April 2021 BookPage

DISCOVER YOUR NEXT GREAT BOOK

APR 2021

With a revolutionary perspective on history and motherhood, Kaitlyn Greenidge’s Libertie is the freshest historical novel so far this year. ALSO INSIDE: New books from Anne Lamott, Haruki Murakami, Sally Thorne and more

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APRIL 2021

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behind the book | anna lee huber. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5 The new Lady Darby mystery is (accidentally) her timeliest yet

interview | uzma jalaluddin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 A new spin on a classic romance recipe

cover story | kaitlyn greenidge. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 nonfiction. . . . . . . . . . . 23 young adult. . . . . . . . . . 26 children’s. . . . . . . . . . . . 31

The author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman goes on an adventure of discovery

feature | inspirational living. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Four enlightening guides provide shining examples of faith

q&a | anne lamott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 With her signature wit and wisdom, Anne Lamott reminds us how to find the light

feature | poetry. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

columns the hold list . . . . . . . . . . . 3 whodunit . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 cozies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Celebrate National Poetry Month with three extraordinary collections

feature | earth day. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Appreciating the beauty, delicacy and tenacity of birds

feature | short stories. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

well read. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 lifestyles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 audio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

New tales from Haruki Murakami and Elizabeth McCracken

interview | judy batalion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Discover the untold story of Jewish women who resisted the Nazis

q&a | charlie jane anders. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

book clubs. . . . . . . . . . . . 9 romance. . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

A YA sci-fi adventure considers the high cost of a heroic destiny

feature | earth day for young readers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Six wonder-filled books explore the marvels of nature

q&a | carlie sorosiak . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Behind the creation of one of the year’s most memorable middle grade narrators

meet | raúl the third. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Meet the author-illustrator of Tag Team

PRESIDENT & FOUNDER Michael A. Zibart VICE PRESIDENT & ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Elizabeth Grace Herbert CONTROLLER Sharon Kozy MARKETING MANAGER Mary Claire Zibart

PUBLISHER & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Trisha Ping DEPUTY EDITOR Cat Acree ASSOCIATE EDITORS Stephanie Appell Christy Lynch Savanna Walker

SUBSCRIPTIONS Katherine Klockenkemper BRAND & PRODUCTION MANAGER Meagan Vanderhill CHILDREN’S BOOKS Allison Hammond CONTRIBUTOR Roger Bishop

EDITORIAL POLICY

BookPage is a selection guide for new books. Our editors select for review the best books published in a variety of categories. BookPage is editorially independent; only books we highly recommend are featured. Stars are assigned by BookPage editors to indicate titles that are exceptionally executed in their genre or category.

Cover image and pg. 12 art from the jacket of Libertie, designed by Laurindo Feliciano and published by Algonquin.

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list the hold list

Best of the bestsellers At BookPage HQ, we look at books months before they’re published. So it’s always a delight when something we adored finally hits shelves, and everyone else falls just as head-over-heels in love with it as we did. Here are five recent blockbusters whose climbs up the charts made us cheer.

Mexican Gothic

Just as I Am

Catch and Kill

The Poet X

Beach Read

I have long lamented the waning of the gothic novel. We as a society need more women running around crumbling hallways in giant ballgowns, gripping candelabras as they uncover hideous family secrets. Even if Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel doesn’t kick-start a whole new wave of romantically moody thrillers (though it certainly should), I’m delighted that its success catapulted its very deserving author onto the bestseller lists. Putting a unique and elegant stamp on a genre is Moreno-­Garcia’s signature move. She’s written what she called a “fantasy of manners” with The Beautiful Ones and a Jazz Age comingof-age novel that incorporated Mayan mythology in Gods of Jade and Shadow. So of course her gothic heroine isn’t a timid wallflower. Noemí Taboada is a headstrong and glamorous socialite whose foibles and inner demons make her as interesting as she is heroic. And the ending? Let’s just say it would blow Daphne du Maurier’s hair back. —Savanna, Associate Editor

Perspective is a tricky thing to hold onto—the present moment with all its immediate concerns sure makes a lot of noise—but a thoughtful memoir of a long and welllived life can help you find your center. Cicely Tyson’s autobiography came out earlier this year, two days before the author’s death, and quickly hit bestseller lists. It’s more than a recounting of Tyson’s life as a groundbreaking actor, producer and activist; it’s also an examination of how a person can use their gifts to make a difference and the mindset required to act on that goal. Co-written with Michelle Burford, a founding editor of O, The Oprah Magazine, the memoir is structured chronologically from Tyson’s childhood to later years, revealing how her rise as an actor led to a singular purpose: to use her art “as a force for good, as a place from which to display the full spectrum of our humanity.” Because, as she writes, art must “mirror the times and propel them forward.” —Cat, Deputy Editor

The world has had more than its fair share of breaking news this past year, so it feels somewhat nostalgic to revisit newsworthy reporting from the bygone era of 2019. Ronan Farrow’s explosively investigated book Catch and Kill delivers on every one of its subtitle’s promises: “lies, spies and a conspiracy to protect predators.” As journalist Farrow began looking into decades of allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein, ranging from verbal harassment to sexual abuse, his life began to get tricky. His employer, NBC, got more and more antsy about the story. He received a rash of threatening anonymous messages on Instagram. And through it all, he had the distinct feeling that he was being followed. This book’s pacing is breathless, the twists increasingly twisty. At times it reads like a spy thriller, except better—because by the end of this electric story, real women who have suffered in silence for years are finally heard, believed and vindicated. —Christy, Associate Editor

Once in a blue moon, a YA book earns universal critical acclaim and achieves great commercial success. The Poet X, Elizabeth Acevedo’s debut novel in verse, was one such book. It won just about every award that exists to honor YA literature, including the National Book Award and the Michael L. Printz Award, and spent more than 20 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. You’ll understand why as soon as you begin reading it. The story of Xiomara, a Dominican American teen who discovers the light of poetry burning within her and reckons with the forces in her life that would see it extinguished, will set your heart on fire. I especially recommend the audiobook for your first read, since Acevedo’s narration draws out the meter and musicality of her accessible, conversational verses. I’m usually wary of sweeping statements, but in this case, one is merited: The Poet X is a perfect book that everyone should read. —Stephanie, Associate Editor

I picked up Emily Henry’s Beach Read last spring, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. With no travel plans on the horizon, a vicarious getaway to the shores of Lake Michigan was appealing, and during what were repeatedly referred to as “uncertain times,” the anticipated beats of a rom-com sounded especially soothing. Why not read about two authors trying out each other’s genres to beat writer’s block, and reluctantly falling in love? Beach Read hit these marks and then surpassed them to become one of my favorite types of reading experiences: a diversion with depth. The screwball vibe and snappy dialogue I had been looking for are there on the page. But as Augustus and January slowly open up to one another, the lighter threads of the story are woven into an honest exploration of grief, trust and the healing power of art. It’s a connection-­ affirming, generous novel that deserves its status as a word-of-mouth bestseller. —Trisha, Publisher

Each month, BookPage staff share special reading lists—our personal favorites, old and new.

3

whodunit

by bruce tierney Northern Spy

In 1998, the “troubles” of Northern Ireland were brought to a close by the signing of the Good Friday agreement—in theory. The present-day reality is somewhat less resolved. As Flynn Berry points out in her new thriller, Northern Spy (Viking, $26, 9780735224995), “most Catholics still wanted a united Ireland, most Protestants wanted to remain part of the UK. The schools were still segregated. You still knew, in every town, which was the Catholic bakery, which was the Protestant taxi firm. How could anyone not have seen this coming? We were living in a tinderbox.” Two sisters, BBC producer and new mom Tessa and paramedic Marian, occupy center stage in the narrative. They are exceptionally close, so Tessa is shocked to her core when she sees raw news footage of a gas station holdup and recognizes her sister as one of the Irish Republican Army perpetrators. Now Marian is on the run, and the police are convinced that Tessa knows more than she’s saying. When Marian seeks her help, Tessa is faced with a Sophie’s choice: Should she come to her sister’s rescue, putting her baby in peril by getting involved? Berry’s thriller is an excellent and sympathetic look at family bonds, ideological enmity and the difficulty of maintaining some semblance of balance in a situation outside one’s control.

Dance With Death Nobody born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1958 should be able to channel 19th-century London as splendidly as Will Thomas does in his well-loved series featuring private enquiry agents Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn. The latest installment, Dance With Death (Minotaur, $27.99, 9781250624772), is a tale of duplicity and murder centered on an upcoming royal wedding. The future Nicholas II, who will one day become the last czar of Russia, plays a pivotal role in the narrative, as does the daughter of Russian revolutionary Karl Marx, the future King George V of Britain and legendary prima ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska. These real historical figures mingle freely and seamlessly with fictional characters, some of whom are prepared to die for them, while others seek the opportunity to kill them. Barker and Llewelyn are tasked with safeguarding the future czar from an assassin known only as La Sylphide. Politics and privilege, Russian and English alike, come into play as the suspense mounts at a high-society masked ball, where identities are concealed every bit as cleverly as lethal intentions. A bit of good news for readers: If you like this book, there are a dozen previous Barker & Llewelyn mysteries to keep you entertained for the foreseeable future.

Transient Desires European cities’ ubiquitous surveillance cameras are often criticized as intrusive, but on the occasions that they identify criminals, everyone is happy. Well, everyone but the criminals—such as the two boatmen who, at the outset of Donna Leon’s latest Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery, Transient Desires (Atlantic Monthly, $27, 9780802158178), unceremoniously unload two badly injured and unconscious American women onto the dock of a Venice hospital emergency room. The boatmen turn out to have been friends from childhood. One is now a fledgling lawyer, the other a manual laborer for his uncle’s canal-based delivery business. There are rumors, however, that said uncle is involved in human trafficking. Brunetti enlists the help of colleague Claudia Griffoni, who in turn brings on board a Neapolitan coast guard captain named Ignazio Alaimo. Italian interagency cooperation, while not unheard of, can be difficult. Vast geographical and cultural chasms separate different regions of the country (in this case Naples and Venice), raising troubling questions about whom Brunetti can trust. Transient Desires is the 30th installment of Leon’s series starring Brunetti, and like the 29 mysteries that preceded it, it’s a splendid read. Through Brunetti’s observations and ruminations, the author weaves Venetian history, architecture, aromas, tastes and snippets of daily life and family interactions into an immersive narrative.

