated prose is a bit flat, and the war itself goes underexplained, though

helpful backmatter offers context, noting that the war was fought between the Nigerian government and the self-declared Republic of Biafra. Digital illustrations make this important historical moment—one that many readers may be unfamiliar with—both vivid and accessible. A brief and personalized account of a history that shouldn’t be forgotten. (Picture book. 5-9)

Who Meows? A Book of Animal Sounds

Page, Robin | Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster (32 pp.) | $19.99

May 27, 2025 | 9781665959568

An interactive exploration of animal sounds, in the vein of Bill Martin Jr and Eric Carle’s Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? The book’s opening spread establishes a pattern: A full-color portrait of an animal’s face fills the left-hand page, while a handful of words appear on the right. An unseen narrator asks the titular question. A page turn reveals the answer: a lively illustration of a wide-eyed feline paired with the words “A cat meows.” The rhythmic text creates a rollicking cadence, aided by the book’s design. The color of the text on each spread matches a prominent hue in the illustration of the animal. The next question also appears, smaller and in a different color, on the bottom right of the spread, inviting children to turn the page to find out “who gobbles?” or “who hoots?” Details such as the pig’s eyelashes or the owl’s plumage stand out. With their mouths agape (as though making their sound), some creatures appear startled, while others look downright menacing. The final question—“Who giggles?”—is accompanied by an image of a tanskinned, dark-haired child: “You giggle! And giggle and giggle and giggle.” Appended facts about animal sounds add depth to this simple and engaging book.

A solid read-aloud with lots of opportunities to oink, caw, and chuckle together. (Informational picture book. 3-5)

Goodbye Spring, Hello Summer

Pak, Kenard | Godwin Books (32 pp.)

$18.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9781250151735

Pak comes full circle, completing the series of books that began with 2016’s Goodbye Summer, Hello Autumn. The author/illustrator’s nuanced introductions to seasonal transitions have been as reliable and relatable as the seasons themselves. Even the colors of the letters on the title page are apt, with cool greens and blues giving way to hot orange. A tan-skinned child with long dark hair tied back with a red bow walks outside (“Hello, spring afternoon”). Raindrops trace diagonals across the blue sky, past white clapboard houses with sloping roofs, mullioned windows, and dark shutters. As the rain stops, the landscape changes to “rolling hills” and, in the distance, a long white building. It’s a school, near a church and playground, but the narrator doesn’t pause; after all, as a sign indicates, “School’s out.” The text is a brief dialogue, apparently between the child (“Hello, fluttering butterflies”) and the natural surroundings (“Hello! We’re flying in and out of the sunrays”). Seasonal flowers introduce themselves, as do a forest’s trees and chickadees. The protagonist approaches a group of smaller, diverse children; a tan-skinned one (perhaps a sibling) runs over. It’s time to say hello to the “big setting sun” as they retrace the afternoon’s path, depicted via a bird’s-eye view, until the sunrise heralds a summer morning. Luminous illustrations deploy simplified but specific forms with well-chosen detail accompanying minimal, repetitive words, resulting in a delicately wrought, immersive experience. A lovely “goodbye” to this excellent concept series. (Picture book. 3-7)

Suka’s Farm

Park, Ginger & Frances Park | Illus. by Tiffany Chen | Whitman (32 pp.) $18.99 | April 10, 2025 | 9780807577165

During the Japanese occupation of Korea, a young boy finds a way to help his family.

Kwan lives on a quiet mountainside in 1941. Whether his family eats depends on what his father, a woodcarver, and his mother, a painter, can sell at the farmers market. After Kwan overhears his parents worrying over the lack of food in their onggi pot, he ignores their warnings to stay away from Suka’s Farm and approaches the old Japanese man for a job, introducing himself as Aoki—his legally assigned Japanese name. Cantankerous Mr. Suka initially turns Kwan down but finally lets him help care for the goats. Bit by bit, Kwan chips away at Mr. Suka’s harsh exterior with persistence and kindness that the old man eventually returns. Kwan solidifies Mr. Suka’s respect when he recovers the goats after they go missing, and Mr. Suka asks Kwan to tell him his real, Korean name. The wellpaced narrative artfully weaves in Korean terms and cultural references, such as the children’s song “Santoki,” which Kwan’s parents sing on the way to market and Kwan whistles to entice the goats. Chen uses soft washes and blends of bright colors to bring warmth to the detailed landscapes and cartoon portraits. In an authors’ note, the Parks explain that they drew inspiration from their father’s experiences working on a goat farm as a child.

A gentle tale and a rare personal glimpse into a tumultuous period of Korean history. (glossary) (Picture book. 5-8)

A Thousand Years

Perri, Christina | Illus. by Joy Hwang

Ruiz | Viking (32 pp.) | $18.99 April 1, 2025 | 9780593622599

A hit song reimagined as a book about parental love.

Featured in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1, Perri’s “A Thousand Years” deals with the speaker’s fear of romantic love. In picture-book form, it explores a parent’s unwavering love for a child, who grows from an infant into a toddler over the course of the narrative. The caregiver expresses awe when the youngster learns to stand and fear that the child might fall while beginning to walk. “I have spent every day waiting for you,” the parent says. “Darling, don’t be afraid.” What the child might fear isn’t clear from the joyful balloonand rainbow-filled illustrations. The story borders on cloying, and words that might work when sung and accompanied by music don’t sound fresh on the page: “Time goes by. / You grow ever stronger as you fly.” The refrain, however, is a lovely sentiment: “I have loved you for a thousand years. / I’ll love you for a thousand more.” Perri’s legion of fans may flock to this version, illustrated by Ruiz with sparkling stars, bubbles, and big-eyed toddlers, but it doesn’t hold together as a narrative or an ode, as it’s billed, and it’s a long way from the original song. The child is tan-skinned, the parent is lighter-skinned, and other characters are diverse.

A sweet notion that falls flat. (Picture book. 4-7)

This Is a Moment

Player, Micah | Rocky Pond Books/ Penguin (32 pp.) | $18.99

March 25, 2025 | 9780593695937

Hold on to precious moments. This mindfulness stuff can seem breathless and heady. Youngsters may not get the concept, at least not right away. They have to feel it, live it, and certainly be encouraged in the undertaking by their special grown-ups. Player focuses on ways to live in the moment and relish the here and now. “It’s a SONG and how YOU hear it. It’s a SUNNY DAY and how YOU feel it.” The author/illustrator turns philosophical at times: “A MOMENT is made when everything that came BEFORE meets what is happening NOW.” The cheery digital illustrations effectively express these big ideas and will help readers grasp them, relying on saturated colors and dramatic use of perspective to convey young people experiencing “crowded moments,” “peaceful moments,” and “moments when YOU feel SMALL.” Much of the simple, understated text is set in capital letters, emphasizing that these concepts deal in big ideas and weighty sentiments. Adults reading this volume aloud should encourage children to discuss their own special moments and help them understand that all moments are significant—and so are young people themselves. Characters are diverse in terms of race and ability.

Moments sharing this lovely book with children will be time very well spent. (Picture book. 4-7)

A boy summons courage as he faces a big obstacle.

SHIVI’S

BIG LEAP

For more by Ginger Park, visit Kirkus online.

A look at the people, places, and objects that make up a child’s world.

NEXT TO ME

Shivi’s Big Leap

Rao, Kritika H. | Illus. by Sandhya Prabhat | Feiwel & Friends (40 pp.)

$18.99 | March 11, 2025 | 9781250325334

A boy summons strength and courage as he faces a big obstacle.

One Saturday during his South Asian family’s weekly trip to the rec center, young Shivi announces that he wants to try the climbing wall. “Are you sure?” asks Amma. “I’m Hanuman!” Shivi tells his mother, referring to the Hindu monkey god, whose many powers include a special talent for climbing. Plus, Shivi’s been practicing his dangling, springing, and diving on the swings and the jungle gym, so he’s sure he’s ready. Shivi is thrilled when his parents agree—at least until he’s faced with the reality of how high the wall is for a small boy without magical powers. Shivi then admits how frightened he feels. Only after his parents help him with the rope and harness and remind him how similar he is to Hanuman does Shivi regain his bravery. The book’s vibrant palette and energetic illustrations—often depicting Shivi as a green-furred monkey, capering and cavorting— perfectly complement the sweetly relatable story. Shivi’s evolution is both endearing and believable. Although Shivi’s Amma and Abba are ultimately the ones who set him on the right path, his burgeoning belief in himself is a well-earned and heartwarming payoff. Peppy encouragement for intrepid youngsters who find themselves in over their heads. (Picture book. 4-7)

Next to Me

Salmieri, Daniel & Sophia Haas

Rocky Pond Books/Penguin (40 pp.)

$19.99 | May 13, 2025 | 9780593462003

A look at the people, places, and objects, both novel and familiar, that make up a child’s world. School’s out, and Mama and two pups are waiting to escort their kiddo home. As they journey through their neighborhood, the child’s rhythmic, repetitive refrain names landmarks large and small: “I see ORANGE CONES / Next to a BACKHOE / Next to a BIG HOLE.” Look around, the book urges; there’s always more to see. The lists encompass kid-friendly favorites, from the “PUFFY CLOUD” to the ever-popular “TWISTY SLIDE,” while specifics such as the “SPINNY CLOTHES” laundromat ground readers in the child’s world. As the family arrives home, the list transitions to the cozier, more intimate elements leading to bedtime: supper, bathtime, and a story before a “SOFT / Next to SOFT / Next to SOFT” ending that young readers will melt into. In the tub, the “FLOATING BOAT” is festooned with the words SS LIONNI—a reference to kid-lit collage master Leo Lionni—and indeed, Salmieri and Haas’ matte collage illustrations, made from paper colored with acrylics and plant-based inks, have a lovely touch of Lionni-esque color and boldness about them. Vibrant outdoor urban scenes pulse with activity and enough changes in perspective to keep things interesting; more subdued indoor scenes

focus on small moments, capturing the closeness between parent and child as they share a story. Mama and the child are tan-skinned; their neighborhood is diverse. A reassuring meditation about noticing and appreciating your place in the world. (Picture book. 2-6)

When Night Comes Calling

Schumerth, Cynthia | Illus. by Sheryl Murray | Sleeping Bear Press (32 pp.)

$18.99 | April 1, 2025 | 9781534113367

A nocturnal adventure opens a child’s eyes to wonders in the dark. An excited child awakens a younger brother for a walk under the full moon. The young narrator points out the night sky and various phenomena and encourages the little one to listen for night creatures: wolves, loons, a barred owl, crickets, frogs. The duo spy many animals, from skunks and bats to fireflies and a luna moth. The protagonist’s care for the young boy is both evident and sweet; the narrator ensures he’s dressed properly, holds his hand, eases any fears he might have about the dark woods, offers warnings about rocks and roots, and carries him when he gets tired. The rhyming verses are hit or miss in terms of rhythm (“We’ll explore in the dark. / No flashlights tonight. / Our night-vision hike / needs only moonlight”), and several poetic lines glaringly drop the young protagonist’s voice. Murray captures the night well with subdued but glowing colors. Hashed lines in the illustrations add marvelous texture. The older sibling has light skin, freckles, and reddish hair; little brother has light brown skin and black hair in tight curls. Backmatter provides further info about light pollution and the creatures and night-sky sights from the text. Readers are sure to want a night hike of their own…perhaps with a beloved sibling. (Picture book. 3-8)

A Pashtun girl hopes to honor her ancestors with a school performance.

MUSIC OF THE MOUNTAINS

Music of the Mountains

Shah, Sabrina | Illus. by Manal Mirza Barefoot Books (32 pp.) | $17.99

May 20, 2025 | 9798888593660

A Pashtun girl hopes to honor her ancestors with a school performance. Roohi dreams of mastering the rabab, a traditional musical instrument, in time for the upcoming Eid concert. Her grandfather Neka Baba, a talented rabab player, offers guidance: “You must feel the rhythm, feel the beat of your people.” But when Neka Baba falls ill, Roohi is left to continue her lessons on her own. The pressure of letting everyone down begins to get to Roohi. “I can’t play like him,” she tells her mother. “Not even close.” After her mother urges her to find her own voice, Roohi bravely steps out ono the stage, strumming her rabab and “finally [finding] her own rhythm!” Mirza relies on saturated greens, turquoises, and blues, depicting a richly hued landscape. Patterns on the characters’ clothes have an eye-catching energy, and scenes are pervaded with warmth, bringing to life Roohi’s village and giving her moments with her family a cozy, intimate feel. The rhythmic prose captures Roohi’s pride in her culture as well as her uncertainty, all culminating in a triumphant climax. Backmatter offers more information on the rabab (including a labeled diagram) as well as on the Pashtun people of northwest Pakistan, on Eid, and on the kamees partug Roohi wears.

A moving exploration of the delicate balance between preserving tradition

and acknowledging individual efforts.

(Picture book. 5-8)

Ashimpa: The Mysterious Word

Sobral, Catarina | Trans. by Juliana Barbassa

Transit Children’s Editions (40 pp.)

$19.95 | May 13, 2025 | 9798893380026

In this Portuguese import, the discovery of an obscure word incites widespread public curiosity. One fortuitous day, a researcher unearths a word long lost in the pages of an ancient dictionary: ashimpa . News of the researcher’s find reaches far and wide to a receptive audience. Still, the word’s origins raise even more questions. “No one knew what the word meant, or even what type of word it was.” When asked, 137-year-old Mrs. Zulmira suggests that the word is a verb, so everyone begins to “ashimp” everything. Then, a linguist declares that ashimpa is actually a noun, and people start to claim that they’ve seen ashimpas, which apparently exist abroad and are green. Everyone demands one, and the furor reaches a fever pitch until the researcher returns after much careful investigation to share that the word is, in fact, an adjective. What an ashimpish result! Soon, the use of ashimpa descends into utter confusion—people treat the word as an adverb, a pronoun, and “even a preposition!” A tongue-in-cheek treatise on the elasticity of language, Sobral’s latest sparkles with profound wit thanks to a wonderfully bizarre premise. The author/illustrator leans on

quaint absurdities to muse on the humor of everyday grammatical conventions. Meanwhile, the flat abstract artwork favors round bodies and long limbs among a predominantly light-skinned cast of characters set against a city brimming with vivacious reds, greens, and yellows.

Ashimpishly delicious fun.

(Picture book. 3-7)

Marcel With a Splash

Sørensen, Julia | Trans. by Shelley Tanaka Groundwood (48 pp.) | $19.99 Feb. 4, 2025 | 9781773069838

This import, translated from French, introduces a child with Down syndrome. When Marcel is born, his mom’s unfazed by his webbed toes—Marcel’s a Pisces, after all. But when doctors notice Marcel’s “almond-shaped eyes,” the “single crease on his palm,” and more, he’s diagnosed with Down syndrome. Marcel’s parents, unsure how to feel, “bury those strange words at the bottom of the garden” and “leave them to grow in their own time.” Marcel grows, too. Some things are harder to learn, but he’s persistent. Though some kids in Marcel’s village exclude him, Anthony thinks he’s funny, and Melody understands him even though he doesn’t talk. And when Marcel meets Esther, a woman with Down syndrome who lives independently, she helps his parents put his diagnosis “in a vase with some pretty flowers.” Soon Marcel will start school with support—and, like any kid, will look forward to summer vacation. Sørensen, the mother of a child with Down syndrome, reassures kids and parents alike that people with this condition are multifaceted individuals, which her pale ink-andcolored pencil illustrations gently demonstrate. While the choice to bury and later display Marcel’s diagnosis aptly symbolizes his parents’

acceptance, the depiction of the “words” as chromosomes in the corresponding illustrations may confuse younger readers; Down syndrome is undefined in the text. But readers won’t need definitions to understand the most important thing: Marcel is “just like any kid who loves to be silly.” Characters have light skin. Warm and welcoming. (Picture book. 4-8)

Giant Parsnip Soup

Sosa, Daniela | Paula Wiseman/ Simon & Schuster (40 pp.) | $19.99 May 13, 2025 | 9781665961967

Veggie soup— giant yum! Two friends and their dog find a huge parsnip. It’s truly enormous—so big that the imaginative pair, joined by another pal, envision themselves making a car, a slide, or a rocket out of it. Finally, the children decide to whip up “giant parsnip soup.” But they’ll need to gather ingredients, which they name in ascending numerical order—“one giant parsnip, two sacks of potatoes, three crates of carrots, four bags of beets, [and] five pails of water”—all ingeniously collected. Two kids sail a paper boat to retrieve the carrots, while the beets are transported via hot air balloon. What else do they require? “Six busy hands, seven more minutes” (while the soup cooks), and “eight red soup bowls.” As the kids work, they’re joined by an ever-expanding group of diverse friends. It all ends with “ten full bellies.” Over the course of the story, readers will practice their counting skills (a large boldface numeral appears on the lower-lefthand corner of each spread), learn vegetable names and colors, and observe young people working toward a common goal in the spirit of cooperation. Zinging with energy, Sosa’s multimedia collage illustrations are as joyfully chaotic as a

child’s drawing. Readers will practically smell the delicious aromas wafting from the big red pot. Two pièces de résistance at book’s end: a counting chart and a recipe for parsnip soup.

Savory fun for everyone. Kids will lap this right up. (Picture book. 3-6)

Gymnastica Fantastica!

Stewart, Briony | Viking (32 pp.)

$18.99 | May 27, 2025 | 9798217039616

A young gymnast gets busy.

“Quick! Come and see! Something fabulous! It’s…” These words appear near an appealing image: a smiling brown face with black dots for eyes and a mop of brown curls peering from between colorful, patterned fabrics hanging from clothespins. A large yellowish sheepdog naps in the background. The next page finishes the sentence: “Me! Gymnastica Fantastica!” Throughout, the protagonist excitedly describes a series of activities. Stewart’s bright, stylized illustrations match the child’s exuberance and convey feelings of doubt when stunts don’t go perfectly. The artwork, which often depicts the protagonist in multiple positions in sequence on the same page, complements the spirited text. The text’s meter isn’t entirely smooth, but that affirms the point: Have fun, keep trying, and embrace the imperfections! One adorable example shows a succession of Hula-Hoop tricks, ending with the hoop inadvertently around the dog: “Dodging and weaving them, / keeping them moving, / juggle them (nearly), / I’m really improving!” Similarly, an unexpected dizzy landing against a wall is quickly reframed as “headstanding.” The illustrations expose readers to several moves and pieces of equipment (a trapeze, a gymnast’s ribbons), all deployed in varying degrees of competency by an

engaging, upbeat protagonist. Those champing at the bit for a more active storytime will be pleased. A vigorous read-aloud, sure to get little ones moving. (Picture book. 3-5)

The Colors of the Sea

Stewner, Tanya | Trans. by Matthew O. Anderson | Arctis Books (336 pp.)

$18.00 | April 8, 2025 | 9781646900442 Series: Alea Aquarius, 2

A mergirl continues her search to uncover her mysterious origins. In the second book in the Alea Aquarius series, Alea and her friends, the Alpha Cru, sail to Scotland, following the discovery of a mysterious message in a snow globe inside a whale’s belly: “All ye who can read this message, come to Loch Ness .” Once there, Alea and enigmatic crewmate Lennox are forced to continue their journey to the loch by land. Alea has a crush on Lennox, but there are so many similarities in their stories and magical powers, she worries they might be siblings. When the pair finally reach their destination, what they learn leads to as many questions as answers, setting up the Alpha Cru to continue their adventures in the sequel. Translated from German, this sincere story effectively uses magic to convey the importance of environmental stewardship. The books are best read in order: Stewner further develops characters who were introduced in The Water’s Call (2025), adding layers of intrigue and emotion to the story. Readers also learn more about Alea’s magical abilities in this volume, including her ability to understand water speech and read emotions and intentions through the colors she sees in the water. As before, the dialogue feels quaint in ways that may not resonate with contemporary readers, although the expanded magical elements

compensate for this weakness. Most characters read white. A charming, environmentally oriented fantasy quest. (Fantasy. 10-14)

Six Little Sticks

Stone, Tiffany | Illus. by Ruth Hengeveld | Greystone Kids (36 pp.) $18.95 | May 6, 2025 | 9781778401237

Readers are tasked with locating Mama stick bug’s six children. The book opens with a spread depicting Mama on a branch; a page turn reveals her offspring, numbered one through six. They’re already a bit hard to distinguish, between camouflaging leaves and branches and an assortment of tiny toys, including a pinwheel, crayons, and a scooter. “Mama’s going to teach them how to hide so six little sticks stay safe outside.” By the next page, five of the stick bugs are riding Mama’s back, but one is already missing. Mama keeps losing her children, but observant viewers will find them, although it may take some time to spot the little critters blending into the woods. Other insects will become visible as children investigate the illustrator’s delicate, playful multimedia images. This is a book to peer at closely and won’t make for an effective group read-aloud. While the rhyming text is appropriate for very young listeners, the pictures are meant for kids who can really concentrate. Sometimes, only the bugs’ heads are visible, and when “friends and cousins” come to join the game of hide-and-seek, only the most able bug detectives will track them all down. Still, those up for the task will have a field day. Facts about the bugs and a final challenge to search for other bugs will send kids back to the book and out into nature. Eagle-eyed junior entomologists will go buggy for this one. (Picture book. 4-9)

The Legendary Scarlett and Browne

Stroud, Jonathan | Knopf (448 pp.) | $17.99

March 25, 2025 | 9780593707364

Series: Scarlett and Browne, 3

Young bandits complete personal quests while creating immense explosions and massive havoc in this high-action trilogy closer.