H In the Company of Killers It is uncommon for a first novel to earn a starred review in the hallowed halls of this column, but Bryan Christy’s In the Company of Killers (Putnam, $27, 9780593187920) ticks all the right boxes. Far-flung locales (Kenya, the Philippines, South Africa)? Check. A protagonist of few words but lots of action? Check again. Properly villainous villains? Yep, got those. Filled to the brim with tension and suspense? Yes and yes. Central character Tom Klay is an investigative journalist for The Sovereign, a magazine that bears a certain resemblance to National Geographic, for whom author Christy once worked (though one hopes he encountered less murder and mayhem than Klay does). The reader quickly discovers that Klay’s occupation is deep cover for a clandestine position as a CIA asset. As the book opens, Klay and his closest friend, Captain Bernard Lolosoli, probe the Kenyan bush country following a lead they received about elephant poachers. But someone has set them up for an ambush; Klay survives, Lolosoli does not. Klay is sure he knows the identity of the killer, and he means to exact justice or perhaps revenge (if indeed there is any difference) for his friend’s murder. Mercenaries, global superpowers, religious leaders, environmental activists and more are players on this chess board where nobody seems to know which directions the pieces are allowed to move, nor perhaps even the object of the game. In the Company of Killers is not a long book, so my suggestion is to block out time to read it in one sitting. You will not want to put it down.

Bruce Tierney lives outside Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he bicycles through the rice paddies daily and reviews the best in mystery and suspense every month.

4

by heather seggel

H The Unkindness of Ravens Greer Hogan left her life in New York City behind after her husband’s murder. Starting over as a librarian in the village of Raven Hill has offered some distance from that trauma—until she finds her best friend dead in the library. Greer is still an outsider in the tightknit village, so she leans on her research skills to find her friend’s killer while coming to grips with her husband’s death. The Unkindness of Ravens (Crooked Lane, $26.99, 9781643856940) is an edgy delight; it’s moody and tense, literary and urbane. Author M.E. Hilliard is herself a librarian, and she gets the job’s balance of fun and drudgery note-perfect. Yes, there are bake sales and charming patrons, but there are also repetitive tasks and the occasional creep. Analytical and not overly social, Greer keeps to herself, even shying away from the reader at times, which only serves to heighten the suspense. It’s tempting to relax into the novel’s bookish atmosphere, but a fast-paced conclusion that’s truly surprising whips things to a close. The Unkindness of Ravens is an exciting debut, and I’m already eager for another installment.

Animal Instinct When private investigator Corey Douglas was still a police officer, he responded to a domestic violence call in which he could do nothing to help the victim, Lisa Yates. Now, years later, Lisa has died in an unsolved shooting, and Corey decides to try and right a past wrong by solving her murder. Animal Instinct (Minotaur, $27.99, 9781250257208), David Rosenfelt’s second K Team novel, builds suspense by shifting points of view between Corey’s team and their extremely dangerous enemies, who are always a step ahead. Lisa’s job at a medical records company makes for a very data-centric thriller, but plenty of muscle is exerted as well, by dogs as well as humans. Rosenfelt has artfully spun off Corey and his K-9 partner, Simon Garfunkel, from his hit Andy Carpenter series, and Andy appears here in more than a mere cameo, which adds to the fun.

Death of a Showman Death of a Showman (Minotaur, $26.99, 9781250210906) finds lady’s maid Jane Prescott on Broadway, chaperoning her rich employer, Louise Tyler, to rehearsals of a show Louise has been persuaded to invest in. Jane’s not thrilled to be there; her passionate dalliance with composer Leo Hirschfeld abruptly ended when he married a chorus girl, but that doesn’t stop him from flirting with every woman he sees. It’s almost a welcome distraction when the show’s tough-guy producer, Sidney Warburton, is murdered. Author Mariah Fredericks has clearly done her research on Gilded Age New York and its colossal theaters, because she creates a real sense of being behind the scenes and behind the curtain. The murder is nearly upstaged by the drama, backbiting and infighting among the cast and crew, but it’s all told with understated elegance.

Heather Seggel is a longtime bookseller, reviewer and occasional library technician in Ukiah, California.

behind the book | anna lee huber

Cholera in the time of COVID-19 Anna Lee Huber’s new historical mystery is (accidentally) her timeliest yet. Anna Lee Huber always knew that her Lady Darby mysteries, which are set in the 1830s, would eventually reach the cholera epidemic of 1832. What Huber couldn’t have known was that she’d be writing A Wicked Conceit, in which sleuth Kiera Darby must solve a series of crimes in a disease-stricken Edinburgh, while the COVID-19 pandemic was affecting Huber’s own life. ©SHANON AYCOCK

cozies

Illness is nothing new, and neither are epidemics. Yet very few of us living in the developed world have experienced a pandemic, or the strain and uncertainty and immediacy of dealing with one— until now. When I first began writing the Lady Darby mysteries and set the first book in August of 1830, I was aware that my characters would eventually have to wrangle with the cholera epidemic that struck Britain beginning in late 1831. But I had no idea I would be writing about it while enduring a new pandemic in our time. Our scientific and medical knowledge has progressed immensely in 188 years. We now understand that viruses and infections like cholera are caused by germs and not by miasmas. In 1832, the belief was that bad, noxious air emanating from things like rotting corpses, marshy land areas and other putrid matter actually released vapors that caused people to fall ill. We now know that the reason outbreaks kept recurring despite all efforts was that authorities failed to address the true source of the disease: open cesspools throughout communities. It wasn’t until 1854, when Dr. John Snow was able to trace the source of a single cholera outbreak in London to a specific water pump, that the real cause of cholera was pinpointed and accepted. Once significant sanitation improvements were made and uncontaminated water supplies were created, cholera became largely eradicated from many parts of the world, though areas without these two crucial elements still struggle with the disease. While writing for an audience familiar with the masking and social distancing protocols of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was important to communicate the differences in methodology A Wicked Conceit between the medical community of 1832 and Berkley, $17 today. However, the feelings of dread, fear and 9780593198445 misgiving that people experience during times of Historical Mystery crisis were as present in the past as they are today. The desire to make sense of such a calamity was just as strong. Some people in 1832 found healthy ways to grapple with these issues, while others responded with anger and vitriol. Pamphlets from the time railed against people’s sinful natures, correlating the concept of contagion with the idea that cholera was divine punishment. But not everything that can be gleaned from our study of past pandemics is dire or disheartening. There is great comfort to be found in realizing we have been through difficult times like this before, and we’ll get through them again. Chaos and uncertainty may reign for a time, but humanity will eventually prevail. Science and social understanding will be advanced. We’ll emerge with a better understanding of the past, and hopefully of ourselves and others. As an author, I now have a greater empathy for the characters who inhabit my pages and the misfortunes I inflict on them. —Anna Lee Huber

5

well read

by robert weibezahl

Lolita in the Afterlife Vladimir Nobokov’s Lolita is one of the most beloved and most maligned novels ever written. Is it a work of literary genius or unrepentant smut? A madman’s confession or a justification for pedophilia? A sendup of American provincialism or a shocking depiction of the dark human soul? It could be—and has been—argued that it is all of these things. The heated dialogue that began when the book roared onto bestseller lists more than 60 years ago continues to burn today, deepening the conundrum of the book, the girl and the dangerously charming protagonist, Humbert Humbert. Publisher Walter Minton introduced Lolita to a wide readership when he released the book in America in 1958. Minton took his knocks for this bold decision, but he also made a fortune from it. His daughter Jenny Minton Quigley was born long after Lolita’s splashy arrival, but she still grew up under its shadow, with some ambivalence. Now an editor herself, she recently found herself contemplating the book’s place in our more socially conscious age, marked in particular by the #MeToo movement. And so Quigley assembled Lolita in the Afterlife (Vintage, $16.95, 9781984898838), an engrossing collection of smart and thoughtful essays by Thirty-one contemporary an array of contempowriters reappraise the legacy rary writers reckoning with this indelible and and lasting merit of Lolita in a shocking novel. The contributors, post-#MeToo world. mostly women but with a handful of men as well, hold up Lolita like a prism, examining it in different lights and from a range of angles. Tapping her own conflicted reaction to the novel, Roxane Gay examines whether there are boundaries she and her fellow writers should not cross, while Susan Choi and Bindu Bansinath connect their own intimate adolescent sexual experiences to the text. Biographer Stacy Schiff and literary historian Sarah Weinman offer some fascinating historical context, and screenwriter Tom Bissell watches film adaptations of the novel with fresh eyes. Novelists Andre Dubus III and Jim Shepard (who, incidentally, taught Lolita to Quigley in college) provide 21st-century male perspectives, while Alexander Chee juxtaposes Lolita’s story against his own sexual coming-ofage as a gay man. A number of books about Nabokov and Lolita have been published in the last few years, but Lolita in the Afterlife seems to be the first to wholly reassess the work’s legacy as our society grapples with the harm caused by white male privilege and the age-old propensity to look the other way. All tallied, the book’s 30 essays (as well as Quigley’s own incisive introduction) are, by necessity, contradictory, bracing, uncomfortable, thought provoking, informative, entertaining and, in the end, inconclusive—not unlike Lolita itself. Perhaps Lauren Groff says it best in her essay “Delectatio Morosa” when she calls Nabokov’s troublesome masterpiece “a paradox . . . unparalleled as a profane and dirty and gorgeous mirror of America.”

Robert Weibezahl is a publishing industry veteran, playwright and novelist. Each month, he takes an in-depth look at a recent book of literary significance.

6

lifestyles

by susannah felts

H The Healing Garden Two of the first things you’ll see in The Healing Garden (Princeton Architectural, $25.95, 9781616899264) are a close-up of a hummingbird cupped in author Deb Soule’s hand and an acknowledgment that her herbal farm occupies Indigenous people’s ancestral lands. Together, these things set a lovely tone for her new guide to herbalism. The founder of Avena Botanicals and author of How to Move Like a Gardener, Soule has cultivated healing plants and worked with them for medicine and wellness for more than four decades. Her wisdom comes with a gentle summons to mindfulness and a plea to embrace a broader awareness of nature’s cycles. She walks us through drying herbs for teas and infusions and guides us in making tinctures, vinegars, honeys, oils and more. Individual profiles of 18 healing plants dig deep into the history and properties of each, along with tips for growing and processing. Both practical and mystical, this is a beautiful, heartfelt guide to an ancient field of study that is experiencing renewed interest.