Playing to his strengths, Stroud strings together a bank robbery, an ambush that nearly sees Scarlett McCain eaten by cannibalistic Tainted, and other increasingly lurid, violent set pieces, propelling a plot that moves along at a breakneck pace to a climactic battle. In interspersed chapters, neither Thomas (the little brother Scarlett was forced to abandon and has been seeking for eight years) nor the faithful sidekick he acquires come off as more than pale reflections of the lead duo as the author moves them mechanically through contrived adventures. Scarlett’s own sidekick Albert Browne’s search for the secret prison where he and other children with psychic powers have been ruthlessly trained is similarly cursorily wrapped up. And what of the series’ broader ongoing struggles with the local slave trade and the corrupt Faith Houses? Here, too, the author drops the ball at the end.

Readers who delight in titanic explosions, swashbuckling young troublemakers escaping through hails of gunfire, and foes coming to squishy ends will be pleased; those who like stories that offer more

definite closure and their heroes and supporting characters to show meaningful growth, less so. Some racial diversity is cued in the cast surrounding the white leads. Still pedal to the metal, but running on fumes at this point. (maps) (Science fiction. 10-13)

Kirkus Star

Cranky, Crabby Crow (Saves the World)

Tabor, Corey R. | Greenwillow Books (40 pp.) $19.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9780063373587

Crow sits on a telephone wire as various animals approach, cajoling him into playing. Crow utters one word— “KAW”—to all, even Hummingbird, who invites him to “race-n’do-tricks-n’-loops.” Is Crow just standoffish? It turns out he has more on his mind than silly games. He is a secret agent with an important mission—to save the world from a giant asteroid hurtling toward Earth. As in earlier titles, such as the Caldecott Honor–winning Mel Fell (2021), Tabor plays with the physical format of the picture book, depicting Crow descending an elevator inside the telephone pole; down, down, down he goes to reveal a spaceship waiting for blast-off. The minimalist design features simple animal figures performing a high-wire act against a soft pale background. The tale also exhibits a faultless sense of timing and a delicious touch of drama as Crow

Exhibits a faultless sense of timing and a delicious touch of drama.

CRANKY, CRABBY CROW (SAVES THE WORLD)

awaits orders. A delightfully understated droll humor is in play as Crow saves the world by pressing first the “button for missiles,” then the “button for lasers” (other options include “bubbles” and “cupcakes”). In addition to being a clever caper, with its recurring pattern of Crow uttering only one word and its use of rhyming words— rat , bat , cat —this story also makes a wonderful option for burgeoning readers. Adding to the fun is a secret code to decipher on the endpapers.

Storytelling at its most brilliant— and whimsical. (Picture book. 3-6)

Kirkus Star

Outsider Kids

Tang, Betty C. | Graphix/Scholastic (288 pp.)

$24.99 | April 15, 2025 | 9781338832723

Series: Parachute Kids, 2

Three siblings continue their immigrant journeys in 1980s California.

In this sequel to Parachute Kids (2023), sixth grader Feng-Ling (Ann), older brother Ke-Gāng (Jason), and oldest sister Jia-Xi (Jessie) share their first experiences of Halloween trick-ortreating, a Thanksgiving turkey dinner, and a Christian church service, allowing them to socialize even as they hide their status as undocumented minors whose parents back in Taiwan are still awaiting travel visas. Life gets even more complicated when a visit by two relatives introduces unwelcome dynamics and triggers plot twists and turns that force the siblings to reevaluate their actions, circumstances, and relationships. The central conflict sparking from Ann’s falling-out with their 11-year-old cousin, Ting-Ting (Josephine)—a violin prodigy bound for an elite music school in Los Angeles who also speaks four languages— climaxes in

Tugs

at

the heartstrings and will spark conversations on pertinent topics.

OUTSIDER KIDS

a dangerous situation that the siblings must face as a team. The resourceful trio adapt to their latest challenge and resolve to “make it work.” The closing dedication—“To all kids facing adversity”—boosts the can-do message. The brisk, well-crafted dialogue and attractive, comic-style drawings support the narrative flow, weaving in intercultural perspectives that are at once humorous and relatable while candidly addressing difficult issues, societal controversies, and sensitive interpersonal matters: teenage romance, bullying, racism, gender stereotypes, undocumented immigration, and exploitation of the vulnerable. Tugs at the heartstrings and will spark important, age-appropriate conversations on pertinent, broadly relevant topics. (author’s note) (Graphic fiction. 9-13)

Kirkus Star

Smash, Crash, Topple, Roll!: The Inventive Rube Goldberg―A Life in Comics, Contraptions, and Six Simple Machines

Thimmesh, Catherine | Illus. by Shanda McCloskey | Chronicle Books (56 pp.) $19.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9781452144221

Rube Goldberg’s comics inspired contemporary designs. Goldberg (1883-1970) imagined how ordinary objects might do extraordinary things. He channeled his ideas into comics, and along the way, the name Rube Goldberg became an adjective: “doing something simple in a very complicated way that is not

necessary.” Take Goldberg’s comic “Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin”—a man takes a spoonful of soup, which triggers a catapult that eventually leads to a scythe cutting a string, allowing a napkin to wipe the man’s mouth. Thimmesh’s narrative encapsulates this over-the-top spirit. Her opening two spreads, hilariously illustrated by McCloskey, offer brilliantly convoluted suggestions for reading this book. A biographical section on Goldberg follows, along with several spreads examining the ways contemporary people have built three-dimensional Goldberg contraptions. Having connected the past to the present, Thimmesh makes a more important point: “Beneath the whimsy lies the science.” Six simple machines that come up in Goldberg’s comics— the lever, the wheel and axle, the inclined plane, the wedge, the screw, and the pulley—each get their own page of explanation and comic treatment. Guidance on building a Rube Goldberg machine is followed by amusing, thoughtful tips. Balancing humor, creativity, and science, Thimmesh has crafted a work Goldberg himself would approve of. McCloskey’s exuberant cartoon illustrations make the science easy to grasp; human characters vary in skin tone. Funny, chock-full of science, and wonderfully complicated—like its subject matter. (afterword, glossary, sources) (Informational picture book. 8-12)

For more by Catherine Thimmesh, visit Kirkus online.

Chalk this charmer up as a terrific exercise in creativity and camaraderie.

CHALK THE WALK

The Forest Yet To Come

Thompson, Sam | Illus. by Anna Tromop Little Island (256 pp.) | $16.99 | April 15, 2025 9781915071620 | Series: Wolfstongue Saga, 3

Two siblings with mysterious origins fall under the spell of trickster Reynard in this trilogy closer. Ever since Sally and her brother, Faolan, emerged from the Forest and entered the Land 10 years ago, the homesteaders who took them in have called Faolan “wolf-boy.” Sensitive to change and uncomfortable with eye contact, Faolan is prone to meltdowns; Sally, believing he’s just doing whatever he wants, resents having to care for him. The homestead is barricaded against wolves, and strangers don’t enter— until Reynard, in human form, arrives. Sally doesn’t remember where she and Faolan came from, and the manipulative fox promises to tell her in exchange for information about the “shapes,” benevolent figures who help the homestead prosper. As Reynard commands the shapes to do his bidding and sends the homestead into chaos, Faolan’s visits to Reynard make him a scapegoat, and the homestead Elders exile the siblings. But when Faolan runs away with a wolf pack, Sally must ally with Reynard to find him. Third-person chapters alternate between Sally’s and Faolan’s perspectives, effectively demonstrating Faolan’s loneliness and Sally’s misunderstanding of Faolan’s cued neurodivergence. Helpfully, Reynard’s stories recap the events of

the previous books, and Tromop’s black-and-white illustrations effectively convey the rural atmosphere and characters’ emotions. Unfortunately, this tale feels somewhat muddled toward the end: A late twist abruptly introduces an abstract concept, and Sally’s resentment of Faolan isn’t squarely addressed. Most characters present white.

Thought-provoking. (map) (Fantasy. 8-12)

Opal Watson: Private Eye

Thurman, Brittany J. | Harper/ HarperCollins (224 pp.) | $18.99

April 15, 2025 | 9780063326491

In this series opener based on a popular podcast, 12-yearold Opal Watson loves solving mysteries—she writes down her observations and collects clues in her detective notebook.

Opal, who’s Black, has a condition called retinitis pigmentosa; she occasionally uses the cane she’s named “Pinkerton” to help her navigate in poor light conditions. On her way home to Chicago from New Orleans, where she stayed with her beloved grandmother and attended summer camp, Opal learns from her friend Madison Ling about mysterious noises coming from their apartment building, the Crescent, where Opal’s dad is the manager. Opal works with Madison and Frank Goode, her cousin and best friend, to get to the bottom of the mystery— which quickly grows bigger than any of them could have expected and even

threatens the existence of the Crescent. At the same time, Opal wrestles with being partnered for a big project on the Great Migration with Ivy Atkinson, a new girl at school, after the two get off on the wrong foot at the seventh grade orientation event. The story moves at a steady pace, incorporating historical information into the many twists and turns as Opal races against the clock in a search for the truth. The book beautifully highlights the charms of the Chicago backdrop through the descriptions provided by Opal and other characters.

A fun mystery with a strong sense of place and plenty of surprises. (Mystery. 8-12)

Chalk the Walk

Tornetto, Chelsea | Illus. by Laurel Aylesworth | Familius (32 pp.)

$17.99 | April 1, 2025 | 9781641709682

Kids use bright chalk to enliven a drab urban brownstone block. Sidewalks and walls go from dull to dazzling thanks to the handiwork of these young artists. Along the way, the children are cheered by their creations—and they inspire their neighbors to take part in enjoyable activities. Just watch that gray-haired elder cutting loose, cane in tow. The local saxophonist probably never realized that “chalk can elevate a song.” And the mail carrier joins in on a game of hopscotch. In the end, rainfall washes away the artwork— but no worries. That’s only a temporary setback, for the chalks can be brought out tomorrow to create new projects! The lively story is aptly expressed in jaunty verse. Rhythmic, repetitive wording (most sentences start with the phrase “Chalk is”) will encourage readers to chant along, too. Grays suffuse the backdrops early on, but more vibrant hues are slowly introduced, ending the narrative on an appropriately sunny note. Readers will be pleased to see that the story’s

youngsters make like-minded new friends while going about their colorful business. The book makes another good point: “Chalk is better than a screen.” Kids will pick up some terrific ideas about sidewalk chalk projects of their own—works that could also be rendered on paper with chalk or other media. Characters are diverse.

Chalk this charmer up as a terrific exercise in creativity and camaraderie. (Picture book. 4-7)

Hedgehogs Don’t Wear Underwear

Valdez, Marissa | Roaring Brook Press (40 pp.)

$18.99 | April 1, 2025 | 9781250814388

Jacques is a hedgehog with a big secret: “I wear real, bona fide underwear.”

Our narrator received a mysterious package one day; an illustration shows a pair of underwear tied to a balloon with a note “from the Universe” floating down into Jacques’ burrow. Hedgehogs don’t wear underwear, however. Will Jacques be shunned? Jacques worries but comes to a decision: “I have to wear them. When I do I feel special.” Determined, Jacques, who’s been invited to a party, makes a dramatic entrance, with undies in hand. Jacques’ declaration (“I WEAR UNDERWEAR”) is met with remarks of dismay, before another hedgehog opens up about similar fears and shows off a pair of cowboy boots. More hedgehogs introduce themselves with their own

confessions. The story ends with Jacques unveiling a painting of the underwear in a gallery filled with hedgehogs wearing all sorts of attire. Though the book is simple in plot, characters, and setting, it wins in its balance of bathroom humor, dramatic storytelling, and celebrations of individual expression. French words are peppered throughout, adding to the fun without detracting from the story for those unfamiliar with the language. The cartoonish illustrations brim with fun; Valdez relies heavily on geometric shapes (triangle noses for the hedgehogs; huge circles for their eyes). Details such as speech bubbles and recurring turtle and snake characters contribute to the outlandish humor. Sure to have little ones giggling. (Picture book. 3-5)

What About Scout?

Van Genechten, Guido | Clavis (32 pp.) $18.95 | April 22, 2025 | 9798890631510

Van Genechten salutes those who refuse to conform. The sheep in this book all do

the same things at the same time: eating, chewing their cuds, and even lifting their tails and depositing droppings. But Scout is different. Scout dreamingly gazes at a butterfly when everyone else munches grass, sleeps upside down with hooves in the air while the others slumber on their bellies, and glances skyward when it’s time to frolic. On each spread, an unseen narrator explains a typical event in the day of the life of this herd while also encouraging

A snuggly read-aloud that celebrates those who stand out from the herd.

young readers to examine the visuals closely to find Scout, who’s physically similar to the others but always doing something a bit different. The tale ends on a humorous note, with Scout deciding to break free of this relatively humdrum existence. First published in Belgium and the Netherlands and translated from Dutch, the simple text weaves in information about the lives of sheep while supporting those that don’t follow the usual path. Sheep lovers will appreciate the illustrations of the animals, with their heavily textured fleeces, but all readers will enjoy the vivid, ever-changing background colors, which make each page turn a treat. With its gentle, low-key text, this one will lull little ones to sleep while reassuring them that being different is more than OK.

A snuggly lap-time read-aloud that celebrates those who stand out from the herd. (Picture book. 4-7)

Flower Girls: A Story of Sisters

Weitzman, Jacqueline Preiss llus. by Robin Preiss Glasser Harper/HarperCollins (32 pp.)

$19.99 | May 20, 2025 | 9780062279286

Sisters Weitzman and Glasser team up for a tale of individuality, acceptance, and sibling conflict. Narrator Daisy introduces her family: her parents, who grow and sell flowers, and her big sisters, Lily and Poppy. The older girls’ distinctive personalities are reflected in their respective gardens. Lily’s carefully bordered, rulerperfect squares, manicured with scissors, evince her perfectionism. In chaotic contrast, Poppy’s garden is a riot of her namesake scarlet flowers, ornaments, birdhouses, and a Rube Goldberg–esque device. (Poppy optimistically even plants hard candies.) Each sister gently critiques the other’s style: Poppy suggests a trampoline for Lily’s plot, and Lily

encourages Poppy to be a bit more orderly. So far, little Daisy tends just one plant in a flowerpot, but today is the day she gets her own garden. Predictably, each sister wants Daisy’s plot to reflect her own preferences. In an escalating contest, they go so far as to divide Daisy’s plot between them. But Daisy knows that her garden needs to reflect her own identity. The writing provides effective characterization as the sisters’ rival visions unfurl. Delicate drawings bloom with detail and color. The girls are light-skinned: Lily has long, neatly tied black hair, Poppy has spiky locks, and Daisy’s short red curls stand out.

A satisfying tale of sisterhood—and of a younger sibling who finds a way to shine. (Picture book. 4-8)

Piece Out

Willan, Alex | Astra Young Readers (32 pp.) $18.99 | May 20, 2025 | 9781662620935

A fugitive game board piece undertakes the scary trek back to the storage box— all the way across the house.

After being left on the floor at the end of Friday Game Night, Red decides the safest option is just to wait patiently. The next morning, a roaring vacuum monster attacks. One narrow escape later, fueled by a new determination to get back home, Red sets out on an arduous journey, though the way is long, and hazards ranging from terrifying canine beast Lady Flufferton to wads of sticky chewing gum await. Still, the stick-limbed plastic mite displays

outsize measures of courage and resourcefulness—not even being snatched up and chucked into the feared junk drawer signals a “game over” for our hero. By the time the next Friday Game Night rolls around, Red is back home in the storage box, not only regaling the other game pieces with tales of “dicey” adventures, but ready for more of the same. Dramatic narration brings to life Red’s near misses and brushes with danger. Willan provides a floor map with thrillingly labeled features like the “Smelly Hillsides” (a shoe rack) and the “Rectangular Sea” (an aquarium) so that fellow travelers can retrace the route; he depicts a diversely hued family of human gamers having a blast around a simple board. A rousing Toy Story–style odyssey. (Picture book. 5-8)

Band Nerd

Willis, Sarah Clawson | Illus. by Emma Cormarie | HarperAlley (272 pp.) | $24.99

April 22, 2025 | 9780358447863

A graphic novel that tackles issues of alcoholism and family dysfunction. Lucy, a seventh grade flutist, nervously enters North Carolina’s Windley School of the Arts. But before she can even leave for her first day of school, her parents descend into fighting. Thankfully, on the bus Lucy meets Malia, who becomes her first friend at Windley. Their friendship deepens—Malia also has family

An optimistic yet realistic portrayal of coping with parental addiction.

secrets, which allows them to bond. Over the next few months, Lucy’s father does two stints in rehab. But unbeknownst to the school and her band friends, he’s spiraling, and the fights between Lucy’s parents are escalating. Meanwhile, making first chair in the band becomes an obsession for Lucy, a way to control her chaotic home life, but her overwhelming need to be the best creates conflicts in her friendships, and her plummeting grades lead to more stress. Cormarie’s illustrations of the characters contrast their bright and expressive facial expressions when things are going well with the pain of interpersonal conflict. Willis’ treatment of Lucy’s father’s personality when sober reveals an empathetic glimpse of the genuine love he feels for his children, showing the tragic impact that alcoholism and depression can have on a family. The regular panels feature clean, minimalistic backgrounds, emphasizing the largely white-presenting characters and their feelings.

An insightful and optimistic yet realistic portrayal of coping with parental addiction. (Graphic fiction. 9-13)

Tales From Beyond the Rainbow: Ten LGBTQ+ Fairy Tales Proudly Reclaimed

Wood, Pete Jordi | Illus. by Various Penguin Workshop (256 pp.) | $17.99 April 22, 2025 | 9780593889725

Ten traditional stories from world cultures brought into the present through a queer lens. Royalty, heroes, and simple folk facing momentous odds—these are some of the roles populated by LGBTQ+ characters in this collection of adapted folklore. Within the tales, readers encounter a trans woman in the Dahomey Kingdom who works in a market stall, a

Romanian princess who takes on the guise of a boy to honor her father’s promise, and two gender-nonconforming Chinese male lovers who seek justice. Drawing upon folkloric research, Wood has created a well-researched and well-adapted collection from a broad variety of locations, including Canada, the Cape Verde Islands, India, Denmark, and more; although three of the five non-Western tales cite old collections gathered by cultural outsiders, Wood “worked with authenticity readers from around the world.” By altering the stories’ presentations and some of their wording, Wood seeks the “reclamation and reinterpretation” of queer identities. Some of the changes validate characters’ moments of honest love, describe euphoria connected to affirming one’s gender, or honor chosen pronouns and names; others eliminate discriminatory language or eschew physical transformation in favor of emotional acceptance. Each tale includes a black-and-white centerpiece illustration by an artist whose heritage matches the story’s origin; the beautifully varied artwork stylishly evokes the stories’ protagonists. A creative and insightful achievement in folktale adaptation. (author’s note with sources) (Fiction. 10-14)

Fara, the Soccer Fairy

Woollard, Elli | Illus. by Irina Avgustinovich Paw Prints Publishing/Baker & Taylor (32 pp.) $18.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9781223188997

A soccer-loving fairy’s big leg gets her into and out of big trouble in this fantastical British import. Small of size but bursting with personality in Avgustinovich’s painterly illustrations, Fara—depicted with brown skin, tight cornrows, and diaphanous wings—likes nothing better than “to PICK UP / and FLICK UP / and KICK UP a ball!” Unfortunately, when her toe connects

A soccer-loving fairy’s big leg gets her into and out of big trouble.

FARA, THE SOCCER FAIRY

with a certain apple that her aunt had intended for Snow White and smashes a very special mirror on the wall, followed by another disaster involving a pumpkin at midnight and a fancy dress ball, she’s banished from court. “Fairies are meant to go flying and flitting. / They shouldn’t play soccer! It’s simply not fitting.” Alone in the forest later that night, she rouses a huge troll by angrily kicking a ball into a cave. Could this be the end? But instead of eating her, the troll invites her to join the “Happily Ever After” soccer club. On she goes to become the toast of all the soccer fans in fairyland. Upbeat text and energetic visuals combine for a goofy fractured fairy tale ideal for sports fans. Most of the human figures in the illustrations are, like Fara, dark-skinned.

Shoots and scores on behalf of ball players of all sizes. (Picture book. 6-8)

A Surprise in the Wood: A Touching Story of Love and the True Meaning of Family

Zanotti, Cosetta | Illus. by Lucia Scuderi Trans. by Angus Yuen-Killick

Red Comet Press (40 pp.) | $18.99 April 22, 2025 | 9781636550923

Two bears adopt an unusual cub. One night, “a fine thread descend[s] from a star” and deposits Mama and Papa Bear’s child at 29 Wood Lane. Though initially startled to discover their “cub” is a goldfish, the parents welcome Fin warmly. Other forest dwellers are skeptical (“Since when do two bears adopt a fish?”),

though kindly Frog praises Fin’s bubble-blowing skills. At sunrise, the family moves to Lakeside Lane, where they’ll be able to swim with Fin. Finding the bears’ abode empty, the animals troop to Lakeside Lane, and all join Fin for a swim, negative remarks forgotten. The backmatter explains that the story was inspired by Rosita and Giorgio Boniotti, whose adopted son, Davide, has Allan–Herndon–Dudley syndrome; the Boniottis founded Una Vita Rara, an organization dedicated to raising awareness of this rare congenital disease. Scuderi’s lush paintings deftly blend realistic animal depictions and subtle emotional expressions. Sadly, Zanotti’s text, translated from Italian, is somewhat muddled. Though the bears’ acceptance of Fin is stirring, the other animals’ change of heart feels abrupt. The assertions that Fin “[chose] his parents” and “before he was born, he knew they were waiting” may comfort some readers but will alienate others, particularly since the dedication from the Boniottis mentions Davide’s “choice to live in silence in this immobile body.” Those who don’t share the belief that babies choose their lots in life may find the suggestion problematic enough to overshadow the story’s inclusive message.