Directions I almost let Hallie Bateman’s Directions (Workman, $12.95, 9781523510054) slip past. What can I say? I’m a Taurus, and I don’t always love being told what to do, so affirmations in large quantities make me queasy. But once I started paging through this colorful, scrappy little book, I couldn’t stop, and I might have even smiled. A few personal faves: “Dance and encourage dancing but don’t force anyone to dance.” “Apply lotion regularly and generously. Get old anyway.” “Conjure specialness from thin air. Invent holidays, traditions, and surprises. (Duck Day, Ice Cream Tuesday, etc.)” This would be a fun one to leave by the bed in a guest room or an Airbnb, since almost anyone will find a direction or two that resonates with them. Happily, Bateman’s book has prompted me to explore her larger body of work; her Instagram account is one to follow.

Simplicity at Home I’ve been daydreaming about travel; haven’t we all? I yearn to wander a new city, to chance upon an exquisite shop where the artfully arranged goods and decor and lighting and background music all work in tandem to create an immersive experience. Yumiko Sekine’s shop in Tokyo, Fog Linen Work, would surely fit the bill, but for now we have Simplicity at Home (Chronicle, $27.50, 9781797202952), which presents Sekine’s “joyful minimalist” way of living and thoughtful devotion to reusing, repairing and creating harmony with the seasons. The pages are filled with neutrals, spare arrangements of housewares like small ceramic bowls and wooden spoons, neatly folded cloths, bright bunches of vegetables, tiny seeds on white plates, a clutch of flowering branches in a clear glass jar— and of course, delicately rumpled linen for days. If home is a bit suffocating lately, take a trip through this book, make some cold noodles for lunch, fold your socks and breathe.

Susannah Felts is a Nashville-based writer and co-founder of  The Porch, a literary arts organization. She enjoys anything paper- or plant-related.

audio

H A Swim in a Pond in the Rain Critically acclaimed writer and longtime creative writing professor George Saunders offers a master class in writing based on a study of seven short stories by classic Russian writers. Saunders narrates A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (Random House Audio, 14.5 hours) in an easy, conversational tone that makes the listener feel as if they are in a relaxed classroom—or perhaps sitting in a lounge for a one-on-one lesson from this thoughtful teacher. Well-chosen, exceptionally talented actors, including Phylicia Rashad, Glenn Close and Nick Offerman, narrate stories from Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy and others, and their dramatized performances provide a refreshing contrast to Saunders’ more familiar style. More than a writing course, this audiobook is a unique exercise in paying attention and thinking critically. —Autumn Allen

Black Buck Debut author Mateo Askaripour frames his novel, Black Buck (Blackstone Audio, 11 hours), as a “howto” manual for fellow Black workers that reveals the secrets of the narrator’s success. This framing device is particularly well suited to the audiobook format, as its similarity to motivational tapes subtly adds to the novel’s rich satirization of the bizarre and toxic realm of white startup culture. Narrator Zeno Robinson strikes just the right balance in his performance of protagonist Darren Vender’s first-person narrative, hitting both his swaggering cockiness and subsequent regret with equal sensitivity. —Norah Piehl

Better Luck Next Time Set on a “divorce ranch” during the 1930s, Julia Claiborne Johnson’s novel unfolds through personal anecdotes and observations from Ward, now an elderly man but once a 24-year-old ranch hand who was strong, handsome and ready to get into trouble. Actor David Aaron Baker lends an easy, personable voice to Ward’s narration, capturing the character’s charisma with a slight Southern twang. Listening to Better Luck Next Time (HarperAudio, 8.5 hours) feels like hearing someone reminisce about the best years of their life—with the occasional plot twist sprinkled in. —Tami Orendain

The Witch’s Heart In Genevieve Gornichec’s fantasy novel, The Witch’s Heart (Penguin Audio, 12 hours), Angrboda has been burned three times for performing witchcraft, but she remains alive at the edges of the mythical Ironwood, where she begins a tenuous relationship with the trickster god Loki. But Ragnarok, the destruction of the known world, threatens their future. Jayne Entwistle brings Angrboda to life with a husky, sage voice and northern English lilt. Her comforting tone and gentle pacing reinforce the novel’s focus on Angrboda’s domestic challenges in the shadow of cosmic conflicts. —Mari Carlson

7

A new book in the

™

original graphic novel series

Sex, drugs, and murder in 1980s Los Angeles...

MAY 2021 ISBN: 978-1-5343-1836-6 Price: $24.99 US

IMAGECOMICS. COM FRIEND OF THE DEVIL™ & © 2021 Basement Gang, Inc. Image Comics® and its logos are registered trademarks of Image Comics, Inc. All rights reserved.

8

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book clubs

by julie hale

Young love and impossible dreams Swimming in the Dark (William Morrow, $16.99, 9780062890016), Tomasz Jedrowski’s electrifying comingof-age novel, takes place in 1980s Poland during a time of political upheaval. After they meet at a summer camp, Ludwik and Janusz begin a secret, passionate romance, spending idyllic hours together in nature. But the two don’t see eye to eye politically, and their relationship is threatened by Janusz’s devotion to the country’s embattled Communist regime. Jedrowski portrays the intense connection Growing up is hard to do— between two men in a repressive culture with but great fodder for book wistfulness and emotional authenticity. The novel’s club discussions. rich exploration of themes like loyalty and identity, as well as its less commonly trod historical setting, make it an excellent reading group pick. The Girl With the Louding Voice (Dutton, $17, 9781524746094), Abi Daré’s accomplished debut, tells the story of Adunni, a 14-year-old Nigerian girl who harbors hopes of getting an education and leaving poverty behind. Adunni faces many challenges, including an arranged marriage, but she’s determined to live life on her own terms—and to help other women. Language plays a major role in this lively, inspiring story, and Adunni’s remarkable voice reflects her developing relationship to English words and grammar. Potential discussion topics include gender norms, societal expectations and the importance of agency. Philippe Besson’s Lie With Me (Scribner, $16, 9781501197888) is an unforgettable exploration of early love and a piercing analysis of social class and self-­image. With true passion, the novel’s narrator, a successful writer named Philippe, recalls an affair he had in high school with a classmate. Because he’s the school principal’s son, Philippe keeps h i s l ove f o r Thomas, the son of a farmer, a secret. He doesn’t talk to Thomas at school, and Thomas senses early on that their relationship is doomed. Molly Ringwald’s (yes, that Molly Ringwald) translation from the original French captures the bittersweet emotions at play during a formative time in the young men’s lives. Etaf Rum’s tense, dramatic novel, A Woman Is No Man (Harper Perennial, $16.99, 9780062699770), follows three generations of Palestinian American women as they try to reconcile arranged marriages and motherhood with their personal desires. The story of Isra, who immigrates to America with Adam, her husband, forms the backbone of the novel. Isra and Adam settle in Brooklyn, where she struggles with an overbearing mother-in-law. Isra eventually gives birth to four daughters, including Deya, who wishes to attend college in open defiance of family expectations. Rum explores Arab American culture in a multilayered narrative that’s rife with discussion material.

A BookPage reviewer since 2003, Julie Hale recommends the best paperback books to spark discussion in your reading group.

BOOK CLUB READS SPR ING FOR WINTER THE WINDSOR KNOT by SJ Bennett “If ‘The Crown’ were crossed with Miss Marple…the result would probably be something like this charming whodunnit.” —RUTH WARE, New York Times bestselling author

THE NOTE THROUGH THE WIRE by Doug Gold “A moving and uplifting story of love, courage and bravery amidst the horrors of war. I can’t recommend it enough.” —HEATHER MORRIS, bestselling author of

The Tattooist of Auschwitz

THE RESTORATION OF CELIA FAIRCHILD

by Marie Bostwick “[A] big-hearted tale of redemption, family ties, secrets, tough choices, and happy endings...that will leave readers deeply satisfied.” —SUSAN WIGGS, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost and Found Bookshop

THE SILENT TREATMENT by Abbie Greaves “A remarkably assured debut which doesn’t go where you expect it to go. I very much look forward to seeing what she writes next.” —JOJO MOYES, New York Times bestselling author of

Me Before You t @Morrow_PB

t @bookclubgirl

f William Morrow I BookClubGirl

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interview | uzma jalaluddin

©ANDREA STENSON

sell a novel that featured characters and storylines outside of the industry’s narrowly defined expectations for a Muslim romance. “You don’t usually see a woman in a hijab having agency and being the star of her own love story,” she says. “You expect a story about her arranged marriage where she runs away, takes off her hijab and dates a white boy. That’s the story we usually hear—not one where she falls in love with a conservative Muslim man who changes a bit but still has his beard at the end of it.” By adopting familiar frameworks, like the beats of a rom-com or the slow burn of an Austen novel, Jalaluddin artfully deploys classic tropes to give happy endings to characters from backgrounds that are rarely represented in Author Uzma Jalaluddin deploys romance tropes the works she is referencing. And those to expand the boundaries of the genre. happy endings aren’t After updating Pride and Prejudice with her of Hana Khan, as is her gift for just about romanHana Khan Carries On debut romance, author Uzma Jalaluddin turns to precise plotting and clearly tic love. Jalaluddin Berkley, $16, 9780593336366 defined, immediately lovable also addresses other a more modern but no less beloved classic: You’ve aspects of her heroGot Mail. Her sophomore novel, Hana Khan characters. Contemporary Romance Carries On, is a retelling of the beloved Meg Ryan A lengthy crafting process ines’ experiences such and Tom Hanks rom-com that swaps the film’s isn’t new for Jalaluddin. Her first novel, Ayesha at as community, identity and honoring your faith in a secular society. dueling bookstores for halal restaurants. The tituLast, also took a long time to write, beginning in lar Hana helps run Three Sisters Biryani Poutine, 2010. “I wasn’t writing every day, but it did take me Though both of Jalaluddin’s novels contain simia community staple that’s owned and operated around seven years to reach a final draft,” she says. lar pleasures, the author sees differences between She describes that story’s Jane Austen connection by her family. Unfortunately, sales are down, and her debut and Hana Khan Carries On, which an upscale halal eatery opening nearby could put as a “happy accident,” as it was some time before was written during a time of political and social them out of business she noticed Lizzie upheaval. “In the past few years, I was more aware for good. and Darcy reflected of the storm clouds gathering, and I think that “When I was growing up, I comes through in Hana Khan Carries On,” she But Hana’s heart i n t h e n ov e l’s wondered, where is the Muslim is not in the restaucharacters. says. Within the course of the book, Hana and her community must deal with microaggressions and rant business. She “I know that Bridget Jones? Where is the hate crimes while pursuing their dreams. launched her own sounds ridiculous But passion flows through it all, from the devopodcast while internlooking back on it,” Muslim Meg Cabot?” tion of Hana’s family to keeping their halal restauing at a local radio Jalaluddin says, “but station and recently formed a flirtation with an I also feel like I was writing in a vacuum.” Jalaludrant afloat to Hana’s excitement and ambition in anonymous caller. Add in a fearsome, scene-­ din’s parents immigrated to Canada from India, launching a podcast. It’s similar to the passion in stealing aunt and a cousin so compelling he seems and she seldom saw an experience like hers repreJalaluddin’s voice when she’s discussing her path destined for his own spinoff novel, and Hana has sented in the type of books she wanted to write. from reader to writer. her hands full. “In the early 2010s, there was so little South Asian “When I was growing up, I wondered, where is Hana Khan Carries On was dozens of drafts in representation in romance or comedies, especially the Muslim Bridget Jones? Where is the Muslim the making, and Jalaluddin freely admits to reworkSouth Asian Muslim representation,” she says. “Part Meg Cabot?” Jalaluddin says. She has become what ing the story several times over. “The book itself of the reason I decided to turn my head toward Jane she sought as a young reader, and if another young took me many, many years to write. Like a lot of Austen in my first book was because I was a little girl has those same questions now, hopefully she’ll people, I wear a lot of hats,” she says with a laugh bit scared that people wouldn’t know how to deal discover that the answer is Uzma Jalaluddin. with my story.” —Amanda Diehl during a call to her home outside Toronto. Not only is she a mom, but she also writes a column for Jalaluddin’s concerns were justified. Even with Visit BookPage.com to read our starred the Toronto Star and teaches high school English. the Austen hook, Ayesha at Last was rejected countreview of Hana Khan Carries On. Her love of language is evident in every sentence less times by publishers who didn’t know how to

A new spin on a classic recipe

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romance

by christie ridgway

H The Duke Undone Opposites attract is a beloved romance trope, and it’s hard to imagine two people less likely to fall in love than a handsome aristocrat and an orphaned art student. When Lucy Coover encounters Anthony Philby, Duke of Weston, unconscious and naked in a London alley, she covers him up and gets help but later paints him from memory as a mythic (and nude) figure. Anthony discovers the piece before his disgrace becomes public, but he must find the artist to prevent further renderings. The Duke Undone (Berkley, $16, 9780593198285) is no rom-com, however. Author Joanna Lowell’s novel includes glimpses of life at the Royal Academy of Arts, political chicanery, kidnapping and the plight of people in unsavory asylums. It’s a lush, sensual and outstanding romance that makes the heart ache in the very best way.

BookPage

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doesn’t stop here.

H Second First Impressions Second First Impressions (William Morrow, $15.99, 9780062912855) by Sally Thorne is a tender love story about a woman who learns to put herself first. Ruthie Midona both lives and works at the Providence Retirement Villa, and the 25-year-old wonders if she’ll still be living there in 70 years. She’s a cautious sort, so it will take a big bang to shake up her world. This explosion comes in the guise of ne’erdo-well tattoo artist Teddy Prescott, who’s hired as an assistant to a pair of residents (who make adorable supporting characters). Who wouldn’t fall for confident, beautiful Teddy, even though he’s got bigger plans that will soon take him far away? There’s so much to love in this book. Many readers will see a little of themselves in Ruthie’s relatable perspective, and all of them will lose their hearts to Teddy. His self-deprecating charm is irresistible, but he’s more than a pretty face—just as beneath Thorne’s fresh and breezy writing style is a story with real depth. Second First Impressions is an unforgettable charmer.

Flight A former forensic photographer and a detective team up to stop a serial killer in Flight (Berkley, $7.99, 9780593197349) by Laura Griffin. In the small coastal town of Lost Beach, Texas, Miranda Moore tries to de-stress from a particularly gruesome case by photographing birds, but the discovery of a pair of dead bodies soon draws her into a new investigation. Detective Joel Breda recognizes Miranda’s gift with her camera and is also struck by a level of attraction he hasn’t experienced before. Miranda is likewise smitten, but she’s more wary. When it looks like the killer is getting close to her, however, she turns to Joel for more than just protection. Griffin evokes a fabulous sense of place; the reader can feel the humidity and smell the salt air. An appealing cast combined with just the right amount of tingling suspense create a balanced blend of sexy romance and intriguing mystery.

Christie Ridgway is a lifelong romance reader and a published romance novelist of over 60 books.

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cover story | kaitlyn greenidge

For the author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman, writing is as much an adventure of discovering new history as it is an act of creative expression. The legacy of medicine, trauma, motherhood and marriage in Black American communities provides the groundwork for Kaitlyn Greenidge’s second novel, Libertie, an engrossing study of a headstrong mother and her equally headstrong daughter. Speaking by phone from her Brooklyn home, Greenidge discusses her novel’s deep roots in history and the literary traditions created by Toni Morrison, whom she describes as “the mother of everything.” Libertie was inspired by the true story of Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward, who in 1869 became the first Black female doctor in New York. She also co-founded the Brooklyn Women’s Homeopathic Hospital and Dispensary at a time when homeopathy was considered stateof-the-art medicine. Greenidge learned about Dr. McKinney Steward and her family while working at the Weeksville Heritage Center, a historic site dedicated to a former settlement of free African Americans that flourished in the 19th century in what is now Crown Heights, Brooklyn. In the novel, Dr. McKinney Steward is transformed into the fictional Dr. Kathy Sampson, mother of Libertie, who studies homeopathic medicine under Dr. Sampson, drops out of college and falls

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in love with a man who moves her to Haiti, all while seeking a sense of identity, self-preservation and liberty. Despite the fact that Libertie is freeborn, expectations related to race, class and gender start early, beginning with Dr. Sampson’s insistence that Libertie follow in her medical footsteps, that it’s Libertie’s duty to carry on her mother’s legacy. “All parents think that!” says Greenidge. “It’s like, ‘Oh, this person can do exactly what I did but without the mistakes.’ With Libertie you can see how she’s just like her mother but she’s not, and she’s trying to figure out how to be her own person.” Like Weeksville, Libertie’s hometown is inhabited and run by African Americans, but the pressure of white supremacy is unavoidable. In one scene, Black children from orphanages across the river in Manhattan are ferried to Brooklyn to escape the rampaging white mobs of the 1863 draft riots. In the first of many parallels to the work of Morrison, Greenidge’s novel is deeply interested in how people deal with personal and generational trauma from such events. “One of the most profound questions for a lot of art, and a lot of novels in particular, is how people explain [trauma] to themselves,” she says.

“The rest of the world tells us so much of how we’re supposed to be, who we’re not supposed to be, punishes us for walking a line.” The Civil War- and Reconstruction-era setting of Libertie allowed Greenidge to investigate both the trauma of enslavement and the ingenious ways people escaped slavery. For example, she based a character from the novel’s opening scenes on a woman who used her dressmaker’s shop and funeral parlor to transport fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad within the concealment of coffins. The freedom seekers had to pretend to be dead, but they looked good while doing it. “It’s amazing,” Greenidge says. “I can’t not include that in the novel!” The first of Dr. Sampson’s patients is one of these casket escapees, Mr. Ben, who avoids his traumatic past by fixating on a woman he claims left him for another man. Another of Dr. Sampson’s patients has lash wounds that refuse

©SYREETA MCFADDEN

cover story | kaitlyn greenidge

to heal. When Libertie leaves her small community to attend college, she meets a pair of silvervoiced singers who call themselves the Graces. They were enslaved for most of their lives but have achieved satisfying if somewhat precarious careers since becoming free. Yet they refuse to talk about their pasts. “I wanted to give a sense of the different ways slavery would have affected people,” says Greenidge. “Trauma is different depending on your gender or your race or your social class. I wanted to explore that with Mr. Ben being a man of a different class from Libertie and her mom, how he lives and experiences what happens to him.” Also like Morrison, Greenidge incorporates questions of colorism, or preference shown to people of color with lighter skin tones, into her narrative. She says she finds the topic uniquely fascinating for “how it affects and doesn’t affect people’s lives.” Dr. Sampson’s skin is light enough that she can pass for white, and though her hospital is open to women of all races, she’s careful not to let her darker-skinned daughter have too much contact with white patients, which Libertie comes to resent.

“How [skin color is] talked about is so dependent on where you’re from,” Greenidge says. “We pretend it’s universal, but it’s not. There’s no such thing as dark or light. People who are dark in one town are light in another because it all depends on who you’re standing next to.” Still, she admits, “it’s very painful for a lot of people.” The Sampson women can’t escape patriarchal forces either. Even Mr. Ben disdains Dr. Sampson because he feels a woman has no business being a doctor, and the women in town only grudgingly respect her. When Libertie moves to Haiti, she’s initially optimistic about her new home in a country run by Black folks, but the expectations around gender are so oppressive that when she becomes pregnant—expected to produce a son for her husband’s prominent family—she has to move into the cooking shed. Greenidge was pregnant during much of Libertie’s creation, so it’s no wonder marriage and motherhood are such prominent parts of the story. “I handed in the first draft the day I found out I was pregnant, the second draft when I went into the hospital to have [my daughter], and the final draft during the pandemic when she was about 6 months old,” Greenidge explains as her daughter shrieks happily in the background. As a new mother and an author, Greenidge is interested in the way Black female writers experience motherhood. She describes it as liberating, not something that’s “oppressive or keeps one unhappily anchored to a way of life or even a place. For Black women, it’s a place of self-determination. The rest of the world tells us so much of how we’re supposed to be, who we’re not supposed to be, punishes us for walking a line. In motherhood, Black women have the freedom to mold our children.” She recalls reading an interview with Morrison in which “Toni talked about finding freedom in motherhood for a Black woman specifically and really enjoying motherhood. She found that motherhood expanded her understanding of the world and expanded who she was as an artist.” As for marriage, Greenidge was intrigued by the fact that one of the first things many Black people did after emancipation was get married. Formerly enslaved people had no property to protect through matrimony but entered into the tradition anyway. “I found that so fascinating and really touching and beautiful,” she says. “It was an alternative understanding of marriage. It was about building a foundation with another person. It’s closer to how we think of marriage in more modern times.” Both Libertie and her mother are free to marry the men they love, and Libertie’s husband even imagines a marriage of equals, though the promise of a balanced relationship soon turns sour. But when Libertie becomes pregnant, motherhood offers her the type of freedom that Morrison spoke of—freedom from others’ control over her and from expectations about who she should become. With its connections to a history that’s illuminated more and more each passing day, Libertie is a superb novel that informs the present and perhaps even the future. —Arlene McKanic Libertie Algonquin, $26.95, 9781616207014

Coming of Age

Visit BookPage.com to read our starred review of Libertie.