A well-meaning but uneven exploration of adoption. (publisher’s note, links) (Picture book. 4-8)

For more picture books about families, visit Kirkus online.

Young Adult

FEMINIST BOOKS WE NEED NOW

THIS YEAR MARKS the 24th anniversary of Rise: A Feminist Book Project for Ages 0-18, part of the American Library Association’s Feminist Task Force. As I wrap up my tenure on the committee, which produces an annual list of recommended feminist titles for young readers, I’m struck by the fact that our work remains (sadly) more relevant than ever.

The following statement from Rise’s selection criteria stands out to me as critical in a society in which people frequently seem to feel threatened by a diversity of opinions and in which individualistic striving is often valorized over altruism and communal care:

“We recognize that feminism is not a monolith or a single organized movement, and we value voices that expand and challenge our existing understandings of feminism. Feminist books for young readers must move…beyond characters and people who fight to protect themselves without concern for the rights of others. Feminist protagonists call out and work to eliminate sexism and other systemic prejudices.”

The following YA books from our 2025 list exemplify these positive social values and highlight diverse perceptions of feminism. They—and the others on this year’s list—are worthy of sharing far and wide.

The Judgment of Yoyo Gold by Isaac Blum (Philomel, 2024): What happens when an Orthodox rabbi’s daughter who’s always done what’s expected of her starts questioning her community’s gender double standards? In an irresistibly engaging voice, Yoyo relates her personal crusade to expose hypocrisy via an anonymous TikTok account.

Flawless Girls by Anna-Marie McLemore (Feiwel & Friends, 2024): In a world where girls— especially brown girls whose bodies don’t conform—must stifle their true selves, Isla investigates the sinister finishing school that profoundly damaged her sister. She seeks answers

for Renata and the other students in this exquisite, gut-wrenching work.

A Greater Goal: The Epic Battle for Equal Pay in Women’s Soccer—and Beyond by Elizabeth Rusch (Greenwillow Books, 2024): Readers don’t need to be fans of the beautiful game to become utterly absorbed in this riveting account of the struggle of the U.S. Women’s National Team to receive equal compensation. Their battle with the U.S. Soccer Federation mirrors many other crusades against injustice.

The Race To Be Myself: Young Readers Edition by Caster Semenya (Norton Young Readers, 2024): In this frank, courageous, and heartfelt memoir, the world-record-setting South African Olympian describes how her intimate medical details became the focus of painfully intrusive scrutiny and biased regulation. Her courage in fighting for

equity makes her a powerful role model.

Black Girl You Are Atlas by Renée Watson, illustrated by Ekua Holmes (Kokila, 2024): This volume of passionate poems and gorgeous full-page portraits of Black women and girls embodies the spirit of uplifting one another and living as full, vibrant beings: “Gather the women, / the truth-tellers, the wise ones. / Always keep them close.”

Diary of a Confused Feminist by Kate Weston (Simon & Schuster, 2024): As a lone girl—even one with loyal friends ready to take up arms (or cans of spray paint, anyway)— smashing the patriarchy feels like a tall order. Readers will laugh in recognition as Kat, an English teen, wrestles with what feminism means.

Laura Simeon is a young readers’ editor.

LAURA SIMEON

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

EDITOR’S PICK

An erstwhile thief takes justice into her own hands in this riotous conclusion to the Little Thieves trilogy. Vanja Ros, who reads white, has lived much of her life according to one clear principle. “When I was younger,” she says, “I believed in what I called the trinity of want: pleasure, profit, and power.” If Vanja’s first adventure hinged on her greed and her second unpacked her relationship with intimacy and her demisexuality, then this final installment deals, unquestionably, with power. In the almost 16 months since Vanja abandoned the love of her

life, Emeric Conrad, for his own good, she’s fully embraced the mantle of the Pfennigeist As the Penny Phantom, she can reach the people that the law—including Emeric and his fellow prefects— cannot. But as her reputation grows, Vanja begins to develop strange, unpredictable powers. Even more worryingly, royals across the empire have begun dropping dead with Vanja’s signature red penny in their mouths. With Emeric on the case, Vanja’s forced to confront the boy she left behind—and the choices she made at the crossroads of her life that led her here. Throughout,

Holy Terrors

Owen, Margaret | Henry Holt

560 pp. | $21.99 | April 1, 2025

9781250831170 | Series: Little Thieves, 3

Owen unfurls a narrative that grapples with the limitations and obligations of power. Incisive social commentary, lush worldbuilding, some truly gorgeous turns of phrase, and evocative spot art

from the author help bring this work to vivid life, but as with the earlier installments, its true beating heart lies in its characters. Deeply affecting and satisfying. (author’s note, glossary) (Fantasy. 14-18)

These Titles Earned the Kirkus Star

By Frederick Joseph

By Jennifer Mason-Black

Terrors

Margaret Owen

By Sandra Proudman

Thrashers By Julie Soto

An

action-packed, magic-filled exploration of natural resource abuse.

COVEN

This Is Me Trying

Adams, Jenna | Neem Tree Press (432 pp.) $15.95 paper | May 27, 2025 | 9781917275101

The age gap between teens cast as Romeo and Juliet in 2010 Bristol, England, has long-term consequences. Brooke, 14, daydreams about forbidden romantic love. There’s undeniable chemistry on stage between her and her co-star, Matt, but after they kiss at his 18th birthday celebration, Matt’s awkward attempts to backpedal fail. He’s drawn to Brooke despite recognizing the impropriety, and they see each other secretly, having unplanned sex right before he leaves for Lancaster University. Brooke is unsettled to learn in a sex ed class that her age means she couldn’t legally consent, and that Matt committed statutory rape; she struggles with depression and self-harm. In the second half of the story, the timeline jumps jarringly to 2014 and 2018. Readers glimpse the lasting impact of that first summer in the trajectory of the white-presenting leads’ adult lives. At 18, Brooke begins a new life in Seattle. A rocky start gradually smooths into a stable career and new love, and a therapist helps her address her self-esteem and codependency issues. Matt, never fully acknowledging his responsibility as the legal adult in their dysfunctional relationship, is unable to move on, though the ending suggests possible closure. The alternating first-person narration features more telling than showing, limiting the

depth of the characterization, and the gritty adult storylines may be of limited appeal to teens.

A portrait of codependency and consent that never fully coalesces. (content warning, reader’s guide, support and resources) (Fiction. 16-adult)

The Life Guide for Teens: Harnessing Your Inner Power To Be Healthy, Happy, and Confident

Anbar, Ran D. | Illus. by Nathan Hansen Rowman & Littlefield (284 pp.) | $30.00 March 4, 2025 | 9781538191415

Pediatric pulmonary physician Anbar takes a holistic approach to encouraging teens to get their minds and bodies to work together for better well-being.

The book is divided into five parts, covering effective strategies for daily life, managing anxiety and other emotional challenges, making improvements to physical health, building healthy relationships, and achieving success across many different areas of life. Within each section, the individual chapters discuss the issue at hand, provide tools that readers can use, offer firsthand accounts from other teens (“Being aware of the power of words helps me find the right things to say—and it also helps me process what other people say”), and advise parents and caregivers. The author presents fear and anxiety as part of our natural survival instincts, which can be harnessed in positive ways using tips from the book. A list entitled “Nine

Signs You Are Ready for Responsibility” is also valuable and will apply to many circumstances. Throughout, Anbar breaks his guidance into steps and offers clear, meaningful examples. Some of the tips and tools build upon one another, but the book is designed to be accessible to those who dip into it rather than read it cover to cover. The discussions of spirituality, gender, sexuality, and relationships are inclusive. Static spot art occasionally punctuates the text.

A practical compass for adolescents to use in navigating life’s tricky areas. (notes, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

Coven

Chainani, Soman | Illus. by Joel Gennari HarperAlley (272 pp.) | $15.99 paper April 1, 2025 | 9780062979681

A coven of problem-solving witches takes on a mission that tests their friendship and bonds. Witches Anadil, Hester, and Dot are summoned to Red Isle when the animals of the Dark Lands are found starving after sludge kills all the vegetation. Mother Sorastra, the leader of the Dark Lands, confronts Prince Lexius of the neighboring Light Lands, arguing that he’s abusing nature’s gift of raaka, a resource used to power clever inventions. But Prince Lexius blames Mother Sorastra for breaking a truce and causing the pollution. The conflict escalates when citizens of the Light Lands are murdered, and their facial features are erased. Pale, white-haired Anadil, brown-skinned, black-haired Hester, and Dot, who has brown skin and Afro-textured hair, arrive in time to stop the outbreak of war and attempt to solve the mystery of the face-stealing killer. When a coven of witches impersonating the trio appears, Anadil, Hester, and Dot must overcome their bickering and work

through hurt feelings in order to band together and bring peace and balance to Red Isle. This graphic novel features cleverly realized characters: Anadil with her team of magical rats, Hester with her pet demon, and Dot with her ability to summon confectionary are memorable leads. The relationship between Anadil and Hester adds a hint of romance to the story, and the environmental themes add real-world relevance. Vivid illustrations with saturated colors create a fantastical backdrop for the fast-paced storyline. An action-packed, magic-filled exploration of natural resource abuse. (Graphic fantasy. 12-16)

Time After Time

Daughtry, Mikki | Putnam (368 pp.) $19.99 | May 27, 2025 | 9780593533826

Two pairs of girls living a century apart have an otherworldly connection. Elizabeth and Patricia met in 1925, when Patricia came to work as a kitchen girl in 19-year-old Elizabeth’s family home on Mulberry Lane. The young women dove headfirst into a blissful romance, despite their class difference and the widespread prejudice against Irish people like Patricia. In 2025, 19-year-old Libby, who’s cued white, feels destined to fix up the dilapidated Victorian house on Mulberry Lane, so she buys it with an inheritance from her grandmother. Her reckless purchase— she’s solidly middle class, and the money was intended for college— enrages her parents, and her controlling father kicks her out. In a set design class, Libby meets Irish American Tish, who’s good with construction and unhappily living in an overcrowded apartment. Tish first noticed the Mulberry Lane house when a green glass stone embedded in the sidewalk sent a shock up her leg; she quickly agrees to help restore it and eventually moves in with Libby. The girls grow

closer as they work on the house, and the journals that Elizabeth, who reads white, left behind help Libby unravel the mysteries binding all four girls together. Daughtry introduces multiple timelines, perspectives, and characters from the outset, but the initial investment for readers in keeping these elements straight is well worth it for the enjoyable saga that follows. The author deeply conveys the intensity of the romances in both timelines.

A page-turning story about the power of love. (Romance. 13-18)

Summer Girls

Dugan, Jennifer | Putnam (320 pp.)

$19.99 | May 27, 2025 | 9780593696897

Cass Adler has a rule: “Absolutely no dating summer girls. Ever.” Unfortunately for her, Birdie Gordon is irresistible. Cass is a hardworking lifeguard on the beaches of Newport, Rhode Island. She loves her friends, family, and neighborhood—and hates the entitled summer tourists. Cass is headed to MIT in the fall, and she has to make as much money as she can to help pay her way. When wealthy George Gordon, who owns the many rental properties Cass’ father manages, offers to pay Cass to keep an eye on his wild, flighty daughter, Cass reluctantly agrees. But between the forced proximity and emotional memories of their childhood friendship, Cass finds herself caught in Birdie’s orbit. Birdie, on the other hand, has been nursing a secret crush on Cass for years. Both girls are white and bisexual; Birdie is a well-known social media influencer with a boyfriend. The narrative not only chronicles the teens’ slow-burn romance, but also deftly addresses the underlying issues present in their relationship, including wealth, class differences, the privilege of being able to come out on your own terms, and the volatile nature of social media.

This fast-paced enemies-to-lovers romance will keep readers turning the pages, eager to see whether Cass realizes that not all summer girls are the same, and that some, in fact, might be worth everything.

A summer romance that’s a delightful read in any season. (Romance. 13-17)

Blades of Furry: Vol. 1

Erdos, Emily & Deya Muniz | Little, Brown Ink (512 pp.) | $32.99 | May 13, 2025

9780316459839 | Series: Blades of Furry, 1

An animal rivals-to-lovers romance based on a popular WEBTOON series.

After an accident takes out another entrant in a competition in which ice skating meets martial arts, Emile Fia, a small, light-brown deer with tiny antlers and enormous ears, is shocked to find he’s up against Radu Basanko, a statuesque, dark-brown fruit bat who’s currently the world’s top-ranked skater—and a charmer at that. Their size difference could be dangerous, but Emile handles the battle well, until he cuts his hand on his blade and Radu suddenly starts behaving erratically. And just like that, Emile learns Radu’s biggest secret. Their relationship enters new territory after Radu apologizes, swears he wouldn’t hurt Emile, and begs Emile to keep quiet about his hidden identity. If Emile’s nightmares are anything to go by, this is a difficult favor, but it’s one he promised to keep. Over time, though, even his scariest nightmares begin to shift into dreams that are steamier in tone, albeit with Radu still starring in them. Now that he’s in on the secret, Emile starts to learn about a new world—and possibly even get tangled up in it. With stylish outfits, expressive characterization, and engaging banter, this series opener incorporates animal behaviors and quirks into its anthropomorphized characters. Emile is unintentionally funny, Radu is flirty, and their appealing friends of various species round out the cast.

A sweet (and furry) queer sports romance with off-the-charts chemistry. (bonus comic) (Graphic romance. 12-18)

Shadow and Tide

Greenlaw, Rachel | Quill Tree Books/ HarperCollins (384 pp.) | $15.99 paper March 4, 2025 | 9781335015310

Mira learns more about her existence within a complicated web of political intrigue in this sequel to 2024’s Compass and Blade. Mira Boscawen is reeling from a painful betrayal and learning about her siren lineage when the rulers known as the watch set her village on the island of Rosevear on fire and demand that she be delivered to them. The enigmatic and infuriating Lord Elijah Tresillian arrives, ready to collect on the bargain that he and Mira previously made. After helping the village, the pair travel to Ennor, where they plan to deal with Capt. Renshaw and the watch, who have formed an alliance to take control of the Fortunate Isles. Mira and Elijah continue to grapple with their identities and the powers they don’t understand, all the while growing closer to one another. Meanwhile, Brielle, a monster hunter who tracks creatures and extracts their blood for spells, is assigned by her coven to hunt Mira. As Brielle learns more about Mira, she starts to question what’s being asked of her, especially when her own and Mira’s fates ultimately collide. Mira, at great cost, gains insight into herself while she tries to save Rosevear. Brielle’s perspective adds a much-needed view into a messy political system, and Mira’s and Elijah’s motives are explored more fully in this gratifying sequel, which satisfyingly addresses underdeveloped areas of the plot and characterization. Main characters are cued white. A deeper exploration of a compelling fantasy world. (map) (Fantasy. 14-18)

Murder Land

Greenwald, Carlyn | Sourcebooks Fire (336 pp.) $12.99 paper | May 6, 2025 | 9781464226540

Opening night at a new murderthemed amusement park attraction turns into a deadly race against an unknown assailant.

Billie Cooper, a recent high school graduate, has just received a promotion at Californialand, the theme park celebrating her home state where she’s worked for two years. Now she’s a ride operator in Murder Land, a new section inspired by infamous Southern California crimes. But Billie’s first night goes off the rails when a fellow employee dies on her ride. Determined to prove it was natural causes and not her fault, Billie teams up with her friend—and one-time hookup—Leon, her best friend, Grace, and Grace’s girlfriend, Sawyer. Together they uncover disturbing truths about the park’s hidden history. As the events of the night unfold, the stakes rise, and someone else dies. The story includes transcripts from a YouTube series detailing the park’s history and conspiracy theories tied to the property. While some plot points stretch believability, the theme-park setting adds to the intrigue. The diverse cast includes Billie, a queer Jewish protagonist with a rebellious streak, white-presenting Grace, who wants to pursue film studies, Korean Canadian Sawyer, who speaks French and is into hacking, and Leon, who’s queer, cued white, and an engineering student. The atmospheric backdrop sets this work apart from similar stories. Fans of Natasha Preston and Eireann Corrigan

will appreciate the fast-paced plot and compelling twists.

A surprise-filled thriller unfolding in an evocatively spooky setting. (map) (Thriller. 14-18)

All We Lost Was Everything

Harlow, Sloan | Putnam (352 pp.) | $14.99 paper | May 6, 2025 | 9780593855942

A young woman must unlearn everything she knows about her parents in order to find the truth. River, the daughter of a Filipino father and a white mother, finds her world irrevocably changed when her mother goes missing and her father dies in a house fire during her senior year of high school. She’s left with an additional mystery after an anonymous person donates $2,000,000 to her GoFundMe fundraiser. Together with her best friend, Tawny, her ex, Noah, and her new love interest, Logan, all of whom are cued white, River dives into her parents’ pasts. However, as she investigates, she realizes that everyone has a secret—and no one can be trusted. In this fast-paced thriller, Harlow captures the complexities of human emotions from grief to love. Her characters are well developed, especially Logan, who has an ideal blend of depth and attractiveness. Tawny, who’s adopted, has experienced grief of her own. Together, the characters move the plot with increasing speed through jaw-dropping twists. Letters incorporated into the story present other points of view, bringing texture to the story and

Will resonate with anyone whose good intentions have gone sideways. THIS THING OF OURS

increasing readers’ uncertainty about whom to believe. Harlow skillfully weaves together a page-turning mystery that’s enhanced by River and Logan’s steamy and passionate relationship. A sexy thriller where the ultimate prize is finding and embracing the truth—even if it’s difficult to understand. (Romantic thriller. 14-18)

Kirkus Star

This Thing of Ours

Joseph, Frederick | Candlewick (384 pp.)

$18.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9781536233469

A Black basketball star starts his senior year by pivoting to find his true voice in the classroom. Ossie Brown was destined for greatness before an injury in a game ended his high school basketball career. Ossie feels like his future was stolen— and on top of that, his girlfriend dumps him. Grandma Alice comforts him with a reminder that basketball doesn’t define him; still, the game helped Ossie cope with his fractured relationship with his widowed mother. A new opportunity opens up when Ms. Hunt, Ossie’s Black English teacher at mostly white Braxton Academy, where he has a full-ride scholarship, tells him about the Mark Twain Creative Writing Program. A vivid dream in which his father speaks to him inspires Ossie’s application essay. He connects with Luis and Naima, the only other participants who aren’t white, but agitation by conservative students against a “woke agenda” leads to Ms. Hunt’s replacement by a teacher who exclusively uses texts by white authors. Ossie’s online attempt to support Naima’s protest has unintended consequences, and he’s forced to reevaluate his solo activism. The central characters’ relationships will engage readers, and Ossie’s dilemma will resonate with anyone whose good intentions have gone sideways. Committed, pragmatic, and reflective

Ossie ultimately learns from Grandma Alice’s wise counsel: “This thing of ours—life, you see—is only as beautiful as the bonds we make as we journey through it.”

A thought-provoking exploration of storytelling dynamics in a social media–driven society. (Fiction. 14-18)

Igniting Fate

Louise, Jean | Harper/HarperCollins (384 pp.) | $19.99 | March 11, 2025

9781335010056 | Series: Waking Fire, 2

The second installment in the Waking Fire duology delivers a relentless, action-packed continuation of the story. Picking up shortly after the events of the previous installment, the book reunites readers with Naira, who’s still haunted by visions from the Three-Faced God. She begins a treacherous journey across the unforgiving salt pans in search of Gamikal the Long-Lasting, a figure she believes holds the key to defeating the oppressive force of Sothpike. Struggling to control the fire magic she discovered in the first book, Naira faces external threats and internal turmoil as she leads her companions through a series of landscapes filled with danger and revelations. Naira’s quest to find Sothpike drives the plot, but the overwhelming pace and influx of new characters and mythological elements often make it difficult to fully engage with the story. While the world surrounding the brown-skinned characters is richly inspired by a blend of diverse cultures and traditions, the narrative offers limited time for reflection or a deeper understanding of these influences. Naira’s struggles add emotional depth but are often overshadowed by the rapid storytelling. Her relationships feel underdeveloped and lacking in maturity when compared to the complexity of the worldbuilding. Despite these shortcomings, the strong

narrative momentum and vivid imagery make this a gripping, if somewhat chaotic, read for those already invested in Naira’s journey.

A series closer set in an expansive fantasy realm that’s let down by a rushed pace. (map) (Fantasy. 13-18)

Shampoo Unicorn

Lovett, Sawyer | Disney-Hyperion (320 pp.)