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feature | inspirational living

Glimmers of hope Four enlightening guides provide shining examples of faith. Each of these books highlights practices that can heal fractured relationInspiration has been hard to come by in a year marked by a devastating ships or bring us closer to God, such as prayer. However, our understanding pandemic, economic hardship and shocking political turmoil. If your faith of prayer is often as constricted as our understanding of Jesus. In his monuhas been challenged, these books will encourage hope, offer guidance and mental and elegantly insightful book Learning to Pray: A Guide for Everyprovide glimpses of light amid the shadows. With her characteristic deadpan humor, Anne Lamott shepherds us through one (HarperOne, $27.99, 9780062643230), James Martin, SJ, teaches a simple the darkness in Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage (Riverhead, $20, but enduring lesson: “Prayer is a personal relationship with God.” He gently 9780593189696). In short, affectionately candid chapters, Lamott meditates guides the reader through reasons to pray and offers a richly detailed history on the beauty of nature, the power of forgiveness, the wonder of love and of various types of prayer, from petitionary prayer and centering prayer to kindness and the benefit of recognizing specks of hope all around us. When nature prayer and lectio divina, or praying with sacred texts. Martin reminds she’s in an airport, exasperated us of the many reasons we pray, by flight delays, for example, she including to praise God and to If your faith has been challenged, these books notices a young girl’s absorption unburden ourselves. Because we in some hair ribbons. Suddenly it will encourage hope, offer guidance and provide often think of prayer as asking for dawns on her how we can recover favors from God, or as limited to glimpses of light amid the shadows. our faith in life “in the midst of so certain times and places, we don’t much bad news and dread, when always realize that we can pray our children’s futures are so uncertain: We start in the here and now. . . . without knowing it by “pausing to think about something that inspires you,” We start where our butts and feet and minds are. We start in these times being “aware that you are grateful” or even simply wishing you could pray. of incomprehensible scientific predictions, madness and disbelief, aging Martin’s book is so abundantly full that it may be the only guide to prayer and constantly nightmarish airport delays, and we look up and around for you’ll ever need. brighter ribbons.” In the book that accompanies his PBS series of the same title, The While Lamott explores how we restrict ourselves with limited ideas about Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song (Penguin Press, $30, grace, sin and forgiveness, Diana Butler Bass focuses on the ways we put 9781984880338), Henry Louis Gates Jr. sublimely evokes the power of worship Jesus in a cage, confining the universality of his life and message behind to create both religious and political solidarity. Drawing on meticulous archibars of dogmatism. In her moving Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as val research, as well as on insightful interviews with a diverse group of reliFriend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence (HarperOne, $26.99, gious leaders, Gates plumbs the history of the Black church in America, from 9780062659521), Bass attempts to answer the age-old question, “Who is Jesus its roots in slavery, through its development in the 19th and early 20th centureally?” Theologians have long responded to this question by focusing on ries, to its struggles during the 1960s and into the 21st century. Gates elegantly either the human Jesus of history or the divine Christ of faith, but Bass writes illustrates that “the signal aspects of African American culture were planted, watered, given light, and nurtured in the Black Church.” He also teases apart that neither history nor theology, “neither intellectual arguments nor ecclethe two stories present within African American religious traditions: “one of siastical authority elucidates the Jesus I have known.” She shares wonderful stories of finding Jesus during every stage of her life, noting that experiencing a people defining themselves in the presence of a higher power and the other Jesus as a friend during one’s teenage years will be very different from expeof their journey for freedom and equality in a land where power itself . . . was riencing Jesus as a friend in middle age. In this refreshing book, Bass tells (and still is) denied them.” Gates’ enthralling book offers a powerful reminder readers of a Jesus “who shows up consistently and when we least expect him. that our actions affect the communities in which we live. —Henry L. Carrigan Jr. Freeing Jesus means finding him along the way.”

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q&a | anne lamott

Keeping the faith With her signature wit and wisdom, Anne Lamott reminds us how to find the light. Anne Lamott’s latest book is a timely guide to restoring our hope and finding our faith as we wait for a new day to dawn. She shares some ideas for how to get by when the world seems especially dark.

You got married in 2019, and your attempts to deal with this new relationship dynamic underlie much of Dusk, Night, Dawn. Can you describe some of the ways your marriage affects your outlook on broken relationships and forgiveness? My husband, Neal, and I have been in quarantine together since right before our one-year anniversary, so things have possibly been a little more insulated than we had been expecting. We’re both pretty easygoing, so that helps a lot, and we both hole up a lot to do our writing, so we have a lot of space apart. When you’re mostly stuck in a house together and the other person says or does something hurtful, there’s a lot of incentive to work through it. And Neal is (almost) always willing to talk things over. Both of us believe that Earth is Forgiveness School, so we practice on each other. Some days go better than others. In one chapter, you use the image of Soul Windex. Can you describe Soul Windex and how we use it? Our vision gets so smudged by all the endless and meaningless data that come at us, and by toxic obsessions, cravings, resentments, etc. So Soul Windex is a new way of paying attention to what is real and of real value, so that we are spritzed awake. Think of it as an energetic equivalent to the fluid you clean your windshield with. It’s usually found in nature or in being of service to those in need. You write about the tricky concept of sin in this book. Can you define sin? How does your definition of sin differ from the traditional Christian definition? The origin of the word sin is an archery term for missing the mark. So I don’t see sin so much as drug cartels and porn shops, but rather all the isms—racism, sexism, ageism and so forth.

©SAM LAMOTT

What’s the story behind Dusk, Night, Dawn? I started writing Dusk, Night, Dawn during the tour for my last book. Everywhere I went, the people in my audiences felt scared and overwhelmed by all the bad news—and this was before COVID-19. So I wanted to share my experiences of going through extremely scary, defeating times without losing my essential isness or my capacity for joy and curiosity.

to the greatest scientific knowledge that could ever be. I never lose hope in science or in most people’s essential goodness. How do we recover our faith in life? Basically we start where we are; we start where our butts are. We do kind things for others, and we pay more attention to all the beauty and goodness that surround us. We make gratitude lists of everything that blesses us, that gives us feelings of safety and nurture, pleasure and relief. And on some level, I think we decide to keep the faith. What will readers be surprised to learn about from Dusk, Night, Dawn? How really hilarious so much of life can be, if you have a couple of best friends; how much of life still works, no matter what a disaster the Earth or a family is; and how much light can be found almost anywhere we look, no matter how dark and scary the world can be.

How do you describe forgiveness? Dusk, Night, Dawn Riverhead, $20, 9780593189696 Forgiveness is when you decide not to hit back—when your heart softens ever so slightly toward someone who Religion & Spirituality has harmed you or someone you love, or your country. What’s the significance of the title Dusk, Night, Dawn? It doesn’t mean you have to have lunch with the person, I discovered that twilight means both dusk, the trippy but it usually involves seeing them as having acted badly from a place of feeling light before evening, and dawn, that mystical light before morning breaks. And damaged and empty, not from evil. I have felt very strongly for the last few years that this is the darkest the world has ever been—but we have come through so much, with the little pilot light Do you feel hopeful about the future? inside us still burning, and even though it gets darker and darker, the light will return in the morning. It always has, it always will. Yes, I have so much hope for the future! Our young people are so incredibly —Henry L. Carrigan Jr. passionate about climate change and have access (because of us older people!)

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feature | poetry

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Distilled language at its most potent Celebrate National Poetry Month with three uplifting, enlightening and sustaining collections. In the pages of these poetry collections, you’ll meet three extraordinary poets whose work provides prismatic perspectives on the human experience. Writing in a refreshingly defiant voice, Yemeni American poet Threa Almontaser offers a razorsharp interrogation of home, gender and cultural norms in her first collection, The Wild Fox of Yemen (Graywolf, $16, 9781644450505). In “Muslim Girl with White Guys, Ending at the Edge of a Ridge,” Almontaser articulates the challenges of living between two cultures: “Neither muscle nor mouth / devoted to one way of speaking. Every language / I borrow from somewhere else.” While addressing the generational differences and frictions that exist within her extended family, Almontaser reveals herself to be exceptional at playing with shape, manipulating a page’s white space in order to underscore her ideas. (The lines of “Feast, Beginning w/ a Kissed Blade” form the shape of a knife, crafted to conclude on a pinpoint.) Winner of the 2020 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, Almontaser’s daring debut both speaks to and transcends the times. Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2021 (FSG, $35, 9780374600136) offers a wonderful overview of recent work by beloved, acclaimed poet Yusef Komunyakaa. Spanning 20 years, the volume brings together selections from his previous books and features 12 new poems. A Louisiana native, Komunyakaa enlivens observations about youth, music, race, love and war with singular, spellbinding imagery. His poems capture the magnitude of everyday moments and the mysteries of the natural world. In “Slingshot”—as “summer rambles into a quiet / quantum of dogwood & gum”—a boy’s experiment with a homemade weapon proves to be transformative. In “Our Side of the Creek,” the poet is attuned to the ominous: “The Jim Crow birds sang / of persimmon & mayhaw / after a 12-gauge shotgun / sounded in the mossy woods.” Komunyakaa, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1994, writes majestic yet deeply human poems that make this a collection to savor. In his innovative and urgent first collection, The Perseverance (Tin House, $16.95, 9781951142421), British Jamaican poet Raymond Antrobus reflects on finding his place in poetry as a deaf person. In “Echo,” he writes, “Even though I have not heard / the golden decibel of angels, / I have been living in a noiseless / palace where the doorbell is pulsating / light and I am able to answer.” Themes of misunderstanding and the nature of communication run through Antrobus’ work. “When you tell someone you read lips you / become a mysterious captain,” he says in “I Move Through London Like a Hotep,” which takes its title from a misheard phrase. Throughout the collection, he adopts different forms and registers with the ease of a seasoned writer. His appealing book, which has already received numerous honors, including the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, deserves a wide readership. —Julie Hale

feature | earth day

Take a bird’s-eye view of Earth Day To better appreciate the beauty, delicacy and tenacity of our aerial friends, these books will put you on the right crosswind.

This period of cloistering at home has made bird lovers everywhere more attentive to their backyards. Millions of us have hung bird feeders, ordered bird identification cards and glued ourselves to the windowpane to watch these tiny emissaries of the sky. Yet for all the joy that birds bring us, they face grim and unprecedented dangers as their numbers dwindle.