$18.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9781368108959

Isolated teens with a podcast solve a mystery and heal themselves in this debut. Canon, West Virginia, is a small town where the coal mines have shut down and football is a big deal. Brian isn’t the “only gay in the village,” but he certainly feels that way when closeted Greg, who used to be his best friend, passively witnesses constant homophobic bullying. Brian’s only outlet is Shampoo Unicorn , a chatty podcast he hosts with his now-bestie Riley, a straight biracial (Black and white) girl who stands out as a racial minority in town as well as in the largely white-centered queer storyline. Meanwhile, Leslie, a trans girl living about an hour away in rural Pennsylvania, is grafted onto the narrative as she finds the strength to come out to her parents, who surprise her with their support, and becomes inspired to organize Canon’s first ever Pride festival. The plot loosely coalesces around a hate crime committed against Greg after he’s expelled for a locker room hookup, the whodunit weakly propelling the story forward. Written with multiple points of view, including podcast transcripts, much of the story involves the characters explaining things to each other and to readers. However, the story does provide hope—and a possible roadmap—to teens who feel cut off from their communities and the world.

An earnest addition to the contemporary queer YA canon. (Fiction. 14-18)

THE KIRKUS Q&A: ASHLEY HOPE PÉREZ

The YA author has edited a diverse anthology of stories about—and resources to fight—book bans.

BY BRANDON TENSLEY

The new anthology Banned Together: Our Fight for Readers’ Rights features a wide array of storytelling approaches— short stories, poetry, essays, graphic formats—to address the urgent topic of book bans. The book is edited by Ashley Hope Pérez, whose 2015 novel, Out of Darkness, has been a frequent target of censors, and it features contributions from Nikki Grimes, Elana K. Arnold, Traci Sorell, Trung Le Nguyen, and others, with illustrations by Debbie Fong. Together, they underscore the power of books to help young people understand the world around them, and the importance of protecting that power.

In one section, Maia Kobabe remembers that many of the people in line to get their copy of Gender Queer signed at an event in 2019 were librarians. And all of them had the same message: “I know exactly who I want to give this to!” For Kobabe, this warm reception served as affirmation that it wasn’t only family and friends who were interested in the memoir, which recounts Kobabe’s gender and identity journey. Just a couple of years later, though, the book received a very different kind of attention: Conservative parents and legislators sought to banish the title from public schools. For a time, Gender Queer was the most banned book in the country.

In a starred review, Kirkus calls the anthology a “critically timely blueprint for action.” Pérez and I recently spoke by phone to discuss the anthology; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

place on hardworking teachers and librarians. It creates a toxic environment. It pushes people out of the profession. It diverts resources from what they came to the job to do, which is to help students. I want to give librarians, even in the most ravaged districts, a book they can buy that includes the works of the authors whose writing they’ve been forced to remove.

What’s your goal with Banned Together ?

When I think about the goals of the anthology, one was helping young people, like my former students, know what’s missing from their libraries or from the libraries of other students in this country.

I also wanted to give young people tools to respond, to find the books, to understand what they’re missing and why that matters, and to create a resource for librarians. Over and over we hear about the incredible strain that censorship efforts

The anthology includes an all-star cast of YA authors and illustrators. How did you go about finding and selecting contributors? One of the few silver linings of being in the book-ban nightmare since the one [that targeted my book and many others] in Leander, Texas, in 2021, is that I’ve gotten to work with so many incredible authors and advocates. I had a

robust personal network of folks who’ve been engaging in and staying with advocacy for young people and who have the capacity to do this work. One thing we can’t emphasize enough is the cost for creators of censorship. I started with the authors I’ve been working with, whether fellow plaintiffs in lawsuits in Florida, folks I’ve been on panels with, or folks we’ve been on group calls with. I put out a broad call and then followed up with certain people. And then all of the usual stuff—a lot of hustle. Nobody was doing this for some big advance. I mean, this is every writer’s worst nightmare: losing access to our audiences and knowing that the people we write for, the people we care about, the people whose lives we believe are transformed by access to literature, are missing those chances to have a fuller sense of the

Ashley Hope Pérez

Banned Together: Our Fight for Readers’ Rights

Ed. by Ashley Hope Pérez, illus. by Debbie Fong

Holiday House | 304 pp. | $19.99

March 4, 2025 | 9780823458301

world, to become really joyful, engaged readers. Kids are walking into libraries and looking around and thinking that there aren’t any books out there for them because none of those books are in the library.

The structure of the anthology is striking: poetry, essays, graphic narratives, short stories. How did you decide on taking a multigenre approach?

When I was a high school English teacher, one of the things I discovered working with students who had barriers to engagement with reading and writing was that multigenre approaches were really appealing to them, both in terms of texts they related to and in terms of their own writing.

I’ve contributed to anthologies and I admire so many different approaches, but one of the things that I

People who actually work with adolescents understand that teenagers aren’t the ones who are afraid of the difficult topics.

wanted with this anthology was for it to have a very invitational feeling, so that if you pick it up, anywhere you are, you have a sense of being pulled in. And because different readers have that experience with different kinds of texts, having a range supports that.

So the aspiring poet who flips through and sees that poem has a hook. The person whose way of engaging with literature is graphic narrative—there it is. There’s also just something about visual diversity when you’re looking at a text. I like the ways we use purple in the text so that the resource pages really stand out because they have a purple background. A student who’s flipping through with a very practical What can I do about this? mindset gets right to those lists of books and lists of strategies.

I get annoyed when people think of multigenre collections as existing because we all have short attention spans and we have to be grabbed every moment. Well, no. Anthologies, to be successful, have to invite people in in multiple ways.

The book takes these difficult themes and directs them at adolescents—it doesn’t shy away from treating these young readers as smart, capable interpreters of the world around them. What are your thoughts on that relationship?

People who actually work with adolescents understand that teenagers aren’t the ones who are afraid of the difficult topics. That fear belongs to adults. That discomfort belongs to adults. That anxiety about tricky conversations comes from adults.

I don’t mean to say that every young person is teed up to engage with a book like my novel, Out of Darkness. It’s really heavy and intense and confronts a lot. That’s not everybody’s cup of tea or the right thing for every reader at a given time. But what we know about young people is that when something’s not a fit for them, they just close the book and leave it there for someone else. It’s not a complicated transaction.

I want people to close a book that isn’t right for them at that moment they feel overwhelmed by or unprepared for [it]. Great— close it. Leave it there for someone else. All of it comes back to this fundamental belief in the seriousness and maturity of young people and, frankly, their right to know about the world that they’re responsible for.

If we’re talking about kids ages 13 to 19, if we think about that range, we’re talking about people who are a handful of years away from being responsible for adult realities. And you don’t turn 18 and someone flips a switch and, boom, you have all of the resources you need to navigate that. It’s a process of developing that capacity.

So taking young people seriously is both out of respect for their readiness to do the difficult work of reading about challenging topics and also out of necessity, because they deserve to know about the world that they’re moving into as adults.

Brandon Tensley is the national politics reporter at Capital B.

Death in the Cards

Manansala, Mia P. | Delacorte (352 pp.)

$19.99 | May 13, 2025 | 9780593897928

In tarot, Death is the card of change, and that’s exactly what a Chicago teen faces.

Seventeen-yearold Danika Dizon, a queer Filipino American high school junior, is eager to follow in her private investigator mom’s footsteps. But since her mom doesn’t pay for the hours she spends working behind the desk at the detective agency, Danika reads tarot cards at school as a way to make some cash. When classmate Gaby Delgado, who’s Colombian and Irish, confronts her about her older sister Eli’s recent reading and subsequent disappearance, Danika responsibly brings Gaby and her parents to her mom’s agency. Now Danika is on her first official case, which follows many expected genre beats: covertly questioning Eli’s close friends and ex-boyfriend, evading a potential threat, and infiltrating school clubs and a country club in search of information. In her YA debut, Manansala spins a great mystery that’s filled with atmosphere. The various cultural elements, from Filipino family dynamics and martial arts (for Danika, Kali “is a way of life”) to the art of tarot, are lovingly represented, and the practice of reading tarot cards is made accessible for readers who may be less familiar with it. The investigation chugs along steadily, but dangers are treated with an appropriate level of severity, and the teen characters largely avoid serious harm.

A well-paced and intriguing mystery. (Mystery. 12-17)

Kirkus

Star

Sometimes

the Girl

Mason-Black, Jennifer | Carolrhoda Lab (304 pp.) | $19.99 | May 6, 2025 9781728493299

A teen gets a job organizing and cataloging a chronically ill author’s possessions, an experience that helps her find her voice as a writer.

Pulitzer

Prize–winning author Elsie McAllister has a “permanent A+” reputation thanks to her one novel, which is “read in every high school” in America. The recalcitrant and reclusive older woman has two goals: safeguarding her privacy and ensuring that the person she hires will do exactly as she wishes with her belongings. Holiday Burton’s desire to earn enough to go to New Zealand and work on farms with ex-girlfriend Maya is an incentive to take the well-paid job. Both McAllister and Holi have been manipulated by male gatekeepers who had their own selfish reasons to stunt each woman’s creativity. While sorting through McAllister’s possessions, Holi discovers secrets from her past that were suppressed to make way for her “Great American Novel.” Holi sees an echo of her own artistic self-doubts and vulnerability in the face of a similar exploitative power dynamic. Mason-Black’s prose sparkles with poetic beauty as Holi engages in introspective musings about collective mourning and how individual healing is possible only in

An homage to folk hero stories told through a feminist lens.

SALVACIÓN

community. The stunning descriptions bring vitality to and convey the languid beauty of the Amherst, Massachusetts, setting. This striking work shows the power of intergenerational relationships to fortify queer artists against erasure. The protagonists present as white. Beautifully written and powerfully uplifting. (content note, resources) (Fiction. 14-18)

Gradchanted

Matson, Morgan | Disney-Hyperion (400 pp.) $13.99 paper | March 4, 2025 | 9781368097420

A teen’s Disneyland graduation celebration leads to reliving the same experiences until she discovers how to change the path she’s on. Cass Issac, a recent graduate of Harbor Cove High, has attended 16 schools, making her a pro at goodbyes. Three weeks before graduation, her dads (who run a house-flipping business) announced that they’ll be moving to Oregon, making Disney Grad Nite her last in California. Cass has learned it’s best to leave when things are “at their peak,” so she doesn’t tell her best friend, Bryony Tsai, the news, choosing instead to focus on making the party an epic final memory. But once they’re inside Disney’s California Adventure, nothing goes the way Cass planned. Despite a meet-cute and instant connection with cute British bass player Freddie Sharma from boy band Eton Mess, Cass tries to flee after coming face-to-face with angry friends she’s ghosted. Cass’ wish to have “a chance to do things over and make things right” thrusts her into a time loop. The Disney backdrop is as important as the characters, with each iteration of the time loop feeling like an ode to a restaurant, ride, or character. Despite some entertaining moments and the meaningful central message of appreciating the time we have and the people in our lives, Cass’ slow growth makes the reading experience monotonous, impeding readers’ connection

with the characters. Cass presents white, and the supporting cast contains ethnic diversity.

A plodding tale with some enjoyable highlights. (Romance. 12-18)

The Lost Queen

Phan, Aimee | Putnam (368 pp.)

$19.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9780593697337

Series: The Lost Queen, 1

A lonely teen discovers that she and her new friend are part of something fantastical in this duology opener.

High schooler Jolie Lam used to have good friends, a cherished spot on the swim team, and a great relationship with her Vietnamese paternal grandparents (her late mom was white). Now her former close friends, Lana Marquez-Chen and Daphne Nguyen, ignore her, she only gets to swim in gym class, and her grandfather Ông Nội, who used to be a successful thầy bói, or psychic, is succumbing to dementia. Despite Ông Nội’s belief that women can’t be thầy bói, Jolie’s having strange, vivid visions that include murky water, a bizarre conversation, and a battlefield in ancient Vietnam. When she crosses paths with Huong Pham, a popular junior who recently arrived in the U.S. from Vietnam, Jolie realizes that her visions—and all Ông Nội’s stories—just might be true. As Jolie embraces her magic, she revises how she views herself, her family, and the world itself. Jolie is a relatable narrator, and the California setting is well developed. Phan ties together historical folktales with issues such as war and natural disasters, which add realism and ground the magical elements. Unfortunately, the story’s many potentially intriguing themes—power, mental health, family ties, conflicts among Asian countries, and good and evil—are one-dimensional and underdeveloped. Intriguing plot twists and an original premise can’t overcome limited thematic development. (Fantasy. 13-17)

Kirkus Star

Salvación

Proudman, Sandra | Wednesday Books (336 pp.) | $20.00 May 20, 2025 | 9781250895080

Lola de la Peña defies the gendered expectations of her family and 19th-century Mexican culture as she fights burgeoning threats, both magical and human, to her home.

Mamá, Papá, Lola, and brother Víctor traveled to Alta California to fulfill Lola’s mother’s spiritual calling to heal people using sal negra, a magical substance that’s mined there. Sal negra cures any injury or malady, and people in the town of Coloma wait to be treated by Mamá. But the stories of miraculous healing draw foes as well, including white men who intend to take the resource by force as they colonize Alta California, Indigenous territory recently ceded by Mexico to U.S. control. As Coloma grows more dangerous, Lola and Víctor team up to protect people; despite her parents’ strong disapproval, Lola disguises herself as a masked woman vigilante known as Salvación. As her alter ego’s reputation spreads, so do the dangers to Lola’s family and town. When a mysterious caravan of men arrives, led by a charismatic leader who promises to restore Mexican sovereignty, they’re welcomed by the townspeople and Lola’s parents, who hope that now Salvación can retire. But a stranger’s cryptic warning means Salvación may not be ready to give up the fight. Action-packed and thrilling with a touch of romance, Proudman’s debut novel is an homage to folk hero stories told through a feminist lens. The work, which is rooted in ecological justice, effectively critiques colonialism and jingoistic nationalism. A heartfelt, swashbuckling, standout novel. (Historical fantasy. 13-18)

Out of Air

Reiss, Rachel | Wednesday Books (304 pp.)

$20.00 | May 13, 2025 | 9781250366146

A group of scuba-diving friends from the Florida Keys go on an adventure after high school graduation—but it may be their last.

Phoebe “Phibs” Ray is a natural underwater. Her instincts have led her not only to befriend the Salt Squad, her crew of dive shop pals, but also to discover historic gold coins. The Salt Squad— Phibs, Lani, Isabel, Gabe, and Gabe’s twin, Will—have gone viral on social media thanks to Phibs’ find and her photos and videos of their dives. Over this last summer before they embark on different paths, the teens decide to go to Australia. Phibs, who knows nothing about her father and whose mother abandoned her, lives with her grandmother, and unlike her rich, college-bound friends, she isn’t excited about her future: staying home and caring for Gram. But she’s looking forward to this trip to a remote atoll off the coast of Western Australia, not least because she’ll get to spend time with dark-skinned Gabe, her crush (most other characters present white). Their destination is also the subject of gruesome, creepy stories about a mysterious, treasure-filled cave. Alternating timelines slowly and effectively reveal the Salt Squad’s shared secret and the truth about Phibs’ past. Phibs is a compellingly strong, nuanced lead, and her romantic scenes with Gabe are steamy. The book, which delves into environmental themes, ultimately reaches a conclusion that’s unusual and effective.

A deep-sea adventure that snappily blends mystery and romance with social themes. (Thriller. 14-18)

For another paranormal wilderness thriller, visit Kirkus online.

Girls: Life Isn’t a Fairy Tale

Schaap, Annet | Trans. by Laura Watkinson Pushkin Children’s Books (192 pp.) | $12.95 paper | March 4, 2025 | 9781782693796

In this collection of fairy-tale retellings translated from Dutch, girlhood is fraught with danger. In the spirit of the classic versions of these European tales popularized by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, seven stories contrast humanity’s darker impulses with the youth and vulnerability evoked by the title. The book opens with “Mr Stiltskin,” in which a careless miller offers up his daughter’s gold-spinning talent to an avaricious king. In “Biscuits,” sisters abandoned by their workaholic father wander the streets until they find a bakery whose owners eagerly use the hungry children for a marketing campaign. The theme of neglectful adults continues in “Sleeper,” in which a girl must singlehandedly maintain the household when her parents become immobilized with grief over her dying sister. Danger lurks beyond the family unit in the form of the resentful titular creature in “Wolf” and a sinister village reverend in “Blue.” It may also appear from within, through internalized ideals of masculinity (in “Frog”) and femininity (in “Monster Girl”). Readers won’t find conventional happy endings, though several stories conclude on hopeful notes, with girls grasping independence and self-worth as they move forward. The retellings are largely faithful to their source material, with small differences that draw attention to unsettling implications within each one. The third-person omniscient point of view highlights the girls’ internal narration, which reveals their own selfishness but also their courage and kindness. Schaap’s evocative art punctuates the text.

Cautionary tales that feel both fresh and familiar. (Short stories. 13-18)

Highly effective pacing contributes to the increasingly unsettling tension.

THE THRASHERS

The Whisperwood Legacy

Schulte, Jo | Little, Brown (352 pp.)

$19.99 | May 27, 2025 | 9780316578721

Inside a shuttered North Carolina theme park, one family is bound for a reckoning. Since its inception, Whisperwood Park has been run by a member of the Strauss family: first German immigrant Sir Wilhelm and now Virginia, his great-granddaughter. The popular park featured rides and attractions based on Wilhelm’s tales, which brought to life his German heritage within the Appalachian setting. But 18 months ago, Virginia abruptly shuttered it. As potential heirs to the property, 17-year-old Francesca “Frankie” Montgomery-Strauss and the rest of her family return, hoping to uncover what happened and what it means for their futures. Frankie also seeks to understand the disappearance of her friend (and maybe something more) Zara Morales. And then Oma—Frankie’s grandmother Virginia—goes missing too. The answers lie in the park, with its stories and its quiet, attractive teenage groundskeeper, Jem. Magic, a family feud, and a dark deal coalesce in a whirlwind that complements rather than overshadows Frankie’s story of unraveling her past, her feelings, and her agency. The portrayal of Frankie’s bisexuality stands out as an understated yet clearly integral part of her characterization. Atmospheric and broody, the story brings together monsters and fairy tales even as it tackles teenage love and heartbreak and digs into the key role Frankie plays in the future of the park

and her family. Most characters are cued white; Zara presents Latine. A strong, compelling debut that shows that stories really do have power—and can hold danger. (family tree) (Fantasy. 13-18)

Kirkus Star

The Thrashers

Soto, Julie | Wednesday Books (352 pp.)

$20.00 | May 6, 2025 | 9781250377173

When police investigate a teenage girl’s supposed suicide, New Helvetia High’s most exclusive friend group comes under scrutiny. The Thrashers are high school royalty. Zack Thrasher (the group’s namesake), Lucy Reed, Paige Montgomery, and Julian Hollister are wealthy and attractive. Jodi Dillon, who feels ordinary by comparison, has been friends with Zack since childhood. Not just anyone can become a Thrasher, but that was Emily Mills’ goal. After Emily is found dead the evening of prom, rumors circulate around school that she was Thrashed—socially ostracized—for trying to join the clique. Everything starts to unravel after investigators find Emily’s journal detailing how she was bullied by all of them—except Jodi, who rebuffed her. Jodi feels compelled to seek the truth surrounding Emily’s death without implicating her friends, but the more she learns, the more she doubts their credibility. The story’s careful, highly effective pacing contributes to the increasingly

unsettling tension as strange and terrifying incidents occur. Readers who empathize with insecure Jodi are kept in suspense until the end, feeling relief whenever the others show genuine care for her while nervously anticipating the possibility that harm may befall her. Main characters largely present white. Lucy has brown skin, and Jodi is cued as white and Latine. A haunting page-turner that smartly explores the complexities of teenage relationships and feelings of selfworth. (Thriller. 14-18)

Wake the Wild Creatures

Suma, Nova Ren | Little, Brown (384 pp.)

$18.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9781616206727

A teenage girl must come to terms with her haunting past and mundane future. The book opens “somewhere in the Catskill Mountains,” as 13-year-old Talia is forcibly removed by the police from the mystical community of women where she was raised and sent to live with her estranged aunt and cousins. Adjusting to the outside world proves challenging for Talia, who has spent most of her life in the wilderness, growing up in an abandoned hotel called the Neves alongside a group of women who were scarred by unimaginable cruelty. At 16, Talia still yearns to contact her imprisoned mother despite their complicated relationship and struggles to connect with her family and classmates. Her ultimate goal is to return to the Neves and reunite with the women who raised her. Told in alternating timelines, the narrative weaves together Talia’s childhood memories and her presentday struggles. Talia reflects on the systemic inhumanity women face, uncovering the events that drove her mother to flee society. These themes echo in the experiences of her cousin Lake, whose story parallels Talia’s mother’s. The prose is poetic and

haunting, though the plot occasionally feels thin, relying heavily on Talia’s introspection. However, her evolving relationship with Lake is particularly compelling, offering a nuanced exploration of what it means to believe women. Talia and her mother’s family are Jewish; there’s some racial diversity in secondary characters. Feminist and captivating. (Fiction. 14-18)

Orisha, Volume 1: With Great Power

Umar, Huzayfa | Rockport Publishers (224 pp.) $13.99 paper | Feb. 25, 2025 | 9780760390320

A boy is pursued by divine beings after he accidentally receives a murdered god’s powers in this series opener populated with West African characters. Aboki is often bullied for the “curse markings” on his face, but after the other kids ditch him while playing in the forest, he finds a seed that was thrown into space by celestial god Olorun and landed near his village. The seed turns Aboki into an Orisha, a mortal blessed with divine powers. E’shu, the guardian of the Orisha seed that Aboki found, tries to tell him that the seed is being hunted by Olorun’s killer, but before he can fully explain the situation, they’re attacked, first by a voodoo beast and then by Shango, the Lightning Orisha, both of whom are seeking the seed. Now on the run, Aboki must find a way to prove that he can be trusted with the seed’s power before he, too, is killed. Despite the light character development, the fast pace, dynamic action sequences, and plot twists will keep readers engaged and rooting for Aboki and his traveling companions. Regular readers of adventure manga series like Naruto and My Hero Academia will find the premise familiar, but the use of West African mythology by a Nigerian graphic novelist adds a fresh perspective. Featuring a bold, detailed art style and marvelous

character designs, this is a worthy addition to any graphic novel collection. A strong start to a new adventure series. (Manga. 13-18)

The Glittering Edge

Villaire, Alyssa | Little, Brown (432 pp.)

$19.99 | May 6, 2025 | 9780316574945

An unlikely trio attempt to break a ruinous family curse in this fantasy debut. Rising senior Penny Emberly keeps a low profile in her hometown of Idlewood, Indiana. She’s content with focusing on her mom, Anita, her best friend, and her cafe job. But everything changes when Anita has an accident that leaves her in a coma. Penny’s former crush, Corey Barrion, confesses that he believes her mother to be a victim of his family curse: Anyone a Barrion falls in love with will die— and his aunt has fallen for Anita. The curse is the fault of the Barrions’ rivals, the De Luca family; it seems that the rumors that they’re witches are true. Penny confronts “violent, volatile” Alonso De Luca, a striking goth classmate, and he eventually agrees to help find a way to break the curse. Thrown together, the three teens encounter setbacks as time runs out for Anita, and an ominous shadow figure appears. The third-person narration rotates among the three leads’ perspectives. Penny’s and Alonso’s characterizations ring true, but biracial Corey remains two-dimensional despite his family’s interesting dynamics—his mother is Cameroonian in an otherwise mostly white family (Penny and Alonso are cued white). Villaire does a good job with the magical lore, and the cliffhanger ending successfully sets up for a sequel, but a love triangle storyline feels extraneous, and some dialogue falls flat. Filled with magical intrigue but ultimately casts an uneven spell. (family tree) (Fantasy. 14-18)

Paranormal and Supernatural Reads

New Novel by Adam Silvera Coming This Spring

The YA author will publish a third novel set in the universe of They Both Die at the End.

Adam Silvera will revisit the world of his most popular YA book in a new novel, HarperCollins

Children’s Books announced in a news release.

The press will publish Silvera’s The Survivor Wants To Die at the End in the spring. It will be the third book in the series that began in 2017 with They Both Die at the End and continued in 2022 with a prequel, The First To Die at the End

The two young adult novels by Silvera tell the story of people whose lives are affected by Death-Cast, a service that calls people on the day they are scheduled to die. They Both Die at the End became a viral sensation on TikTok during the Covid-19 pandemic and is being adapted as a Netflix series.

The Survivor Wants To Die at the End will follow two

Book to Screen

Thuso Mbedu To Star in Children of Blood and Bone Adaptation

The film is based on Tomi Adeyemi’s young adult fantasy novel.

Thuso Mbedu will star in the upcoming film adaptation of Tomi Adeyemi’s young adult fantasy novel Children of Blood and Bone, Variety reports.

Adeyemi’s novel, published in 2018 by Henry Holt, tells the story of Zélie, a 17-year-old girl in the kingdom of Orïsha who is determined to bring back magic to the land after a king

does his best to eradicate it. In a starred re view, a critic for Kirkus called the book—the first in a trilogy—“powerful, captivating, and raw” and “exceptional.”

Mbedu, known for her roles in the series adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The

young men, one the conflicted heir to the Death-Cast fortune, and the other struggling with suicidal ideation, who are brought together by chance.

Silvera announced the book in a video on Instagram, saying, “It is definitely a novel about ‘self-unaliving’ ideation, which is something that I’ve struggled with for more than half my life.…It is absolutely about battling mental illness, but it is not about dying, it is about wanting to die.”

The Survivor Wants To Die at the End is scheduled for publication on May 6.—M.S.

For a review of They Both Die at the End, visit Kirkus online.

Underground Railroad and the film The Woman King, will play Zélie in the film. Also starring in lead roles will be Amandla Stenberg (The Hate U Give), Damson Idris (Snowfall ), and Tosin Cole (Doctor Who).

The rest of the cast will include Cynthia Erivo (Wicked ), Viola Davis ( Fences), Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave), Idris Elba (The Wire), and Lashana Lynch (Captain Marvel ). Gina PrinceBythewood (The Woman

King) will direct from a script that she co-wrote with Adeyemi.

Mbedu reflected on her casting in a thread on the social platform X, writing, “‘Children of Blood and Bone’ was gifted to me in 2019 and, truly, it’s one of the best gifts I’ve received.…

To know that I have the opportunity to work with some of the most amazing people as we tell this great story is truly humbling.”

—M.S.

For a review of Children of Blood and Bone, visit Kirkus online.

Thuso Mbedu

Adam Silvera

Indie

PICTURE BOOKS FOR MUSICAL YOUTH

MANY AMATEUR and professional musicians tell stories of first performing songs when they were children, whether taking piano lessons, attending choir practice, playing “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” on a kid-sized guitar, or singing along with pop hits on the radio. It’s no wonder, then, that so many books for very young readers are about playing music live—with all the noise, anxiety, and wonder that experience entails. Here are three such titles, all recommended by Kirkus Indie:

The Day the Instruments Split! (2021), a picture book written by Trinity Bursey and illustrated by John D. Shull, features an array of anthropomorphic musical instruments who enjoy playing together in harmony—until one day, a strange, top-hatted villain upends their notion of music performance. He insists that each instrument should play apart from the others: “How can maracas shake when drums are drumming?… How can pianos play when guitars are strumming?” Soon, everyone’s out for

themselves: “sounds collided / and music crashed, / Until everything / was one giant bash!” The chaotic cacophony even affects the natural world—stopping rain from falling, and clocks from ticking. At a free concert that night, however, a conductor convinces the instruments of the merits of performing in harmony. It’s a lively spin on the notion of collaboration, set in the context of playing a song together. Our reviewer calls it “an engaging music-themed tale for preschoolers who need a simple lesson about unity.”

Debbie Nutley’s 2023 picture-book series entry, Ruby’s Heart Song, tackles the concept of stage fright in a way that young musicians are sure to find relatable. Ruby, a penguin,

tells her pal, Pengwee, that she’s “nexcited” (nervous and excited) about singing at an upcoming talent show whose audience will include “every penguin on the glacier.” Being excited isn’t too unpleasant when she’s by herself, as it inspires her to dance, but when she’s anxious in front of others, she says, her heart beats “too loud.” Pengwee notes that their heart similarly “jumps when [they’re] jittery.” Ruby solves her problem while performing onstage by first looking up at the sky, and then looking at supportive Pengwee in the audience, who knows exactly what she’s going through. Kirkus’ reviewer calls the book, which features illustrations by Alexandra Rusu, “a cutesy but conversation-starting narrative that takes anxiety seriously and offers practical solutions.”

The Kirkus-starred Petunia the Perfectionist by Marissa Bader, illustrated

by Ellie Beykzadeh, was chosen as one of Kirkus’ Best Indie Books of 2024. The young title character always wants to do things perfectly: “The idea of coloring outside the lines made Petunia panic.” Her mom tells her that “nobody’s PERFECT all the time. Mistakes are a good thing—they help us learn!” Petunia is skeptical, and when her finger inadvertently slips on a string during her guitar lesson, it makes a new noise that initially embarrasses her. Then her teacher approves of “the brand new sound! How wonderfully inventive!” Petunia realizes that unexpected musical “mistakes” can foster creativity. “Playing a wrong note strikes the right chord for a determined little girl in this winning children’s story,” writes our reviewer.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.

Illustration by Eric Scott Anderson

DAVID RAPP

EDITOR’S PICK

A CDC doctor’s insider account of the opioid crisis.

LeBaron comes to the subject of the 21st century’s war on opioids as a seasoned professional—he’s a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Medical School, and has been a medical epidemiologist for over 28 years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—but he opens his book with his personal connection to the subject. In disastrous succession, the author experienced meningitis, disseminated shingles, and spinal abscesses. This put him in a position to need opioids himself and brought him into a collision with the escalating and highly politicized war on drugs.

“Beset on every side by these virtuous prime-time crusaders,” he asks, “how was I going to get my little

oxycodone pill?” In 1980, 41,000 people in the U.S. were imprisoned for drug offenses, and as LeBaron points out, that number is now ten times as high. The author’s experiences have put him on the front lines of this “opioid epidemic,” working for the CDC but also serving stints as a prison doctor and as a visiting physician for an Indian Health Service hospital in Appalachia that was a “pill mill” for many of its patients—the author found himself in the position of dispensing “narcs” on a regular basis. This combination of personal and professional vantage points is elevated by LeBaron’s vivid and fast-paced writing style (quotes from Mary Tyler Moore and Rickey Henderson jostle against allusions to Plato)

Greed To Do Good

and gives his insights added weight. “What if rigid opioid prescription controls, prompted by the CDC Guideline, were provoking and even promoting addict-like behavior among those who had nothing but severe pain?” he asks, noting that “exaggerated narratives of fear tend to be counterproductive.” The U.S. has

5% of the world’s population but consumes 80% of the world’s opioids; LeBaron here details both the worst of the country’s dysfunctional system and some working models that might actually improve the situation in gripping, sometimes-searing prose. A powerful, important, expert analysis of the opioid epidemic.

Paul Orzulak

A page-turning, grim tale with a somewhat sympathetic villain.

MUDDY THE WATER

Children of the Fog

Anderson, C.W. | Fever Dream Books (383 pp.) | $14.99 paper

March 5, 2024 | 9781963733013

San Francisco’s fog conceals madness, murder, and demonic intrigue in this lurid horror novel.

Lizzy Gardner has the perfect San Francisco life, complete with a high-paying job as a wealth manager, a swanky downtown apartment, and a devoted boyfriend named Tom. It all unravels when she has a horrific nightmare about a young woman being disemboweled, only to see news reports the next day about an identical girl who has been found dismembered in Golden Gate Park. Lizzy intuits that the dream and the murder are somehow connected to her brother Dylan, a drifter, dream interpreter, and occasional psychward inmate. The runaway junkies whom Dylan hangs out with have been having unsettling visions of a Dark Lady, her ghoulish, corpselike minions, and a giant cat; the apparitions have prompted a rash of overdoses and suicides. A fresh encounter with the Lady’s hypnotic minion sends Lizzy into a nervous breakdown; she starts wandering the streets and has a psychotic episode at work. Dylan takes Lizzy to a prophetess, who clarifies their predicament: Lizzy must allow the Dark Lady to take possession of her body—or Tom will be killed. Anderson’s yarn is a tense, psychological horror story in which the lines between dreams, delusions, and reality blur and

otherworldly villainy feeds on characters’ very human sinfulness and guilt. It’s also an eerie portrait of San Francisco, from the sterile Financial District skyscrapers to the seedy Tenderloin. Anderson’s richly atmospheric prose is punctuated by gory violence and horribly vivid evocations of the macabre: “The grin…was so revolting, so smeared-looking. As if her grandmother had been munching on flies, their black bodies caught in her teeth behind her pursed and bloodless lips. There was a cunning hunger in that grin, quivering, vulgar—a hunger for her.” Yikes.

A haunting supernatural thriller blending splattery carnage with creepy derangements of the soul.

Muddy the Water

Barrows, Matt & Jessica Barrows Beebe Koehler Books (258 pp.) | $27.95 $19.95 paper | Jan. 28, 2025 9798888245620 | 9798888245606 paper

Beebe and Barrows’ thriller delves into the psychology of a killer and a cop.

Det. Lillian Grimes of Haversport, Massachusetts, is pursuing a killer.

The murder of Carlos Joaquin, a boat captain, is personal; he was the detective’s best friend. Too close to the victim to be allowed on the case, Grimes seeks justice anyway, but her quarry is elusive. The villain, Benjamin Broome, is bold, strong, and resourceful; though socially awkward, he can switch on a

short-term winning personality. After Carlos’ murder, Ben is fleeing South when he spots his next potential victim, Charlie Fisher, on a bus. Confident, well-dressed Charlie is en route to Belle Isle, South Carolina, hired sight unseen on the environment beat for a small newspaper. Ben decides to see what it’s like to live a privileged life. Easily overpowering the weaker man, he strangles Charlie, drags him into the Messahawnee River and assumes his identity. Though lacking journalism experience, Ben develops his reporting skills and lands a scoop—a fisherman shows Ben a decomposed corpse fished from the Messahawnee River. The newspaper story Ben writes about the mysterious “John Doe” causes a sensation, and only Ben knows the victim’s identity. Though Ben’s in trouble—an inquisitive sheriff is making progress on the case, and Charlie’s grandmother is sniffing around—he’ll do whatever it takes to protect his successful new life; he has an apartment, car, even a duvet cover. But Grimes is equally determined to catch Carlos’ killer. In Beebe and Barrows’ twisty thriller, which gives the perspectives of both hunter and hunted, readers are steeped in Low Country life and learn about running a small-town newspaper, fishing boats, and Gullah culture. The authors skillfully depict Ben’s unhappy childhood; he’d envisioned himself and Charlie as a matching set of bicycles, “only one had been cared for and stored inside while the other had been left outdoors to rust.” Though operating on the right side of the law, solitary and obsessive Grimes isn’t as compelling, and readers may identify with messed-up Ben longer than is perhaps comfortable.

A page-turning, grim tale with a somewhat sympathetic villain.

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Facing Inward

Carter, Melissa | Whanging Dude

Publishing (275 pp.) | $19.95 paper

May 1, 2025 | 9798989407804

A radio personality looks back on her storied career and discusses her experience of suffering from chronic illness in this memoir.

Sometimes a celebrity memoir is all about the glitz and the glam, the hobnobbing with the who’s who of the media industry; Carter’s new memoir delivers on this front. She dishes on her run-ins with RuPaul, David Byrne, and a juicy fake kiss with pop star Pink among other celebrity encounters over the course of her career in television media and, especially, radio. These stories add spice to a memoir that is, ultimately, about growing up as a lesbian in the American South while suffering from chronic illness. Carter pieces together the events of her life chronologically, from a birth scene originally written in a screenplay format (a man, her father, is asked to make a “Sophie’s Choice” between saving his wife or his daughter: “M-my wife, of course”) to the near-present in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. As a child, the author suffered from mysterious gastrointestinal issues eventually diagnosed as “spastic colon” (what might now be diagnosed as IBS). As the narrative progresses and she grows older, the focus shifts to the challenges of balancing her kidney failure and dialysis with the work of talk radio. The book is also an account of coming out of the closet and navigating romantic relationships on top of all of the author’s health complications. Carter’s prose throughout is clear and well balanced between moments of levity and sincerity. (A scene in which the author comes out to her father underneath the glow of a Wendy’s sign is particularly poignant.) While Carter’s memoir sometimes feels uneven, as the author doesn’t always

manage the smoothest tonal shifts between her health episodes and her professional development, the work is valuable as a piece of well-wrought introspection and as a look at queer life in the 1990s and 2000s.

A thoughtful chronicle of illness enlivened by celebrity anecdotes.

City Swimmers & Other Stories

Clark, Steve | Black Note Press (138 pp.)

$26.95 | $16.95 paper | Sept. 11, 2024 9798990416727 | 9798990416710 paper

Clark offers a collection of city-based short stories exploring themes of adulthood, marriage, parenthood, and loss. These 10 vignettes excavate interior musings and relationships between spouses, parents, and children; most of the stories center around marriage. In the title story, a writer and lifelong New Yorker ponders the main character of a story he is working on as he gets his young son ready for school and reminisces about his wife. “For the Love Of Wasabi Peas” is a poignant portrait of a couple that has married three times and divorced twice as they are on the verge of their third divorce. (“When you fall in love, no matter how old you become, how many years pass, a part of you remains that age for each other forever, no matter what.”) In “His Day at the Beach” and “The Reunion,” divorced fathers grapple with the distances between them and their sons. (“I could lose her. But my kids, my boys? I had to lie down. My heart was beating so fast I thought I’d die, and I couldn’t do that and leave them unprotected.”) “The Revenge Fund” is a marked contrast; in this tale, a young woman is the only one of her friends denied entrance to a club. (“The buzzard doesn’t think she can hear him, says out the side of his mouth, ‘Face Control.’ He’s referring to her. It’s her face that’s

being controlled. Being excluded, shut out.”) When she gets an unexpected and large inheritance the following week, she takes elaborate and satisfying revenge on the buzzardlike bouncer. In his first collection of short stories, Clark deftly depicts people of varying ages and perspectives. The conversations throughout are sharp and authentic, as are the interior monologues that illuminate the motives and actions of characters. For the most part, the stories take place in New York City and its environs, with witty evocations of its gruff reputation; even “A Last Stroll Through Her Favorite City” set in Paris, includes this shout-out: “How unlike New York, a woman just smiled at me for no reason.”

An entertaining and thoughtful group of stories.

The Hipster’s Legacy: A Story about a Family

Cohen, Lorraine Gibson | Plumtree Tales (598 pp.) | $35.00 | $25.00 paper March 18, 2025 | 9798990845626 9798990845602 paper

The daughter of a 20th-century jazz musician recollects her unique childhood in this debut memoir. A classically trained Julliard musician, Harry Raab first made a splash on Harlem’s jazz scene in the 1930s. The Jewish, jive-taking boogie-woogie musician eventually evolved into “Harry the Hipster,” an alternative persona characterized by screwball, drug-themed antics. In the words of Cohen, his daughter, “He wanted his fame,” even if that meant shedding his own personality to become a caricature in the interest of securing television and radio appearances. In this memoir, set primarily during the 1950s and 1960s during Cohen’s childhood and adolescence, the author provides an intimate lens through which readers can view the life of an iconically idiosyncratic 20th-century musician. Readers are given a backstage

tour of the era’s jazz scene featuring reflections on Nat King Cole, Ray Charles, and Fats Waller, among others. Cohen also takes readers into the backrooms of radio studios and lowbudget television stations of the era; the book begins as Harry takes his family with him to The Al Jarvis Show, where they meet Betty White. While Cohen’s life as a showbiz kid was never dull, her dad consistently battled with personal demons and insecurities, spurring his never-ending quest to strike it rich with a platinum hit. This led him to write a slew of novelty Christmas songs in hopes one of them would take off, including “I Hope My Mother-in-law Don’t Come for Christmas.” Harry was also preoccupied with drugs, which inspired some of his more well-known songs, like “Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?” On one occasion, after Harry was arrested for drug possession, Cohen recalls her mother selling the family’s furniture to pay for legal fees (despite her father’s status as a B-list celebrity, the family lived modestly in a small home adjacent to a landfill and oil wells).

More than just a tell-all book about a wacky entertainer, this coming-of-age memoir features Cohen’s own story as a girl growing up in California during an era of national upheaval and social change—historical anecdotes from the era are blended with more intimate memories of childhood friends, siblings, teenage hormones, and even a hitchhiking adventure. Based on journal entries the author began writing in the early 1960s, the book’s vignettes are remarkably detailed, especially given the half-century between them and this remembrance. Described by Cohen as a “dramatized memoir,” the book is written almost like a novel, featuring reconstructed dialogue and occasional third-person narration (notably, the author rarely refers to her father as “dad,” but almost always as “Harry”). Cohen’s accessible prose style is punctuated by Harry’s jive-infused vocabulary, and the book includes a glossary of the era’s hipster lingo for neophytes. The pages also include an abundance of photographs and family snapshots. Cohen’s successes as a New York City–based artist and package designer for JC Penney are

minimized in the text; invested readers may hope for a second book that details the author’s own history as a trailblazer in corporate America. The spellbinding story of one of history’s zaniest entertainers as told from the perspective of his daughter.

State of Matter

DeGrandpre, Richard | Sad Story Press (321 pp.) | Oct. 7, 2024

Uranium stolen in 1994 is used in a present-day attack on a United States Navy command ship with a threat of more to come in DeGrandpre’s thriller.

“Me?…I’m just an interpreter,” proclaims young CIA officer Bill Estes. Right, and Jack Ryan was just an analyst in Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October. Based on his smarts and resourcefulness in this techno-thriller, Bill Estes, too, may have a franchise in his future. Estes, “a natural for the intelligence service,” is just 18 months into his employment with the CIA when he receives his first field mission to Kazakhstan. With no authority to make anything happen, he is promised that the mission will be “neither terribly exciting nor demanding.” Wrong on both counts: A nuclear device destroys a Navy command ship, wipes out a fishing village, and disrupts communications and electronics. Is this a test device? Estes believes so, and together with FBI Special Agent Michelle Marsh he pursues whoever stole the uranium used in the attack. The plan is simple, Estes tells Marsh: “Relentless pursuit.” The pursuit leads them to Konstantin Pavlovich, who is obsessed with nuclear

gadgetry, and to mercenary and arms dealer Grigori Kirill, who, as he demonstrates with ruthless efficiency, is not someone to be messed with. DeGrandpre brings a sense of authenticity to this propulsive global thriller that spans decades and features far-flung locations from Tennessee to Russia. Understatement serves the author well, heightening the suspense and menace: “Kon never learned exactly what Yuri had done to upset Kirill; all he knew was that the man must have done something, because one day, some ex-Soviet KGB henchmen showed up in a military 4x4 and shot Yuri pointblank for trespassing.” Chapter headings undermine the story’s momentum, but the characters, major and minor, are strongly defined, and an effective open ending sets the stage for an anticipated second mission. A superior thriller with real-world chaos and well-credentialed heroes that will engage fans of the genre.