H A World on the Wing

adaptability, intelligence and ability to forge connections, even with humans. In his debut book, A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey (Knopf, $30, 9781101875704), Meiburg travels across South America in pursuit of this little-known hawk that seems to either enchant or chagrin anyone who crosses its path. So intimately does Meiburg acquaint his readers with this inquisitive, curious, sometimes playful thief of a bird that it’s startling when he adds “doomed” to that list of adjectives. Meiburg’s fondness for the caracara is plain, and he can’t help but dream up a plan to rescue this odd winged creature from its steadily shrinking habitat, encroached upon by forces both natural and human-made. What’s more, Meiburg lodges the caracara so deeply in readers’ hearts that by the end of the book, they will feel ready to participate in whatever scheme he proposes to save this peculiar dinosaur descendant.

Scott Weidensaul, a Pulitzer finalist for his book Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere With Migratory Birds, returns to the topic in A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds (Norton, $32, 9780393608908), though much has changed in the intervening 20 years. For one thing, tracking technology has improved, with devices shrunk to a size that even the smallest songbirds can wear. Weidensaul describes a minuscule transmitter fitted to the small of a bird’s back by two small loops around its legs, and this is charmThe Glitter in the Green ing to think about—first, of birds having a small of the back, and second, of their wearing transmitters like tiny At the other end of the avian spectrum lies the underpants. hummingbird, that glamorous, sugar-high pugilist of In 2016 the Anthropocene Working Group proposed the garden. Natural history writer, photographer and that humanity had left the Holocene and entered hummingbird obsessive (within the first hundred pages the Anthropocene, an he crosses both a bear and era defined by the ways puma in pursuit of this The plight and toughness of birds atiny, glimmering bird) humans have destabilized Jon Dunn has written a the natural world. Weidenand their human defenders book that is both an ode saul addresses migratory will move you in lasting ways. to hummingbirds and a birds’ changing reality and the scientists who work remarkable piece of travel tirelessly to learn more about them and advocate on literature. In The Glitter in the Green: In Search of their behalf to the powers responsible for decimating Hummingbirds (Basic, $30, 9781541618190), we travel with Dunn to Alaska, Mexico and across South America these birds’ lives and rhythms. The plight and toughness as he follows in the hummingbird’s wake. of both birds and their human defenders will move you in lasting ways. Dunn gives us the facts about hummingbirds—for example, their long tongues coil inside their skulls when not in use and split at the end to allow for rapid-fire A Most Remarkable Creature nectar gathering—but he also explores the places where According to Jonathan Meiburg, a South American hummingbirds intersect with the world they inhabit hawk called the caracara is both the most and least and the people they affect. The story of hummingbirds likely animal to survive the world to come. Personintertwines intriguingly with Mexican witchcraft, James able and wickedly clever, the caracara’s Bond, plane crashes, economies around the world and the lingering legacy of Aztec power. We come to realize greatest strengths are its that these familiar visitors are astonishingly mysterious: They perform impressive migrations to arctic climes for breeding, their feathers have been valued as currency, and some cultures believe they bring love and guard travelers. From the narrative of Dunn’s excursion, we learn that a backyard hummingbird sighting is actually an exotic visit from the wide, strange world. —Anna Spydell

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reviews | fiction

H What Comes After By JoAnne Tompkins

Literary Fiction “Evil isn’t a person. . . . It’s not a political group either. Or a religion like some people think. Evil is a force. Like gravity. It acts on all of us. We’re all vulnerable to it.” In Port Furlong, Washington, Isaac Balch speaks these words without knowing he will soon experience one of the greatest evils a parent could ever face. Eight days after Isaac’s teenage son, Daniel, fails to come home from football practice, Daniel’s childhood friend and next-door neighbor, Jonah, dies by suicide. In a note, Jonah confesses to Daniel’s murder. Weeks later, a 16-year-old girl turns up in Isaac’s yard. The bereaved father can’t bring himself to abandon Evangeline McKensey to the cool fall night; she looks as lost as he feels, her unwashed state and not-so-hidden pregnancy suggesting she needs a home. When Isaac has to leave town for a family matter, he risks the discomfort of asking

The Ladies of the Secret Circus By Constance Sayers

Speculative Fiction When a story is set in an invented universe, the line its author must walk is a bit more treacherous than when a tale is set in a recognizable “real” world. In The Ladies of the Secret Circus (Redhook, $28, 9780316493673), Constance Sayers proves she can walk that line with grace and power. Sayers’ second novel (after 2020’s A Witch in Time) unfolds through two narratives, eight decades apart. In the 1920s, a woman named Cecile is part of a wondrous family circus with a magical secret. A love affair might set her free but could also cost her everything. In the 2000s, Lara, a descendant of that same family, prepares for her wedding day and is shaken to her core when her fiancé goes missing. As she searches for answers, Lara is drawn into a web of secrets and magic that leads her to Cecile’s journals and beyond, as she uncovers a dark curse stretching back generations. The novel’s massive network of connections— tactile and ethereal, physical and mystical— makes for a luxurious reading experience, like a rich tapestry. The Ladies of the Secret Circus is a

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Lorrie Geiger—the mother of his son’s killer—to check in on Evangeline. In What Comes After (Riverhead, $28, 9780593085998), debut novelist JoAnne Tompkins takes readers to dark places in her characters’ psyches: Isaac’s unwillingness to grapple with the complexities of the people closest to him; Jonah’s hatred of his friend; and Evangeline’s growing understanding of what she will do to survive, and what a mother can and cannot walk away from. They’re all learning who to trust, navigating the evil forces that permeate the world. Tompkins’ experience in the legal system (she was a mediator and judicial officer) exposed her to great tragedy, and this background informs her empathetic exploration of her characters’ lives. She writes about mental health and faith, particularly Isaac’s Quaker beliefs,

without sentimentalizing or damning her characters’ experiences. In the novel, faith is simply part of life, a reality that is rarely so sensitively portrayed in fiction. Like faith, evil is also part of the human experience. As the people of Port Furlong grapple with the evil act committed by one of their own, Tompkins poses questions of morality and motivation, nature and nurture, and how people move forward. When Isaac explains the concept of evil, he points to the tumors that killed his mother. “My mother had cancer, she suffered cancer, but no one ever thought she was cancer itself. . . . Despite all the evidence.” —Carla Jean Whitley

book to get lost in, not just because of the fantasy elements that layer it with intrigue but also because of the emotional connections that tie it all together. Through beautifully orchestrated prose and careful, confident pacing, Sayers constructs a story that feels like sitting down with an older relative and slowly, over hours, getting all the family secrets in one juicy, enchanted package. Perfect for fans of Anne Rice’s Lives of the Mayfair Witches series or Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic, The Ladies of the Secret Circus is just as much about the secrets we keep in the name of family as it is about the spells we cast in the name of love. —Matthew Jackson

during the Cuban revolution, Carmen leaves her mother behind and immigrates to Florida. Later, in a wealthy suburb, Carmen tries to provide her daughter, Jeanette, with a comfortable American life. Jeanette has a drug addiction, is hiding a tragic secret and is desperately seeking a purpose. Their lives intersect with that of Gloria, an immigrant from El Salvador who hopes to give her young daughter, Ana, a better life in Miami. Then Gloria is seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Ana must reunite with her mother at a detention center in Texas. They are deported to Mexico with no resources and forced to start over on their own.

H Of Women and Salt

Debut novelist Gabriela Garcia expertly threads each woman’s story to another’s and pulls their stories taut.

By Gabriela Garcia

Family Saga The relationship between mothers and daughters is a richly mined topic in fiction. In her beautifully written debut, Gabriela Garcia presents a new classic of m o t h e r- d au g ht e r literature. Of Women and Salt (Flatiron, $26.99, 9781250776686) tells the intertwined stories of women in two families from the 19th century to the present day. After an unstable childhood

Some novels attempt to tell a sweeping narrative only to get bogged down by a busy plot and too many characters, but despite a large cast from numerous time periods, Of Women and Salt expertly threads each woman’s story to another’s and pulls their stories taut. Disparate hardships propel each of their lives, but they are linked by a shared struggle to carry on in a harsh world, whether each survives her circumstance—or not. Motherhood is “a constant calculation of what-if,” Garcia writes. At the heart of Of Women and Salt are the sacrifices made by mothers so their daughters can have different lives—perhaps better ones.

reviews | fiction But daughters may make choices based on their own wishes and needs, and this possibility is ever poised to pierce a mother’s heart. In this way, the novel is quietly heartbreaking. As Garcia writes, “Even the best mothers in the world can’t always save their daughters.” —Jessica Wakeman

H The Women of Chateau

Lafayette

By Stephanie Dray

Historical Fiction The Château de Chavaniac, a beautiful stone castle in the remote reaches of the mountains of Auvergne, is the birthplace of the Marquis de Lafayette, a man who played an integral role in the French Revolution and who famously helped the American colonies win their independence from British rule. In The Women of Chateau Lafayette (Berkley, $27, 9781984802125), the marquis is a mere supporting figure as author Stephanie Dray’s novel instead follows three women over three eras of the château’s history. First there’s Adrienne Lafayette, the marquis’ wife. History has all but forgotten her role as adviser and strategist to her husband, but she put her life and family at risk in pursuit of liberty for all of France. Then during World War I, Beatrice Astor Chanler, a millionaire’s wife and former actor, uses the family fortune to restore the crumbling château, transforming it into a sanctuary for sick and orphaned children. Finally there’s Marthe Simone, one of those orphans, who grows up at the château and works there as a teacher as the Nazis occupy France. Marthe uses her gift as a talented artist to falsify paperwork and protect Jewish children at the manor. Dray is a bestselling historical novelist who has previously written about Eliza Hamilton and Patsy Randolph, Thomas Jefferson’s daughter. Her ability to create engaging narratives from history, incorporating rich details and fully drawn characters, is downright magical. Adrienne and Beatrice are both based on real women whose stories come vividly to life here, while Marthe is a composite character inspired by the manor’s female resistance fighters, an artist-in-residence and other figures from the château’s history. In The Women of Chateau Lafayette, we move among the extravagance of Marie Antoinette’s royal court, the brutality of trench warfare in World War I and the misery of a French countryside slowly starving under Nazi rule. It’s an epic,

gripping novel, a powerful depiction of the way brutal conflicts based on prejudice and greed tend to repeat time and again. And through it all, Dray poignantly reminds us of the undervalued contributions of women throughout history. “I had freed my family by force of will,” says Adrienne. “Not only my family, but those who had been arrested for our sake. I had done it without sacrificing any principle or doing violence. It was not the sort of victory for which people built stone monuments, but I hoped it might still, someday, be remembered.” —Amy Scribner