Flight of the Sparrow

DeMornay, Fallon | Podium Publishing (336 pp.) $19.99 paper | April 1, 2025 | 9781039482821

DeMornay presents an intergalactic adventure in which a cadetin-training must team up with her imprisoned grandmother’s friends on an unexpected mission.

Nimah Dabo-124 is a disciplined and ambitious cadet training to be an elite law enforcement officer for the Stars Intelligence and Government Authority. Her life is upended when her estranged grandmother, the infamous pirate Capt. Indira “La Voz” Roscoe, is accused of a devastating act of

A must-read for fans of spacefaring escapades.

terrorism. Thrust back into a world she thought she left behind, Nimah must team up with her grandma’s quirky, geriatric crew to pull off a seemingly impossible heist in order save the pirate’s life. Scenes of Nimah working alongside her grandmother’s peers—a group of sharp-witted, older women who are equal parts charming and formidable—puts a delightful spin on the usual casting of a slick, younger heist team. It’s a diverse and compelling cast of characters; the group features a spectrum of personalities, backgrounds, and skillsets, and one crewmember navigates missions with a high-tech mobility aid. This inclusivity makes the ensemble feels authentic and dynamic, enriching the story as a whole. Readers are also treated to solid worldbuilding, with glimpses of many different parts of the galaxy as the action takes Nimah and her crew across a vibrant, richly imagined fictional universe. Adding complexity is an appealing enemies-tolovers subplot as Nimah confronts her personal prejudices and finds unexpected connection with someone on the wrong side of the law. The plot features clever twists, keeping readers on edge as Nimah navigates her own complicated emotions. It’s a story of identity, of loyalty, and of finding courage in the most unlikely places, and it’s a mustread for fans of spacefaring escapades. A heart-pounding SF adventure that’s as emotionally resonant as it is thrilling.

Novelty

Dermot, Leon | Self (181 pp.) | $18.40

$9.85 paper | Dec. 6, 2024

9798302705716 | 9798302702708 paper

In Dermot’s novel, a billionaire aims to save humanity from the illusion of free will with a decisionmaking invention. Wealthy, 53-year- old Finn Balor has become preoccupied with the notion that choices are not acts of agency, but a product of predetermined fate. A

billionaire and self-described “polymath with a genius-level IQ,” Finn is determined to “smash the immortal causal chain” by introducing true randomness to decisionmaking with the Oracle, a device he invented based on the theory of quantum indeterminacy. It chooses between two courses of action in a truly random manner, unlike, say, flipping a coin, which is shackled to predetermination. This random disruption, he believes, will save humanity—and this, he asserts, is his own predestined fate, as revealed to him by a coterie of former lovers in his dreams. To test the Oracle, he creates a top-secret, cultlike organization called Q-Path. As his well-paid followers use the Oracle and obey its directives, chaos ensues—but the loss or ruin of millions of lives is a small price to pay, he thinks, for the salvation of countless lives down the road. It’s all quite taxing for Finn, who frequently drinks and experiences blackouts; meanwhile, unidentified parties seem to be sabotaging his mission. Dermot effectively plunges readers into the chaotic and likely unbalanced mind of his protagonist, who narrates the story in a stream-of-consciousness manner. The egomaniacal, misogynistic Finn is simultaneously intriguing and loathsome; readers aren’t likely to root for him, but they won’t be able to look away, as his story is simply too darkly funny and brilliantly unhinged to stop reading. Throughout, Finn indulges in long pseudo-philosophical monologues, explanations about Q-Path and Oracle, and anecdotes about his troubled upbringing, which sometimes slow the pace, but not enough to hinder the overall flow.

A chaotic black comedy about a man with a messiah complex.

Lost on Cherry Street

Donahue, Jack | Willow River Press (360 pp.) $16.07 paper | June 25, 2024 | 9781958901885

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Three generations of Irish Americans struggle to make it in America in Donahue’s historical novel. In the midst of the Great Famine in 1847 rural Ireland, families save to send their children to America in the hope of a better life. Stephen Callaghan receives an offer from an Irish immigrant in New York who wishes to employ the young man. Before Stephen leaves, he spends one night with his love, Biddy, promising to send for her as soon as he can afford it. Meanwhile, after her father is imprisoned, 9-year-old Peggy O’Rourke travels West on a “coffin ship,” one of the boats so-named for the enormous death tolls incurred during their transatlantic journeys. Neither Peggy’s sister nor her mother survive the trip, leaving Peggy completely alone in a new country. When Stephen arrives, his benefactor, congressman Matthew V. Flaherty, puts him to work building apartment buildings for his business, which benefits immigrants from Ireland. As the Callaghan lineage grows, the decisions made by the first generation play out in the lives of descendants Carney, James, William, Jim, Raymond, and Anna Callaghan. While the Callaghan family endures much tragedy, Donahue weaves in moments of joy and levity, keeping the novel from becoming too bleak. Carney Callaghan, Stephen and Biddy’s son, provides welcome comic relief throughout the narrative; in a conversation about his children, Carney says of one daughter, “I might ask my friend Reverend Jeremiah Dooze to baptize her agin. It dint work the first time.” The author deftly manages the large number of characters in the novel—only a few players feel slightly unrealized, including Peggy. While she has an engaging and empowering character arc, she disappears from the narrative by the end, which is especially

disappointing after her intricate characterization in the novel’s first half. Still, Donahue impresses with this sweeping yarn about the Irish immigrant experience. A compelling, often devastating Irish American family saga.

A Chasm of Night

Eliott, Peter | Further Press (518 pp.)

$24.99 paper | Dec. 17, 2024 | 9798986706566

In the final volume of Eliott’s Shadow Bidder trilogy, an ambitious assassin must bring together a dangerous team to complete a deadly mission.

The once-glorious city of Sullward, now known as Hell’s Labyrinth, is at a crossroads, as is the entire Tergonian Empire. High Lord Ulan Gueritus, a power-hungry sadist (nicknamed the Raving Blade) prepares to consolidate his allies and bring tyranny to the fallen city, and time is running out for Vazeer the Lash, a killer who was commissioned to assassinate the notorious underworld boss. Vazeer has dreams of rebuilding the coastal locale, which was destroyed centuries earlier in a cataclysm called the Great Storm, and bringing it back to its former cultural grandeur. To accomplish his task of killing the Blade, he’ll need to unite a group of elite criminals, some of whom want Vazeer dead. Complicating matters further are Vazeer’s intimate connections with numerous women, including a former lover, the deadly contract killer Terza Falconbrow; a killer named Shade of Night, who’s preoccupied with having sex with and torturing Vazeer (sometimes simultaneously); and a mysterious woman who could be a legendary actress with an almost mythical reputation. Although the book’s exploration of the complex character dynamics slows the momentum in places, there’s a lot to enjoy about this novel. The worldbuilding is extraordinary, meticulously describing the current fallen city but also giving

A relentlessly paced and audaciously violent thrill ride.

A CHASM OF NIGHT

readers valuable insights into Sullward’s and the Empire’s backstory, particularly through the device of a former empress’ memoir.

Complementing the razor-sharp worldbuilding is the author’s use of varied sensory description, which immerses readers in the dark and dangerous world to create an intimate and intense reading experience: “There was a loud knock on the front door… a sound so concussive it felt like being struck on the side of a metal helmet with a club, and my eyes snapped violently open.” Another noteworthy element is the depth of the writing, which can be likened to a complex narrative tapestry. Throughout the complex characterization and immersive atmospherics, the author weaves in subtle imagery, symbolism, and philosophical components, which give the novel a poetic sheen: “Time is a blade that will claim us all in the end. Before that day comes, let the sharp steel of your own dream razor a pathway to the light.” However, the biggest potential selling point is the offbeat nature of the story as a whole. In a genre that often embraces stereotypical characters and formulaic plotlines, Eliott’s narrative features a cast of original and memorable players, an impressive number of unexpected plot twists, and a conclusion that is as unpredictable as what preceded it. Readers may also find the circular nature of the story—which ends with powerful imagery that calls back to the opening scene—to be perfectly fitting. Ultimately, this trilogy could effectively serve as a prequel of sorts—a foundation to a more expansive story arc, both in terms of scope and theme.

A relentlessly paced and audaciously violent thrill ride through a richly described urban landscape.

The Fires of Birth

Enfield, J.A. | Wayzgoose Press (312 pp.) $14.99 paper | Dec. 15, 2024 | 9781961953260

The final volume in Enfield’s Time Alleys series sees Mick Conway reunited with his sister while aiming to prevent a sinister network from using time travel as a weapon. In 1853 London, Mick and his friends are persevering in their roles at the Forsyth Institute. Freshly promoted from a street team to a “greet team,” Alison, Leech, Dolly, and Mick can share more information through the Institute’s secret telegraph network as part of a city-wide operation responsible for “scouring the sequences for signs that time was misbehaving.” Following the cataclysmic Collapse in The Flickering Bridge (2024), several of their ranks were lost in a one-way portal to 1767, orchestrated by former ally Lady Penbrook and assisted by Catherine Collins, who turned out to be Mick’s sister; due to shifting loyalties and ongoing underhand plots, Mick must hold this secret close to his chest. The Institute adults note that Lady Penbrook’s expanding operations threaten the future of all the “alley rats,” and that she’s allied with the egotistical Lord Harrowgrave. Mick must keep a watchful eye on his sibling; meanwhile, he notes that time portals are continuing to display ominous characteristics, “dividing into concentric rings, each spinning in the opposite direction from the ones it was touching.” Enfield’s final series installment features all the intricate plotting, good-humored charm, and amiable, diverse

characterization that one expects from the Time Alleys tales. The author effectively balances pathos and hijinks in a version of Victorian London with a unique SF slant. The mechanics of the time alleys are well constructed, and readers will enjoy decoding the alley rats’ messages through time, right alongside the main characters. Mick is once again shown to be an emotionally mature protagonist who copes with the loss of his former, future life while also managing the responsibilities of his role at the Institute. The importance of found family is further strengthened in this volume, as Mick concludes that “his friends were his home. His sister was his home.”

A moving finish to a compelling YA SF series.

Block’d

Hawkins, Brian | Maverick (200 pp.) | $14.99 paper | Feb. 4, 2025 | 9781545815991

Hawkins’ supernatural graphic novel follows a teenager facing a difficult choice between family expectations and what’s right. Rising high school basketball star Cam Banter can’t even miss one pass without igniting the fiery anger of his gruff father Julien, who is determined to raise his son to win at all costs—both on and off the court. At the same time, the new coach, Damien Castle, is trying to instill a sense of morals and team cohesion into his players (“We are a team and no one should turn on the other just because they had a bad game”). Damien butts heads with Julien immediately, creating a tension that puts Cam in an awkward position. Cam also has trouble containing his volatile outbursts. His anger is the result of more than regular hormones—Cam and his father are werewolves and members of a vicious pack that use their powers to get ahead. Coach Damien himself is also a “shifter” with the ability to turn into a panther; he recognizes Cam’s potential

and hopes to steer him toward a path of using his powers responsibly. As the wolf in Cam starts to rear its furry head, he has to choose between his father’s unrelenting aggression and his coach’s calmer wisdom. As Cam bounces back and forth between these two competing visions of adulthood, Di Meglio’s illustrations call back to classic comic strips with vibrant colors and a vintage style of square-jawed, allAmerican jocks. The artwork becomes even more fun when the supernatural elements come into play, allowing Di Meglio to create some great panels of half-men/half-wolves dunking shots and growling at each other. Hawkins’ use of shapeshifting as a coming-of-age metaphor does not feel like anything new—the basic setup will call to mind classic high school films like Teen Wolf —but Cam’s uneasy choice between his father’s brutality and his coach’s emphasis on responsibility and duty creates a rich dynamic to drive the entire story. Fans of supernatural high school stories will appreciate that this wild fantasy shoots for a story grounded in real emotions.

A riff on classic teen tropes with a poignant emotional arc and vivid, fantastical illustrations.

Finding Foxtale Forest: Book Two

Hewitt, Madeleine | Illus. by Isabel Burke | Self (244 pp.) | $25.00 paper Nov. 15, 2024 | 9781964010052

In Hewitt’s children’s fantasy sequel, five girls reunite with a mysterious fox to break through illusions in another world. Since their last adventure in Foxtale Forest, third graders Amy, Kez, Eva, Pax, and Dani have all felt a desire to belong, whether it’s in the popular group at school or in their own families. None of the girls are happy, and they each yearn for a return to the forest. However, when the Fox calls them back there, they don’t leave their personal

issues behind. The Fox sends them to investigate the city of Lumina, where almost everyone wears special glasses called Visionizers that show them images of a flourishing and modern urban landscape: “Where you’re going, the truth is hard to see. To uncover what’s real, you have to look with more than just your eyes.” The only people in Lumina who don’t regularly wear Visionizers are Tyler, who does so secretly so he can enter the mayor’s citywide Visioneering Games, and his mother, Mira, an engineer who doesn’t trust the universal addiction to a false reality. When Ty runs away to enter the competition, the girls decide to track him down in order to protect him from the mayor’s schemes. This second book in Hewitt’s series presents a larger-than-life adventure with a relevant lesson about being yourself and stepping away from screens to embrace the real world— two things that Amy, in particular, grapples with throughout the story. It’s difficult to keep track of the individual personalities of each of the five girls, other than Amy, but many readers may find the lives of individual members of the diverse group to be relatable. Burke’s dynamic full-color illustrations punctuate key moments in each chapter, and smaller black-andwhite insets appear throughout. A strong sequel with a clear message about embracing one’s true self.

Out Here: Essays and Encounters from the Heart, Soul, and Left Field

Hill, Bob | Old Stone Press (352 pp.) $24.95 paper | Nov. 12, 2024 | 9781938462696

A veteran newspaper columnist reflects on decades in print journalism. “My early newspaper career was somewhat hampered by the fact I had never taken a journalism class,” writes Hill in the book’s preface. Yet, between his first

day of work with the Louisville Times and Courier-Journal in 1975 (a day when he met the city’s most famous resident, Muhammad Ali, by happenstance) and his last day as a journalist, more than 30 years later, he wrote more than 4,000 columns and 14 books; he was also awarded a lifetime achievement award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. In this collection of autobiographical vignettes and favorite columns, the author recalls stories that took him around the globe, from the World Ice Skating Championships in Czechoslovakia to a Southern Indiana nudist colony: “There is zero sex appeal in a swimming pool full of naked people,” he notes. Yet what makes this book stand out are its accounts of regional personalities. As someone born in the Midwest who attended college in Texas, Hill was initially an outsider in Kentucky—a status that he used to his advantage, as he played up his lack of knowledge to encourage locals to relate regional stories and lore. Kentucky, he points out over the course of this book, is not a monolithic state; the Appalachian Mountains of the east, he notes, possess a distinct culture that’s very different from Northern Kentucky, whose counties border Cincinnati along the Ohio River—and the biggest city, Louisville, has its own specific character. Most chapters feature celebrations of the state’s eccentricities, such as Kentucky Derby parties; a few, however, are very serious in nature, such as a recollection of Hill’s visit to a Ku Klux Klan rally in Harlan County in 1975. Although the author admits the book may “meander some,” it’s digressive in a way that recalls some of the South’s best storytellers, highlighting the quirky personalities, cultural oddities, and regional peculiarities that make the state unique. Skillfully written narratives of Kentucky and beyond from an award-winning author.

This Is the Thing: About Life, Joy, and Owning Your Purpose

Jackson, Shane | Greenleaf Book Group Press (264 pp.) | Jan. 28, 2025

A successful CEO meditates on how to give life meaning, structure, and purpose in this self-help book.

that many readers may find relatable. Jackson’s writing is fluid, with a tone that calls to mind a friendly, benevolent boss. Although some readers may find that his recipe for success is not perfectly straightforward, it does contain ingredients for a happy life. Searching readers may benefit from this book and may be inspired to pick up other works that Jackson mentions in its pages. A conversational, upbeat advice book that draws on the author’s life experience.

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For Jackson, the head of staffing company Jackson Healthcare, finding one’s purpose in life begins with recalling that we all die, eventually, and will likely be forgotten by society at large. The brevity of one’s time on Earth is what makes the questions such as “what’s the best way to enjoy the gift of your life?” so urgent. He asserts that people must make important choices to answer such questions, and this book is framed as a collection of ideas on how to do so. Divided into sections on “Perspective,” “Understanding,” “Reflection,” “Examination,” “Consideration,” and “Application,” its individual chapters are loosely organized around such topics as seeing life as a journey and recognizing various types of happiness. Jackson mixes personal anecdotes, drawn from his career, athletic accomplishments, and family life, with musings on philosophy, religion, and literature; he also draws on concepts attributed to Aristotle, Jesus, and Viktor Frankl, among others. He mostly steers clear of self-help cliches but supplies comforting narratives about his ancestors, who included bootleggers and struggling farmers; he also notes that his father, who was raised in foster care, informed his views on parenting in an even more direct way. He includes practical advice throughout, noting the benefits of interviewing oneself and creating a rule book for one’s life; he also writes that one can rely on “the Power of Three” to keep one’s goals achievable by focusing on only three priorities at any given time. His thoughts on the loss of meaning that one may experience upon retirement speak to a personal concern

My Backyard Bird Book

Johnson, Cheryl | Bird Nerd Publishing (56 pp.) | $14.99 paper March 15, 2021 | 9781735324210

A colorful guide to birdwatching in the United States for children. Bird calls are often the first thing a person will hear when they step outside; even if the birds are not visible, it’s probable that there are hundreds of different species living in the trees and bushes in any neighborhood. Kids who are curious about those birds and would like to identify them can refer to Johnson’s picture book, a guide to finding different avian species with common tools they will likely have readily at hand, including their eyes and ears, coloring supplies for notes and drawings, and, of course, a pair of binoculars. After reading through a glossary of ornithology terms to familiarize themselves with physical traits and common bird behaviors, readers can delve into the profiles of various specific birds. There are over 23 species listed, from the American crow to the white-breasted nuthatch; the guide dedicates two-page spreads to each, with one page featuring a full-color picture photo of the bird and the other providing facts such as the name of the species, what birds of that type look and sound like, their favorite food, and where they can be spotted during certain seasons. Additionally, the author provides some “Birding Tips,” simple activities to lure birds to the yard for observation. With

this information at their fingertips, any child can identify the winged creatures living in their neighborhood and work toward becoming a “Junior Backyard Ornithologist.” Johnson’s second edition of this birding guide is filled with her gorgeous photographs and packed with practical exercises that encourage children to take an interest in their surroundings using everyday resources that are available at home. Data is explained in scientific terms but packaged in a way that is relatable to children—for example, readers learn that a black-capped chickadee (which is “comfortable around people”) is normally five inches in height, or the size of a pen, and weighs 0.4 ounces, or as much as ten jellybeans.

An educational, easy-to-use resource for budding naturalists.

Unbound

Johnson, Ryan & Jared Branahl | Self (319 pp.)

$21.99 | $11.99 paper | Nov. 9, 2023

9798991945813 | 9798991945806 paper

Two young boys fight to save their big brother in an exceedingly dangerous, timefrozen world in Johnson and Branahl’s debut middlegrade fantasy.

Val Devereux’s family awaits sad news in Philadelphia; chances are, the rescue team searching for him on top of the Matterhorn in Italy won’t succeed. While mourning the likely death of their brother, 15-year-old Max and middle schooler JB stumble upon a strange golden key stuck in a lock. After turning the key, the two realize they’ve “turned off time,” allowing them to roam among a silent world of frozen people. JB sees this as the perfect opportunity to cross the ocean to Europe somehow and save Val. But Max and JB learn they aren’t the only ones still mobile as they run into other “Unbound” individuals who’ve previously experienced frozen time. While some are accommodating, many are Mals (short for Malevolents)

An exhilarating nonstop adventure with

delightful heroes at the helm.

UNBOUND

who capture and cage the Unbound, especially newbies. If the Mals discover Max and JB are the timestopping “Turners,” they may not live long enough to reach the Alps. Johnson and Branahl’s story is a sublime mix of action and exposition. Crisp, concise prose keeps the narrative moving as the Devereux brothers use their wits to travel (cars, for example, don’t run). Along the way, they meet others, hide from Mals, and pick up the lingo (“Grifters” are unabashed thieves). The brothers are superb protagonists, especially JB. He’s a believable adolescent who’s prone to immaturity, but he’s also bright, at one point using his love of war history to great effect. He and the rest of the cast have access to snazzy tech, from “tap-jackets,” which produce electricity through body heat, to the “sky-skippers” that make Mals even more of a threat by putting them in the air. This standalone novel boasts a first-rate ending and leaves the possibility for sequels wide open.

An exhilarating nonstop adventure with delightful heroes at the helm.

By Hook & Crook

Karam, S. G. | Chymist Press (420 pp.)

$14.99 paper | Nov. 15, 2024 | 9798991599511

A group of thieves, regulated by the government, go up against one of the world’s most powerful men in Karam’s debut SF/ fantasy novel.

Lars Harrow and his crew of thieves’ latest haul is impressive—and, because they weren’t caught stealing it, perfectly legal. The

nation of Ithris’ Gaming Commission permits theft, provided that thieves abide by certain stipulations. A quarter of the profits, for example, must go to the Commission, and the city’s general welfare fund must also get its share. This regulatory scheme has caused a significant decrease in violent crime, which is why news of the fatal stabbing of someone from another crew comes as a shock to everyone. Around the same time, a mysterious woman, Vivienne, hires Lars’ crew for a heist. Although she’s cryptic about details, the apparent target is a “secret warehouse” belonging to affluent Lord Cecil Thume, the founder and head of the Gaming Commission. The mission may also be connected to a crystal that Lars’ engineer Liora Banz discovered at the murder scene; dynamo-based energy powers the nation, but this crystal, unlike any other, holds a charge of its own. Karam’s tale, which kicks off a planned trilogy, sketches a vibrant steampunk world. Dynamo power was discovered a few decades ago, but many machines and vessels still run on steam; Liora invents wonderful devices, including a “squawk” for communication and a way to record sounds. The characters are compelling: Lars and rival crew leader Darius Adalan are shown to be headline-making celebrities, Vivienne and her objectives are delightfully mysterious, and Lars’ crew scores an unlikely ally. However, the murder mystery running through the narrative is somewhat lacking, as it relies on assumptions regarding the culprit and the motive. Still, the final act impresses with genuine surprises and an excellent setup for the next installment. Karam’s confident prose depicts marvelous sights, such as capital city Azoria’s bustling market district, and sounds: “the rumble of carriages, the distant

clang of a foundry bell, the laughter spilling from a nearby tavern.” Sublime characters fuel an energetic and worthy series launch.

Words With My Father: A Bipolar Journey Through Turbulent Times

Klessig, Lowell & Lukas Klessig Medley Park Press (264 pp.) | $24.95 $14.95 paper | April 25, 2023 9780960118908 | 9780960118915 paper

Klessig’s memoir, which recounts a life spent battling mental illness, incorporates commentary from his son.

Lowell Klessig was raised on a dairy farm in rural Wisconsin. He was a bright but awkward kid, curious about things and hardworking. As he entered the wider world attending the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he began to suffer from seasonal affective disorder and mood swings that were finally diagnosed as bipolar disorder. At the same time, Klessig was changing his views radically. He was raised to revere Joe McCarthy as a heroic scourge of communists and to see the Vietnam War as a noble endeavor; now, he began to question the war and involve himself with the Civil Rights movement and, eventually, climate change activism—a radical turnaround. Klessig forged a respectable career in academia. When in his manic phase, he produced brilliant work; in the depressed phase, he was a wreck, hiding in bed, almost unable to take basic care of himself (these passages are truly painful to read). His first marriage ended in divorce. He attempted suicide and finally found salvation in the form of lithium carbonate, “a wonder drug that actually worked wonders” and kept him on an even but precarious keel for the rest of his life. The text consists of long autobiographical passages by Klessig interspersed with commentary by his son Lukas. Readers eventually learn that Lukas has a milder form of his father’s

maladies (he was diagnosed at 13 with OCD). Lukas is a shrewd observer of his father (who died in 2014 of a rare neurodegenerative disease), recognizing that Klessig did have his flaws and was not always easy to live with. Still, this is clearly a labor of love. And it is grimly uplifting, considering the enormous challenges that Klessig did overcome. The man left boxes and boxes of writings, and this volume’s aftermatter contains sketches, poems, and family photos. A different sort of family story, and a valuable one.

Chaos Magic

Knox, Jen | Kallisto Gaia Press (188 pp.)

$19.95 paper | Feb. 11, 2025 | 9781952224430

Abuse victims conquer their fears with equal parts magic and friendship in this occult-tinged feminist revenge novel. After getting her jaw split open by her abusive evangelical husband, Trent, Lissa pours her savings into procuring a stay at The Lavender Center, a safe haven for domestic abuse and human trafficking survivors. Situated in the scenic woods outside Cleveland, Ohio, the tranquil mansion boasts all manner of unconventional healing services: “reiki, shamanic healing, akashic record retrieval, hypnotherapy, yoga, life coaching, hydrotherapy, massage, heat therapy, therapeutic dance, somatic breathwork, and weekly treks to a salt cave to detox with a gong bath.” She’s driven there by her mother, Pauline, a psychologist whose unconcealed disapproval of TLC’s “woo-woo” ethos doesn’t outweigh her love for her daughter. Lissa is greeted by TLC proprietors Doreen and Glenda, whose warmth and kindness set her immediately at ease. Things get even brighter when Lissa meets her roommate, Annika. Their friendship is bolstered by the fact that the new roomie can read minds and cast spells; she’s a witch, and so are Doreen and Glenda. With Annika’s help, Lissa

learns to actualize her beloved late father’s refrain, “Allow yourself a little magic.” But before she can cast a spell to banish her abuser, she has to cast aside her own self-doubt. “Anxiety is a magic killer,” Annika’s wise teacher, Inga, warns. An omniscient narrator floats among characters, allowing each their own arc. Looking past the novel’s moralistic tone (which makes for occasionally unnatural dialogue) and the main plotline’s formulaic structure, Knox offers a lucidly written, wellconstructed, and affirming story of friendship and recovery. Young adult readers in particular are sure to enjoy its neat ending and positive message. It’s a fun, redemptive read, even if it rarely strays outside the lines.

A character-driven, entertaining, albeit unsurprising tale where evil forces get the boot.

Phantom Border: A Personal Reconnaissance of Contemporary Germany

Lange, Kerstin | Ibidem Press (280 pp.) $34.00 paper | Nov. 12, 2024 | 9783838219516

Lange, who was born in West Germany, recounts her trip to the former border of a once-divided country. In the 1960s and ’70s, the author grew up in Northwestern Germany and saw East Germany as a “distant shadow, a blank shape behind the Iron Curtain,” a “mysterious country about which I knew almost nothing until it ceased to exist.” In 1987, she moved to Vermont, a place that eventually became another home, or “second Heimat,” for her, but despite her acquired American sensibilities, she longed to reconnect with her German roots. In 2016, Lange commenced a multiyear expedition across the German borderland (much of it on her father’s “trusty Bremen Bike”) exploring the area referred to as the Green Belt and known for its “remarkable biodiversity.” In this exceedingly thoughtful memoir, the

author interviews many Germans who lived under the acrimonious bifurcation of Germany into ideologically opposed states and explores how this experience affected their own senses of Heimat. A philosophically searching reflection on the very meaning of the term emerges from her investigations: “Heimat is inseparably tied to a person’s feelings about that physical place: a sense of belonging, of feeling understood, of connectedness with a particular landscape and familiar people, of not being a stranger, of one’s native habitat.” The notions of habitats and ecosystems are central to her reflections as she notes the ways in which the “brutality of the border” was also a “haven for so many creatures” and the Green Belt was “an oasis of remarkable space and quiet in a fast-moving world.” Lange also writes astutely about the “dark side of Heimat,” the nationalistic fervor to exclude “anyone ‘other.’” This is an impressively erudite remembrance, one that invokes the spirits of Thoreau and Goethe. An engrossing recollection, brimming with insight and emotional candor.

Wellness on the Weekly: 52 Fun Prompts for Mindfulness, Movement, and a Whole Lot Less Stress!

Lind, Adrianne | Self (210 pp.)

$32.99 | $19.99 paper | Nov. 7, 2024 9798345797686 | 9798345592625 paper

L ind, a certified yoga teacher, offers an introduction to mindfulness, movement, and stress relief for timepressed people. The author encourages readers to embark on a yearlong health journey involving yoga, meditation, breathwork, and other self-care strategies. First, she says, readers must gather essentials, including a yoga mat, journal, and comfortable clothes; then, they’ll be ready to set an intention and get to work on wellness strategies. Lind introduces forms of meditation, including yoga

nidra (a naplike, full-body relaxation), walking meditation, and silent meditation, reassuring readers that such actions “will either drive you up the wall or make you wonder what you’ve been waiting for all this time.” Readers can learn breathwork, such as alternate nostril breathing (to “feel zen”). A practice known as “Skull Shining Breath” uses forceful exhales for detoxing. Tapping, also known as the “Emotional Freedom Technique,” can help “karate-chop through emotions” via taps on nine meridians throughout the body, she asserts. Lind highlights yoga poses that she says can tap into each of the body’s seven chakras (energy centers). Shoulder shrugs and neck stretches can help one shed “the weight of the world (or your to-do list),” according to the author, and journaling may be used to celebrate strengths, dream about the future, appreciate the body, or forgive oneself. Lind recommends writing down five things for which one is thankful each day, even if it’s as simple as “Thanks to socks for existing.” Some of the advice feels obvious or overexplained, such as “ensure your nostrils are clear. You only need to grab a tissue or hanky and blow. Throw the tissue away and wash your hands.” Overall, though, Lind effectively provides readers with a range of simple techniques to improve their mental, emotional, and physical well-being. With a friendly tone and casual language (“Yaaaas! We. Got. This”), she offers readers motivation in weekly, bite-sized servings. She also includes helpful alternatives for various activities, such as a walking meditation around the house when the weather is bad. A holistic guide for integrating wellness practices into everyday life all year long.

Deep Past

Linden, Eugene | RosettaBooks (336 pp.)

$14.92 | $15.99 paper | May 14, 2019

9781948122375 | 9798755100120 paper

An archeologist working in Kazakhstan is presented with a discovery that could prove revolutionary, but taking it public proves unexpectedly fraught in Linden’s novel.

In the hope of landing a full professorship in the anthropology department at Rushmere University, Dr. Claire Knowland accepts a research position on a dig in Kazakhstan investigating the domestication of ancient horses. Her “true passion” is the study of animal intelligence, but as a 32-year-old adjunct, she is willing, however begrudgingly, to make concessions to secure professional advancement. An unexpected discovery piques her interest: Rob Rebolet, the chief of security for the Transteppe mining company, reports that one of his geologists, Russian Sergei Anachev, has found something peculiar—a grouping of “enormous bones” far too large to belong to horses that seem purposefully arrayed in a place where elephants never roamed. The bones predate the rise of any human ancestor, provocatively challenging the accepted scientific interpretations of the evolutionary emergence of intelligence on Earth, a gripping possibility lucidly explained by the author: “If the bones were not arrayed by some ancient human ancestor, could they represent the rise of intelligence in some other mammalian line, which became extinct many

An immersive tale that is both intellectually enlivening and genuinely entertaining. DEEP PAST

millions of years ago? Given the long sweep of life on earth, if evolution could produce intelligence once, could it have produced it more than once?” Such an explosive discovery will almost certainly be commandeered by the profoundly corrupt Kazakh government, and the examination of the bones is waylaid by the violent outbreak of civil war. Sergei is also menaced by Andrei Bezanov, a cruel Russian oligarch with a longstanding grudge against him who aims to take over Transteppe, thereby gaining control of the region’s valuable phosphorite reserves.

The novel deftly combines a dramatically powerful story with a thrilling scientific possibility, one made impressively accessible by the author. The story ranges from an assassin’s attempt on Claire and Sergei’s lives to searching discussions of the nature of intelligence and its mysterious appearance in the world, which is made even more inscrutable by the fact that human beings seem to have a monopoly on its possession (though Sergei’s findings undermine that assumption). As Dr. Keerbrock, another scientist, puts it to Claire: “Why only us? If rapid environmental change is a driver of intelligence, why don’t we find a bunch of other smart animals?” Some of the literary elements of the novel are questionable—Sergei’s history of acrimony with Bezanov feels convoluted and contrived, and Bezanov is something of a cartoonish villain, brimming with outsized evil plans and fantasies of revenge. Additionally, the eventfulness of the tale sometimes takes a turn for the formulaic; some of the violence depicted seems culled from popular cinema, and is more canned than exhilarating. Nonetheless, Claire is a memorable hero, as smart as she is empathetic, and Sergei is a profoundly complex character, one with an extraordinary grasp of science and a prudent sense of human nature. This is an immersive tale that is both intellectually enlivening and genuinely entertaining.

A deeply intelligent tale about intelligence itself, and the hurdles science must clear to see the light of day.

The Ghost: A Lake Superior Mystery

Lund, R.T. | Little Creek Press (278 pp.)

$17.95 paper | Nov. 22, 2024 | 9781955656870

In this installment of Lund’s Lake Superior Mystery series, a detective’s investigation uncovers a complex tapestry of secrets and lies.

Det. Lincoln Barnes has moved to Lake County after leaving the Minneapolis Police Department following a murder investigation that irrevocably changed her life. She’s now been assigned to find the murderer of Oscar Fawcett, who was run off the road in a collision that resulted in his decapitation. Oscar had previously donated a kidney to his mother Rebecca’s then-fiance, Paul Barton. Following the operation, Paul ended the engagement with Rebecca and married his mistress, which had clearly been his plan all along. Oscar and Rebecca sued Paul, who settled but was greatly angered by them taking legal action against him. In what initially appears to be an unrelated incident, Larry Osgood, the CEO of a mining company, is kidnapped and later found murdered in a remote cabin. Matters are further complicated when Paul Barton and his wife are poisoned.

Meanwhile, Paul’s friend Jack Whitman grows close to his paralegal and begins an affair with her, but she may not be who she seems. If all that wasn’t enough, Lincoln can’t let go of her memories of Judge Robin Gildemeister as she questions whether he was the monster his journal made him out to be (“The contents of the diary were proof that the former judge had murdered the president of the Minneapolis City Council or proof that he was deeply disturbed, or maybe both”). Lund returns to his Lake Superior Mystery series with a stunning sequel that raises the bar already set high by the first installment, Who Are You? (2022). Lincoln continues to tackle cases with her grounded approach and admirable personality, bringing a human element to the overall analytical tone. Including chapters from Whitman’s point of view adds an intriguing element to the

story, allowing the reader to see clues Lincoln is not aware of and illustrating the complexity of characters whose actions are less favorable than the honorable detective’s.

A fast-paced, twisted mystery with a thoroughly enjoyable solution.

Nate’s Noisy Nose

Mackay, Frances | Illus. by Dotti Colvin Self (34 pp.) | $11.99 paper

Oct. 26, 2024 | 9780646705323

A young boy who can’t help making loud noises with his nose tries to fit in with the rest of the world in Mackay’s picture book.

Nate, an upbeat and energetic kid with spiky red hair and fair skin, has an unusual nose. Though it looks ordinary, it contains a snot-covered array of tiny musical instruments that emit loud, outrageous sounds whenever he breathes. This first appears to be a gift—it makes his friends laugh and affords him a rare individuality—but it turns out to be an affliction. Nate’s family, though tolerant, are driven to despair; so, too, are his teachers and classmates. Soon, Nate is banned from going out in public. Doctors and scientists puzzle over his condition, but no one can help. Eventually, when trying out the “NOISY NOSE MACHINE” of a famous oddball inventor, Nate sneezes out his snotty schnoz orchestra…whereupon his red-haired dog Rascal scarfs it down and inherits the condition. Colvin’s illustrations are busy and boisterous, drawn in a cartoon style with plenty of space afforded to the colorful sounds of “WAH! WAH! OOM-PAH-PAH!” and “TOOT TOOT! RING! RING!” emanating from Nate’s noisy nose. Nate and Rascal display strong, class-clown personalities, dampened over time by the disapprobation of those around them (a racially diverse cast of characters). While Nate’s story may serve as a lesson in how to cope with being singled out, mostly it is fun for fun’s sake.

A riotous romp that should play to the amusement of younger readers.

A Turned World

Mordas, Brandon | Self (316 pp.)

$29.99 | $19.95 paper | July 5, 2024

9798332358487 | 9798330290864 paper

An office drone must rise to the challenge when his world suddenly changes in Mordas’ inventive fantasy novel.

Jack lives a bland life, leaving work each day to go home and play video games. This changes when he suddenly finds himself on a planet alongside mythical and historical characters from those very games. He is quickly captured by armored beings and put on a chain gang. He gains an ally in Pan, the man in front of him in line, and together they plot an escape. They break free when they survive a bridge collapse that kills many of their fellow prisoners, and they are taken in by a group of dwarves who are seeking their homeland. Soon after, the dwarves rescue Jill, a woman being assaulted by a group of human men, and she joins their group. Jack continues to be haunted by the need to search for his family. He leaves safety behind to go on his quest, accompanied by Pan, Jill, and Bjarke, a dwarf he’s saved from being killed. The quartet has a series of misadventures as they navigate the strange land, ultimately getting drafted into the ancient war between the forces of King Narmer and the Darkness. Mordas certainly has taken the “kitchen sink” approach in his debut novel—think of any fantastical creature and it’s likely to be found here (a character glossary would have been helpful). Readers may also feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of characters and their various motivations. Still, Mordas deserves credit for his deft handling of the narrative; while continuing to introduce new characters and concepts very late in the book, he still manages to craft a satisfactory conclusion. (That’s not to say, however, that there aren’t many loose ends remaining to be explored in future volumes). The author, who has had a long career in technology, asks a provocative question: What if all that makes our lives easier just

disappeared? Grappling with this question (“If life was easy, we would all be good at it”), Mordas successfully draws readers in to appreciate his winning ideas and characters.

A thought-provoking work that shows how humans can adapt, however grudgingly, to the most bizarre circumstances.

The Red Fiend

More, Ranjit | White Falcon Publishing (444 pp.)

$19.00 paper | Dec. 9, 2024 | 9798892224826

More presents a fantasy novel steeped in Indian mythology about a demon’s fight against deadly forces. This book’s unconventional protagonist—the demon-King Drumila, leader of the daityas—has his four hands full: Not only is he facing an unexpected onslaught of serpent-demons who are the ancestral enemies of the daityas, but he must also deal with a more distant, much greater demonic conflict that will make the first look trivial. The warfare of the first event livens up the book’s early chapters, and Shukracharya, the guru-sage of Drumila’s people, has a plan for the second battle: Drumila can move his entire group from their subterranean homeland (where they “cavorted with their consorts under skies never visited by the sun or the moon”) to a divinely protected island up on Earth’s surface. Drumila is a valiant and conscientious leader, but in his heart, he has one overriding passion: his hatred for the Creator, who killed his mother and has the appearance of a 16-year-old boy, even though he’s “older than the world itself.” The demon-king has vowed to kill him, which would require breaching a supposedly impregnable wall around the sacred stronghold of Svarga. The Creator, meanwhile, is no fan of Drumila, either, and conscripts his daughter Arundhati to weaken and distract his enemy with lovemaking; however, as the novel’s action escalates, Drumila and Arundhati discover unexpected feelings for each other. Over

the course of this mythological epic, More effectively immerses readers into the intense and offbeat world that he’s created. To that end, he also helpfully appends a glossary of most Hindu terms in the text, and also sprinkles the narrative with very modern language; the story, meanwhile, is packed with the kind of colorful action that one expects of good epic fantasy. There’s a bit too much exposition at times, which can make the work feel labored. However, there’s also intriguing worldbuilding that draws on elements that, for many Western readers, will be refreshingly unfamiliar.

A vivid and complex, if sometimes overly dense, epic of a heroic warrior-demon.

My Secret Life

Morrison, Crystal | FriesenPress (156 pp.)

$29.99 | $16.99 paper | Oct. 30, 2024

9781038325884 | 9781038325877 paper

A woman seeks to understand her traumatic past and build a better future for her family in Morrison’s debut memoir.

The author was born in Niagara Falls, Canada, in 1978 to young parents, neither of whom had experienced stable relationships. After the births of her two younger sisters, Morrison’s parents separated, and the girls would be ferried between their parents before their mother’s alcoholism resulted in them living with their father and grandmother after a period in foster care. Morrison recounts her joy at being reunited with family before life darkened as her father became her first abuser; the author recounts profound abuse at the hands of her father, her stepfather, and other men throughout her life. Morrison relays shocking tales of the ways in which the men around her treated her—hurting her mentally, physically, and sexually—with a calm voice that not only holds them accountable but also tries to understand what pushed them to become so abusive.

The author also discusses the people who let her down and ignored the trauma that she and her siblings suffered. Morrison’s poetry, included between chapters, lends a raw voice to her measured and frank narrative: “If your family stole away your rights to be you, / Robbed your mind and snatched your thoughts away! / Wouldn’t you question what is true? / Their thoughts or mine, this thought haunts me every day.” This is a deeply intimate chronicle of what the author has survived; it ends hopefully with the message that Morrison has been able to break this abusive cycle when building her own family. However, there is the sense of something missing; the conclusion is uplifting, but the narrative abruptly moves through more than two decades of healing—readers seeking support might appreciate a more detailed account of this process.

A brave and hard-hitting memoir about breaking the cycle of abuse.