Good Company

By Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney

Family Drama Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s 2016 debut novel, The Nest, was an instant bestseller for a reason. It had the lure of cash; a charismatic, lovable rogue as a central figure; and a crackling cast of New York City characters. In her second novel, Good Company (Ecco, $27.99, 9780062876003), Sweeney once again flexes her talent for crafting loving family dynamics that splinter due to errant behavior. Flora Mancini’s seemingly idyllic life in Los Angeles as a voice-over actor and wife to Julian, a full-time TV actor, hits the rocks when she discovers an envelope containing her husband’s wedding ring, supposedly lost years earlier. From this pivotal moment, chapters begin to alternate between present and the past, revealing the reason for the ring’s disappearance when the couple was living in New York City with their young daughter, Ruby, and struggling to keep Julian’s theater company, Good Company, from sinking. When the lure of steady work spurs the Mancinis to switch coasts, upgrading their climate and lifestyle, they are able to reunite with Flora’s best friend, Margot, another Good Company alum. Margot’s husband, David, was forced to give up his East Coast job as a heart surgeon after he had a stroke, and Margot was lucky to land a recurring role on a daytime soap opera. Now she’s living the celebrity life. Along the way, there have been bumps in the road for the four friends, but life on the West Coast is treating the former Manhattanites well. Flora’s discovery, however, shatters the illusion of her perfect marriage and her rock-solid friendship with Margot. As in The Nest, Sweeney skillfully navigates the narrow path between literary and commercial

SOUTHERN FICTION

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Available April 2021!

“An astonishingly assured debut.” —Elizabeth Letts, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Available June 2021!

“Women’s fiction lovers won’t be able to put [this] down.” —Kristy Woodson Harvey, USA Today bestselling author

New York Times Bestseller!

“Emotionally resonant and unforgettable.” —Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times bestselling author

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reviews | fiction fiction with plenty of wit, warmth, heartache and joy. Like a comfy armchair, this is a novel you can sink into and enjoy. Good company, indeed. —Jeff Vasishta

H Red Island House By Andrea Lee

Literary Fiction Andrea Lee’s lush and lyrical Red Island House (Scribner, $27, 9781982137809) is an episodic novel of race and culture that flirts with fabulism as it portrays a couple at odds with each other and their island home. It’s set in Madagascar, an island nation that floats between Africa and India both culturally and geographically. “Though defined by cartographers as part of Africa, Madagascar really belongs only to itself,” Lee writes. The novel is a bit like that as well. The protagonist, Shay, is a refined academic and an expatriate American. Senna is a big and brash Italian man. They meet at a wedding in Como, Italy, and fall inexorably in love. He’s older and wealthy, and it’s a second marriage for them both. When Senna builds his dream vacation home in the rough northwestern reaches of Madagascar, on the tiny island of Naratrany, he tells Shay that it’s for her, like an elaborate wedding gift. But she knows better. The house is a fantasy of Senna’s that long precedes her arrival, and it proceeds regardless of her wishes or comfort. Their visits to Naratrany expose and exacerbate the space between them, and each time they touch down there, Senna becomes a terrain that Shay doesn’t recognize and can’t navigate. With time, tiny cracks become cleavages. In Madagascar, Shay is thrust into a role she doesn’t want, as mistress of the Red House, a vast neocolonial manse that requires nearly a dozen staff members to maintain. The fact that Shay is Black complicates things in ways she can’t quite come to terms with. The Red House is not a plantation, the people who work there aren’t enslaved, and yet there is something deeply discomfiting in its hierarchical social arrangements. What can Shay make of the man and the marriage that put her in this position? “Through years of her Naratrany holidays, she never shakes the sensation that her leisure is built on old crimes,” she thinks. The tableau haunts and unsettles her. At first Shay believes she can wall off these problems at the Red House, but the rot cannot be contained. The ebb and flow of Shay’s marriage is just part of the story, as Red Island House contains vignettes about a fascinating array of characters

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and entanglements in the Naratrany society that surrounds though never quite embraces the couple. From the feuding female entrepreneurs whom Shay calls “Sirens” to the local éminence grise who may or may not have spiritual powers, it’s a complex and seductive tapestry. Lee’s striking writing is layered and thick with evocative descriptions of people, landscapes, feelings and foreboding. Sociological and psychological, it’s prose with the abstract feel of poetry. The stories of Red Island House are vibrant and enchanting despite the current of dread that runs through the novel from the start. —Carole V. Bell

Early Morning Riser By Katherine Heiny

Comic Fiction If a handful of c ha ra c t e r s w e re transported from Anne Tyler’s Baltimore to tiny Boyne City, Michigan, they might act a bit like the ones Katherine Heiny has gathered in Early Morning Riser (Knopf, $26.95, 9780525659341). But Heiny’s gentle exploration of how we tiptoe and often stumble through the minefield of love is both fresh and consistently entertaining. When second grade teacher Jane Wilkes meets Duncan Ryfield, they quickly fall in lust. But Jane’s attraction to Duncan, a handsome and capable woodworker who’s more skilled at starting projects than he is at finishing them, is complicated by the discovery that he is, as a friend politely puts it, “extremely . . . social”—meaning he’s slept with most of the available women in this part of rural Michigan. In particular, Duncan has a puzzlingly close relationship with his ex-wife, an aggressive, opinionated real estate agent, even though it’s been many years since their divorce and her remarriage.

In her second novel, Katherine Heiny is unfailingly honest and never at a loss for a witty observation. Heiny’s novel navigates nearly 20 years of smalltown life, with weddings—one canceled and two consummated—children and a con man’s shocking scheme. Some of these events combine to upend Jane and Duncan’s life when they become responsible for the care of Jimmy Jellico, a developmentally disabled man who works as a helper in Duncan’s

shop. This unique relationship, and others among this novel’s cast of characters, raises intriguing questions about the definition of family and how the families we inhabit from birth differ from those we create. Though she mostly goes easy on her quirky creations, Heiny is unfailingly honest and never at a loss for a witty observation, as when she describes the run-up to Christmas in the early days of Jane and Duncan’s relationship as “sort of like the Cuban Missile Crisis in terms of escalating tension.” Early Morning Riser is an amiable and observant novel with perfect pitch and plenty of grace notes along the way. —Harvey Freedenberg

Gold Diggers

By Sanjena Sathian

Coming of Age Shakespeare cautioned that all that glitters is not gold. This lesson runs deep in Sanjena S a t h i a n ’s d e b u t novel, Gold Diggers (Penguin Press, $27, 9781984882035), and many characters learn it the hard way. Happily for readers, Shakespeare’s warning does not apply to the novel itself, a dazzling and delightful work of fiction by an exciting new literary talent. Teenager Neil Narayan has spent most of his life feeling distinctly average and like he doesn’t quite fit in. Growing up in Georgia to immigrant parents, he is overshadowed by his magnetic and determined older sister, who, annoyingly, seems to have reconciled being both Indian and American. Despite the lofty ambitions that his family and community have for him, Neil struggles to find a drive for anything other than the girl next door, Anita Dayal. All this changes, however, when Neil stumbles upon the secret that Anita and her mother have been keeping: an ancient alchemical potion that incorporates stolen gold, transferring the ambition and winning traits of the gold’s original owners onto the drinker. Although this potion seems to be the answer to Neil’s prayers, it soon awakens a powerful thirst within him that will not be easily slaked, no matter the consequences for himself or others. Sathian has produced a beguiling elixir with Gold Diggers, skillfully stirring myth into a playful yet powerful modern-day examination of the American dream and the second-generation citizens who pursue it. A fabulist amalgam of The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye, it’s an engrossing cautionary tale as well as a shrewd appraisal of what

feature | short stories we consider success—and the moral sacrifices we make to achieve it. Imaginative and intoxicating, Gold Diggers richly rewards its readers. —Stephenie Harrison

The Five Wounds

By Kirstin Valdez Quade

Family Drama Expanding on her short story with the same title, Kirstin Valdez Quade’s The Five Wounds (Norton, $26.95, 9780393242836) begs the question: What makes a sacrifice selfless? In three parts that unfold over the course of a year in the aptly named New Mexico town of Las Penas, The Five Wounds is a knife-sharp study of what happens to a family when accountability to other people goes out the window. Quade’s characters are experts at pushing love away, especially when intimate connection is most necessary. The novel begins with a crucifixion. Amadeo Padilla is a ne’er-do-well who is hand-selected by the devout men of Las Penas to play Jesus in the annual reenactment of Christ’s Passion. To carry the cross is a great honor, and Amadeo treats this invitation as an opportunity to redeem himself in his mother’s eyes. He also sees it as a way to opt out of parenting his pregnant 16-year-old daughter, Angel, who has recently arrived on his doorstep. While the terrain of Las Penas seems inhospitable at first glance, life pushes up through the fractured earth. As each member of the Padilla family battles their personal demons, hope shimmers like a mirage over everyday life, a sweet what-if that Quade expertly suspends above the text. What if parents put their daughters first? What if compassion were a two-way street? What if love were enough? After Quade’s 2015 short story collection, Night at the Fiestas, it is a treat to see the author’s exceptional command of pacing on display in a novel. Proof that what you say is just as important as how you say it, her precise lines are wanting in neither substance nor style, and her darkly hilarious, tender, gorgeous use of language is one of the crowning pleasures of the novel. In The Five Wounds, Quade expands a familiar biblical tale—a 33-year-old guy shoulders the pain of the world and gets crucified—into an irreverent 21st-century meditation on the restorative powers of empathy. —Elena Britos

To the point Amid the limitations of short fiction, two treasured writers find boundless potential. Short stories allow for agile exploration of even the heaviest topics. Haruki Murakami and Elizabeth McCracken are light on their feet in these collections.