Vacation and Other Tales of Enduring Love

Morrow, Glenn | En Route Books & Media (217 pp.) | $14.95 paper Nov. 9, 2024 | 9798888702680

Morrow highlights human connections and love in this collection of short stories. The story “Waxwings” describes a ritual between birds in which their “mutual and reciprocal” custom of passing fruit to one another is borne not simply out of necessity but also love; this first story sets the tone for the rest of the collection. In these five pieces of short fiction, the author examines the depth of love in relationships both romantic and familial. The titular story, “Vacation,” follows Thomas and Grace Kemp, a couple touring the Grand Canyon. Thomas has recently developed a proof that explains the existence of God. While expounding on his ideas in a lecture, Thomas notices an extremely tall man, who states, “I miss faith.” Later, at the Grand Canyon, he meets the same

mysterious man and has a horrific discussion with him that rattles Thomas. In this piece, Morrow examines the concept of faith, as well as the depth of love between Thomas and Grace. A similarly evocative story, “Mr. Coe’s Garden,” concerns Curtis, a teenager in need of some spare cash who helps his neighbor, Mr. Coe, create a garden in his backyard. Over time, Mr. Coe’s idiosyncrasies, along with his eccentric plans for the garden, start to make sense when a buried time capsule is uncovered, leading to an emotional resolution. The collection’s standout story is “Navigation.” Lewis is a young man who gets lost so easily and so often that he draws intricate maps of different places to guide him. In college, he meets Robin, and they fall in love. When they vacation in Italy, Lewis thinks to himself, “In her I am never lost. By her I am always found.” Though Morrow’s stories seem brief and simple, there is a depth of feeling displayed throughout. There is also a slight irreverence to the characters, leading to dashes of humor that supplement the emotional gravitas of each story. The scenarios feel lived-in and real, even when something mystical might be taking place. This is an admirable and affecting anthology. A compact but moving collection that will stay with readers long after they close the book.

Kirkus Star

The Art of Impact: Action Principles For A World In Crisis From The Extraordinary Life Of Hansjörg Wyss, An Authorized Biography

Orzulak, Paul & Seth Schulman Disruption Books (246 pp.) | $30.00 Jan. 28, 2025 | 9781633311176

A detailed biographical account of Swiss businessman and conservationist Hansjörg Wyss. While by no means a household name, Wyss is one of the

biggest philanthropic funders of land and ocean conservation. Orzulak and Schulman’s biography provides an understanding of Wyss’ life and vision, starting with his modest upbringing in Bern, Switzerland, and continuing on to his education, business experience, and philosophies. Born in 1935, he first discovered the American West during an internship in Colorado in 1958 before graduating from Harvard Business School in 1965. By 1977, he was hired by Synthes—a Swiss company that developed “internal fixation devices” used by surgeons to fix broken bones and reduce recovery time—to head their U.S. office. The business grew exponentially under Wyss’ careful leadership, largely due to his emphasis on the company’s social mission (providing orthopedic surgeons with materials and training) over short-term gains. From there, the book shifts to Wyss’ philanthropic pursuits in the environmental sector. He believed that “wild lands and waters are best conserved not in private hands, locked behind gates, but as public national parks, wildlife refuges and marine reserves, forever open for everyone to experience and explore.” His activism led him to found multiple organizations, including the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, and donate $1.5 billion via the Wyss Campaign for Nature in support of the 30x30 initiative (preserving 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030). Motivational sayings (“Seek to achieve not just the improbable but the impossible—which may be more possible than you think” and “Pursue change by using your greatest intellectual assets, which are also the most basic: common sense and simple pragmatism”) open each chapter. Orzulak and Schulman combine their extensive research with interviews with Wyss himself, his colleagues and friends, and several recipients of Wyss-funded services, which include women’s health and the arts, to create a book that covers wide-ranging topics, including leadership, philanthropy, and activism, and also introduces readers to a fascinating figure who’s had an

outsize impact on the world. Clear and matter-of-fact, the work conveys Wyss’ perspectives on growth and civic responsibility; e.g., “Drive progress by making sure the public benefits (not just a privileged few) and empowering ordinary people to fight for what is theirs.” Elsewhere, readers get more of a personal glimpse inside the subject’s mindset. Wyss’ former employees recall their boss’s refusal to indulge in “lavish perks that often come with leadership” (with one reminiscing that he would insist on renting the smallest, cheapest cars—resulting in some decidedly uncomfortable rides). Lest readers think everything Wyss touched turned to gold, Orzulak and Schulman also mention his mistakes. When he went against the board’s recommendation and started a new line of spine-related products for Synthes, for example, the venture quickly failed. To his credit, Wyss acknowledged his mistake and collaborated to fix the problem. The authors provide a complete picture of an extraordinary man, and the result is part biography, part business leadership book, part loving tribute, and part rallying cry for social and environmental health. A sweeping, well-crafted tribute to a remarkable philanthropist.

The Zygan Emprise

Pascal, Y.S. | Amphitrite Publishing (512 pp.) | Sept. 11, 2024

In Pascal’s SF novel, a TV actress who is secretly an interplanetary/ time-travelling agent ventures through different eras and dimensions seeking her MIA elder brother. The author here compiles the three installments (some previously published) of her Zygan Emprise trilogy. In the present-day (more or less) universe, Shiloh Rush is an

A rambunctious space opera and

metafictional celebration of the power of imagination.

THE ZYGAN EMPRISE

ingenue starring in the SF streaming series Bulwark, fighting Hollywoodscripted galactic evil. But this is actually a cover story for Shiloh’s astounding off-screen existence, which she shares with her gay British co-star William Escott. They are “catascopes,” secret agents employed by the powerful Zygan Federation of the Andromeda galaxy. Equipped with near-magical weaponry and techniques (including shape-shifting, size-shifting, levitation, teleportation, resurrection from the dead, and time travel), Shiloh and the impressively scholarly Escott (nicknamed “Spud”) embark on fraught missions all over the place (including one in 1947 to Roswell, New Mexico, that will have repercussions), often in the company of alien creatures who resemble everything from bears to whirlpools of liquid or vapor to “one being who looked like an animated Erector Set.” Shiloh’s overlord is the Omega Archon, a godlike entity with multitudinous rules for his minions; terrible punishment (simulated burning in literal Hell) awaits those who transgress—and Shiloh often transgresses. The Zygan Federation’s chief antagonist, it seems, is Theodore Benedict, an unimpressive office-clerk type who marshals the frightening resources at his disposal (including a gallery of well-placed traitors among the “Zygfed”) in a scheme to accumulate power and confound the Zygan Archon. Shiloh’s chief motivation is the fact that her cherished elder brother John Rush, a physics genius who was recruited as a Zygan catascope years earlier, disappeared on a mission six years ago. She hunts for him at every opportunity, her quest eventually taking her to parallel worlds and different dimensions. Is

John alive, dead, trapped, or a secret ally of the slippery Benedict, rebelling against the increasingly malevolent Omega Archon?

While the narrative displays a certain Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy tongue-in-cheekiness, the overall effect of the novel is more akin bingeing on the vintage European Heavy Metal graphic magazine—with a lot of Joseph Campbell and Neil Gaiman on the side. (Just for openers, there is a sortie to 2,000 years in the past that puts none other than Jesus Christ, alias Immanuel the Teacher, in peril.) The story luxuriates in both high and low culture, sometimes threatening to grow twee but righting itself with breathtaking flip-flops between the good guys and bad guys and those in between. Various plot threads reference The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Paradise Lost, Jason and the Argonauts, Star Trek, Norse mythology, and the two Arthurs—Conan Doyle and C. Clarke. The material is safe for a sophisticated YA-and-older readership; it’s the heavy slurry of fantasy jargon (like “Plegma,” “Syneph,” “M-fanning,” and “Octopodal”) and more arcane classical idioms that are tough to navigate. By the conclusion, the magical art of storytelling itself has become woven into the narrative, recalling William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (1973) and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001). It is a trip worth taking.

A rambunctious space opera and metafictional celebration of the power of imagination.

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Kirkus Star

Her Dying Secret

Regan, Lisa | Bookouture (348 pp.)

$10.79 paper | May 9, 2024 | 9781835254721

Series: Detective Josie Quinn, 20

A car crash raises terrifying implications in the latest installment of the Josie Quinn mystery series. Despite living in a small city in Central Pennsylvania, Det. Josie Quinn can’t seem to even take a day off without a gruesome crime scene needing her attention. She and her husband, Noah, a fellow detective, are hoping to adopt and trying to ready the house for a home visit from an adoption agency when Josie gets called in to the scene of an unusual car wreck. Josie quickly sees something even more gruesome than a head-on collision— evidence that the two women in the mangled car were involved in an intense, bloody struggle before the accident. The driver is barely clinging to life, and the other woman has a defensive stab wound and a knife stuck in her abdomen. The only clue to what happened to the women is a single piece of paper, a child’s drawing with the chilling word “HELP” scribbled on the back. When the driver, Mira Summers, wakes up, all she can remember is riding horses at the Tranquil Trails stables that morning, but she has no recollection of the attack or the Jane Doe riding in her car. With the help of her trusted colleague, Gretchen Palmer, Josie quickly discovers that the family running Tranquil Trails has anything but tranquil secrets; the owner warns them that she believes her disturbed brother-in-law may have been capable of such an attack. At the same time, Josie begins to question whether Mira’s selective amnesia is a ruse to cover up vital information. As both detectives race against time to piece together what happened and to save a child who may be in grave danger, they are drawn into a complex family drama that offers no simple answers.

Building on previous episodes in the series, Regan’s Josie Quinn remains a

remarkable, strong protagonist. (At the site of the particularly grisly car wreck scene, Josie showcases her ability to squash visceral reactions in favor of getting her job done, remarking only, “It’s not what I expected.”) Josie’s husband, Noah, is again a reliable partner. But the more exciting pair is Josie and Gretchen. Through them, Regan creates a formidable duo that won’t take any nonsense as they rush to save a young child in danger. As they stumble deeper into an intricate family drama, Regan also smartly turns her lead character’s anxieties about adoption and parenthood into concrete aspects of the case she is trying to solve. Astute mystery readers may see where the investigation is going from a mile away, but there are plenty of suspenseful surprises and action-packed sequences before the final reveals. Also adding to the tension are some chilling scenes showing the young child in question, who’s watching their captor and waiting for rescue. “It reminds me of the blood,” the child thinks, seeing people move in a shadowy room, “Whose blood? The whisper is back.” It’s a chilling and effective addition to help keep this twisted mystery moving.

Strong female protagonists and an intelligent, creepy setup make this mystery installment memorable.

Let Go, Let Golf: Mindful Ways to Practice with Purpose

Rota, John | Illus. by Victor Juhasz

Amplify Publishing (168 pp.) | $17.95 paper Sept. 10, 2024 | 9798891380653

Emmy Award–winning sports producer Rota crafts a golfing how-to that aims to make life on and off the course a whole lot more enjoyable. It might not seem possible to seamlessly amalgamate the stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius with the easy wisdom of an amiable golf

pro, but Rota appealingly manages to do so. Virtually every other line of his concise, energetic prose in these pages contains a memorable aphorism. However, no matter how lofty the observations get, they always land firmly on the green: “Who gives a crap what your final score is? Remember what you did well and build on it for next time” is just one example out of many. Getting a tiny, dimpled ball to sink into a cup hundreds of yards away is one of the most challenging feats in all of sports, and countless instruction manuals have been written to school developing players in the proper way to do it. Rota’s particular genius, though, lies in his ability to deliver real-world golf instruction without the slightest hint of technical jargon. He also points out that understanding fundamental golfing etiquette will not only help one better navigate a golf course but navigate life, as well. Rota’s work is an undeniable pleasure to read and absorb, no matter which way one slices it—golf pun intended. Indeed, many readers will no doubt approach Rota’s golf instruction simply as a vehicle to absorb its low-key wisdom; still others will simply enjoy teeing up the easy, free-flowing prose: “Finish with a few drives on the range,” Rota writes, “release your hands, and turn through the ball. Swing with swagger. Find your tee shot tempo and walk to that tee box with a confident glide in your stride.”

An enjoyable read, even for readers who never plan to hit the links.

Horrible Women, Wonderful Girls

Sipos, Julie Ann | Dartmouth Park (301 pp.) March 31, 2025 | 9798991999410

A down-on-herluck developer of products for the film and gaming industry leaves Los Angeles for a job in Wisconsin in Sipos’ spirited satire. Forty-year-old Jaycee Grayson, fresh from a stint in the Betty Ford

rehab center after having been fired from her job at a big-name Hollywood studio, is about to embark on a new adventure. Her older sister Meredith Grayson-O’Cochlain, a high-powered attorney, has negotiated a contract for Jaycee to be the new executive producer and vice president of global entertainment at Wonderful Girls, a successful manufacturer of lifelike dolls that reflect individual personalities and aspirations. The company, run primarily by women, was founded by the now semi-retired Happy Lindstrom. It has recently been sold for a fortune to a Japanese company but still maintains its headquarters in Littleburgh, Wisconsin. “Pulled by this strange and wonderful concept of female unity,” Jaycee heads to Wisconsin, where she discovers a workplace brimming with an intoxicating sweetness that belies the back-stabbing manipulations of Wonderful Girls’ venomous staff. Amply funded by a new termination agreement with the Hollywood studio hammered out by Meredith, Jaycee buys a house in Littleburgh reportedly built by the late architect Frank Lloyd Wright for his mistress. Once she settles in, it does not take long for her to discover that duplicity runs rampant below Wonder ful Girls’ saccharine surface; bad-mouthing and sabotage lurk around every corner. Sipos writes with wit, introducing a large cast of quirky characters hiding a trove of backstories and deceptions. The dialogue is filled with sharply focused sarcasm, and Jaycee, who narrates the tale, is a feisty protagonist relentlessly trudging through a chaotic swamp of miscreants. Abel Dreaux, the village police chief, adds a bit of offbeat romance, and the aging Happy Lindstrom proves to be a delightful, surprising powerhouse. The relationship between Jaycee and Meredith provides some needed poignancy, as does the developing friendship between Jaycee and the gently rebellious Mennonite couple that tends to her culinary and gardening needs. Even so, acerbic humor is never more than a paragraph or two away. A clever and entertaining read, with amusing, unexpected twists and a sturdy female protagonist.

Guardians of the Vote: History, Heroes, and the Legacy of Voting Rights— 1960s

v. Today

Thomas, Jet | Self (299 pp.) | $23.99 | $15.99 paper | Oct. 23, 2024 | 9798343006575 9798342997263 paper

The violence of Jim Crow has given way to craftier presentday methods of disenfranchising marginalized communities, according to this stirring history of American voting rights. Thomas begins by recapping laws that historically prevented Black people in segregated Southern states from voting, including exorbitant poll taxes and absurdly complicated “literacy” tests required of Black would-be voters but not white voters. More brutal methods were also used, the author notes; Black Southerners who tried to register to vote were often fired, evicted, arrested, beaten, or even killed. Thomas goes on to explore today’s subtler means of voter suppression. These include voter ID laws that disproportionately disqualify minorities who lack official documents; laws that reduce the numbers of polling locations or make absentee voting harder; purges of voter lists; and restrictions on who can vote. Thomas weaves in detailed narratives of voting-rights milestones, like the 1965 voter registration drive and marches in Selma, Alabama, that led to police violence and galvanized the passage of the Voting Rights Act; he also explores later Supreme Court decisions that weakened the VRA and contemporary efforts to restore it. Throughout, the author spotlights voting-rights heroes from Bob Moses, who was beaten while leading a 1961 Mississippi registration drive, to Stacey Abrams, the 2018 Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia who founded Fair Fight Action, which registered thousands of voters and helped deliver

Georgia to Joe Biden in 2020. Thomas combines deep dives into voting law with vivid, dramatic retellings of epic civil rights battles; his prose is lucid and perceptive, with occasional elegant perorations on the sacredness of the franchise. (“When people lose the power to vote, they lose the ability to choose their defenders. They lose representatives who understand, care about, and work to protect their rights. As a result, the US as a whole loses its voice.”) The result is a captivating history that shows how relevant the defense of voting rights remains. An erudite and engrossing look at the perennial struggle to safeguard the cornerstone of democracy.

Zone Trip

Turner, Kitty | Daily House (370 pp.) | $16.57 paper | Aug. 5, 2023 | 9781733668736

Three friends become entangled in legal and psychological drama in Turner’s novel. In the near future, San Francisco store owner Evan pulls a viral, death-defying stunt with his friends Leo and Lydia, and the high they feel from it leaves them craving more (“We need to do another stunt like last night’s. Or something to top it”). They create a club, Chaos Order, and recruit new members; this leads to more stunts. Leo is the ringleader, and while Lydia and Evan both feel he takes too many risks, they go along with him. After one dangerous stunt, they get arrested. Evan and Leo disagree on how to handle the legal fallout, and Leo lashes out at Evan, tossing him out of the Order. Evan gets a job working for a gaming corporation called HERE, ironically the owner of the billboard the Chaos Order destroyed as part of their last prank. He feels ethically conflicted about working for HERE, like he’s betraying the Order, but taking the job is his way

out of legal trouble. He tries to recruit Leo, but they fight—Lydia, who desperately wants a romantic relationship with Leo, decides to stay with him. With Evan and HERE working against him to take control of the Order (in the interest of developing a game), Leo becomes obsessed with revenge, and he acts erratically. Lydia flails as she tries to hold the Order together, especially as Leo ignores her feelings. Things come to a head as Leo gets into deeper legal trouble. Leo is charismatic and manipulative, almost like a cult leader—he’s a fascinating character, and the novel’s chief antagonist. The book is really about Leo and how his magnetism affects those around him, and Lydia and Evan both convincingly grow as the work progresses. The prose is lively, and the story is fast-paced. The deeper message is a little muddled—the novel doesn’t seem to know if Leo or HERE or both are villains—but as a psychological study, it’s effective. It’s not quite a thriller, but it has something of that sensibility. A fascinating psychological novel.

The Phoenix Van Allen, Eric | Terra Verde Publishing (393 pp.) | April 1, 2025 | 9798218591939

Van Allen’s YA novel tells the tale of troubled siblings who meet a very unusual funeral home director. It’s summertime, and 16-year-old Callie Valentine must look after her younger brother, Thomas, and sister, Jess. Callie effectively leads the trio, sourcing food, navigating the dangerous neighborhood around their apartment complex, and shielding them all from the worst of their neglectful mother, who has a drinking problem. To survive a tough life, Callie must be just as tough. When things are at their worst, she and her siblings cross paths with Victor Delamorte, a local mortician who’s an odd character. With his support, the kids’ lives begin to change for the better. The

funeral home is full of forbidden rooms which Callie can’t help but explore. It turns out that Delamorte, who’s very ill, has a bizarre plan for after he dies, which the skeptical Callie and Thomas can’t bring themselves to believe; however, due to their affection for him, they decide to help him execute the plan. Elements of the mysterious and the magical are threaded through the narrative. Callie occasionally experiences glimpses of her dead father, and, from the corner of her eye, other shadowy figures. A mysterious beautician at the funeral home raises more questions. As Callie learns to trust others, she also becomes determined to unravel the funeral home’s mysteries. The tension builds throughout the final act, pulling the reader along at a brisk pace. Callie is an engaging, well-developed narrator whose worries and descriptions of what she and her siblings have endured enrich the narrative without slowing it down: “There was a time I believed I had superpowers. Not like flying or mind-reading….No, my special talents were more common abilities, such as running and hiding.” Intriguingly, in the novel’s first half, her descriptive powers emphasize the grimness of the world she inhabits: holes in the wall are likened to open wounds, for instance; later, this gruesomeness is gone, illustrating her emotional transformation, like the titular phoenix, when in a safe, stable environment.

An engaging, multilayered story that finely balances action with introspection and the real with the mystical.

A Lionhearted Approach for Parent Coaching

Veshee, Lisa | BookBaby (92 pp.)

$17.95 paper | Jan. 10, 2024 | 9798350927559

A brief booklet on parenting through typical childrearing problems.

“It is a child’s job to push buttons, test boundaries, repeat undesired behaviors, whine, etc.,” writes Veshee frankly in her

nonfiction debut. “It is the parent’s job to set boundaries, be consistent, and follow through.” This clear, wide split between the parent’s and toddler’s world persists throughout the guide, which arranges its tips and instructions along an alphabetical framework. A is for “accountability,” for instance, in which the importance of consequences is stressed. Q is for “questions,” which covers not only the best ways to answer a toddler’s incessant questions (e.g., We’re leaving “after lunch” rather than “in ten minutes”), but also the related Q topic of “quiet,” in which the author recommends creating a quiet corner for overstimulated children (“It should be free from requests and designed to make your child feel relaxed and safe”). Generalized subjects, like “pleading,” are covered, as are more specific things, like diaper changing (be firm, and be a parent; don’t yell, and be your child’s friend). The straightforward style and brevity make this a handy, easily incorporated guide for dozens of the most common problems parents encounter in their suddenly willful and fractious toddlers. She’s equally convincing, whether being whimsical (“Be silly, be animated, dance, laugh, and sing,” she writes. “The more outlandish the message, the better it is received by children”) or writing about “Zero Tolerance” (“Please do not allow your children to harm your pets, ignore you, or be aggressive to anyone in your household” and “Do not walk on eggshells around your child; be calm, be firm, and give immediate consequences for undesired behaviors and model appropriate behaviors”). Parents will find a great deal of useful advice crammed into a small number of pages. An empathetic but no-nonsense checklist for raising toddlers.

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