First Person Singular You can’t have a conversation about literary fiction of the past 50 years without mentioning Haruki Murakami, and First Person Singular (Knopf, $28, 9780593318072) reminds us why. As one of the standard-bearers of contemporary magical realism, Murakami has traveled deep into the hearts and minds of both his characters and his readers. In First Person Singular, he offers eight new stories, all told in first person— hence the title—as perhaps memoir, perhaps fiction. For example, “The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection” finds a baseball-­ loving writer named Haruki Murakami musing on his favorite team and the ties that bind us together. Murakami is always blurring lines, and here it’s left up to the reader to decide what’s real. By distorting reality, the author creates a special closeness to his audience, and he acknowledges this relationship with intelligence and grace. Murakami’s most significant (and perhaps only) shortcoming is his frequent fumbling of sexuality, which renders some of his work, to put it lightly, cringe-y. Murakami is surely aware of this frequent criticism of his work, and here he toys with readers’ expectations. The story “Carnaval” is the best example of this. Its opening line, “Of all the women I’ve known until now, she was the ugliest,” introduces a dated, male voice, but Murakami then subverts expectations to tell a story that’s deeper than any one person’s perspective. At the heart of this story are truly moving observations about friendship and the connection between people and art.

With this collection, Murakami leverages his position as an aging man in a rapidly changing world to set an example for others: Your perspective should never stay the same, and your writing must grow until it can’t fit its container. —Eric Ponce

The Souvenir Museum Elizabeth McCracken has published three novels and a memoir, but to many readers, short stories are her home ground. The tales in her third collection, The Souvenir Museum (Ecco, $26.99, 9780062971289), often catch characters out of sorts, having arrived at a strange destination. “All her life she’d felt foreign; landing abroad, she was relieved to assume it as an official diagnosis,” thinks Jenny, a character in “Mistress Mickle All at Sea.” Jenny, who plays a villain in a kids’ TV show, is alone on a ferry to England after visiting her brother. In a lesser writer’s hands, this story might be merely meditative, even dull, but a McCracken story is never boring, and this one offers plenty of surprises. Four linked stories follow a couple, Sadie and Jack, through their long relationship. In the book’s opening story, “The Irish Wedding,” young Sadie and Jack arrive in Ireland for the wedding of Jack’s older sister to a Dutch man. In this wedding tale, both strange and recognizable, we get a portrait not just of the young couple and all they don’t know about each other, but also of Jack’s quirky, possessive family. In the collection’s final story, Sadie and Jack are finally getting married 20 years later. On their honeymoon in Amsterdam, they simmer and fight, but they remember their love when family tragedy strikes. A new collection from McCracken is always welcome. Grief, loss and the passage of time run through these stories, but so does humor, both the wry and laugh-out-loud varieties. —Sarah McCraw Crow

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interview | judy batalion

Women of action While hunkered down in her apartment with women, and I wanted a few historical figures to frame the two young daughters, a 9-month-old son and her husband during the COVID-19 pandemic, Judy piece.” So she went to the library. Batalion has heard rumors from neighbors and Batalion was stunned by her discovery of the book, whose friends of marriages on the rocks because of close title translates as Women in the quarters and unrelieved familial contact. It’s not nearly the same, Batalion declares, but it reminds Ghettos. “I knew right away there her of the Jewish families trapped in the Warsaw was something to it,” she says. She Ghetto during World War II. was eventually awarded a grant to “Families were under high pressure, squeezed translate the book into English, together, and studies show that in the [Warsaw] but the translation work required Ghetto, there was a very high rate of divorce,” significant contextual research. As Batalion says during a call to her apartment in her research grew, the translation Manhattan. She quips that her own home is “now project morphed into a parallel also a preschool, an elementary school, a daycare, history project that became The a corporate boardroom and a gym.” Light of Days. Uncomfortable? Sure. But nothing like the “Very little has been written in disruption and terror of Jewish life in Poland under English, even academically, about the Nazis, which Batalion describes in The Light these figures,” Batalion says. “And of Days, her groundbreaking narrative history of the bits that have been written the young Polish women at the forefront of the read like encyclopedia entries—a snippet here, a snippet there. But Jewish resistance. “The norms of family life were turned upside down,” Batalion says. “Many of the those snippets don’t end up meaning anything. men were afraid to leave the house. It was easier for It’s hard to remember them. I wanted to tell these women’s stories, and I thought telling it as a story women and children to leave or escape, to go out to hunt for food, to smuggle, would be more appealing even to physically squeeze to readers.” The Light of Days At the center of Batalion’s out through the ghetto walls. William Morrow, $28.99, 9780062874214 So there was a cascade of book is Renia Kukielka, History whose commitment to role reversals.” Those reversals were part resistance began when she of a confluence of events that was 15 years old. “She was a led a number of idealistic, woman of action,” Batalion restless, brave young says. “As her children told Jewish women—some of me, she wasn’t someone them barely teenagers— who looked right and left to volunteer as couriers, and right and left. She informants and fighters just went! She had gut in the struggle against the instincts. . . . She was savvy, Nazis in Poland. Batalion smart and daring.” first discovered fragments The Light of Days follows of their stories in a slender, the arc of Kukielka’s life through the early 1940s. musty book written in Along the way, her story Yiddish that she found in the interweaves with those British Library. of about a dozen other Batalion grew up in female activists—such Montreal, the granddaughter as Bela Hazan, who went of Holocaust survivors. After graduating from Harvard, undercover in a remarkable she spent a decade in way. “At the height of the London earning a Ph.D. in Holocaust, she worked as a art history and developing translator and served tea to the Gestapo,” Batalion says. a career as a comedian. “In England I was dealing with There’s even a photograph issues of my own Jewish identity, because being of Hazan with two other Jewish activists at a Jewish there seems so rare,” she says. “I wanted Gestapo Christmas party. “She lied to them that her to write a performance piece about strong Jewish brother had died so she could get a pass to travel to

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©BEOWULF SHEEHAN

While browsing the stacks at the British Library, Judy Batalion discovered the untold story of Jewish women who resisted the Nazis.

Vilna. The office sent her a condolence card! Later she masqueraded as a Catholic woman to help Jewish people in the infirmary at Auschwitz.” Then there was Frumka Plotnicki, who was “an introverted, serious person, a person the whole movement looked to and who refused to [escape the ghetto],” says Batalion. “Time and again she was told to leave, but she couldn’t. She had to be there to fight. She was one of the few who went down shooting.” When Batalion began working on The Light of Days, she discovered that not even a general narrative history of the Jewish resistance in Poland existed. Working from sometimes contradictory memoirs and recorded testimonies, Batalion’s first task was to create a chronology of the resistance—a laborious but necessary effort that adds context and depth to the story she tells. The book has more than 900 endnotes, down from the original 3,000, and two dozen illuminating photographs. Batalion acknowledges that the valiant women she portrays in The Light of Days were not the only female Jewish resistors in Poland or Europe. They’re just the first ones we’ll be able to read about in such depth. “It felt so important for me that these stories are told,” Batalion says. “This is not a narrative about the Holocaust that I’d ever heard before. I kept feeling that if I didn’t tell it, who would? In the most difficult, tortuous circumstances, they stood up. The bravery of these very young women inspired me.” —Alden Mudge Visit BookPage.com to read our review of The Light of Days.

reviews | nonfiction

H My Broken Language By Quiara Alegría Hudes

Memoir Joyful, righteous, indignant, self-assured, exuberant: These are all words that could describe Quiara Alegría Hudes’ My Broken Language (One World, $28, 9780399590047). The celebrated playwright calls her language broken, but in this extraordinary memoir she actually remakes language so that it speaks to her world—a world that takes as its point of origin a barrio in West Philadelphia where Hudes grew up surrounded by Perez women, whom she refers to as her own Mount Rushmore, her pantheon of goddesses. The women in her family laugh, cry, eat, dance and mourn, and they do it in a glorious blend of English and Spanish, in language made of flesh and motion. Hudes watches them from the stairs, eager to join in but uncertain exactly where she fits. Like the best translators, Hudes occupies the in-between—in this case, in between the crowded

Pipe Dreams By Chelsea Wald

Science When your subject is the humble but essential toilet, bathroom humor is unavoidable. So expect a few potty jokes in Chelsea Wald’s very interesting Pipe Dreams: The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet (Avid Reader, $27, 9781982116217). Late in the book, Wald actually explores why people from many cultures use humor to mask their squeamishness or outright disgust at the thought of human excretions. And then she points out that during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the news was full of stories about store shelves emptied of toilet paper. We don’t want to think about it, and yet we cannot avoid thinking about it. So why an urgent quest to transform the toilet? Well, the gold standard of sanitation—a toilet connected to a sewer system connected to a waste treatment plant and then usually to some large body of water to carry away the effluviants—may now be fool’s gold. In our urge to rid ourselves of unpleasant materials, we flush all kinds of inappropriate things down the drain. Because of this, much of our once gleaming sanitation infrastructure is on deferred maintenance, heading for collapse.

and uproarious barrio, where life feels like an unfolding tragicomedy, and the staid suburbs, where her white father has settled into a routine life that offers plenty of picket fences but little space for complexity. Hudes’ narrative follows her life story, from living with both parents to traveling between them; from her growing bond with her extended Perez family to her trips back to her mother’s native country of Puerto Rico. Her delight in the musicians and artists of the Western canon leads her to Yale, where she realizes the infuriating limitations of that canon, and ultimately to Brown, where she dedicates herself to telling the story of her people, their bodies, their spirituality and their language. This is a book of

Should drought-stricken California make massive repairs to a system that uses fresh water in this way? And what about the Netherlands, where Wald now lives, and where a quarter of the country is underwater and half is merely three feet above sea level? Wald tells us that the average human produces about 100 pounds of solid waste and 140 gallons of urine per year. Put that in your calculator and multiply it by the human population. Meanwhile, roughly half of that population has no access to safe sanitation. Much of Wald’s book is a sort of travelogue, wherein she talks to innovators in sanitation science and witnesses contemporary and historical attempts to bring best practices to human health. Her view is that, in our wide and varied world, one solution does not fit all, but we all deserve a sanitary environment. —Alden Mudge

Broken

By Jenny Lawson

Memoir Bestselling author Jenny Lawson’s writing often elicits a range of emotional responses, from gasp-laughs to sympathetic murmurs to the particular type of groan that accompanies massive secondhand embarrassment. Lawson, aka the Bloggess, believes “we are so much less alone if we learn

bringing together dissonant stories, one that Hudes alone could write. Hudes’ first name is an invented endearment, a form of the verb querer, which means “to love.” Her mother had seen the name spelled Kiara or Ciara or Chiarras, but for her daughter she wanted that same sound with a deeper meaning, one that indicated that her daughter was beloved (Quiara) as well as a source of happiness (Alegría). There may be no better compliment to the author of this marvelous, one-of-akind memoir than to say she truly lives up to her name. With My Broken Language, she has invented a language of love and to-the-bone happiness to tell stories only a Perez woman could share. —Kelly Blewett

to wear our imperfections proudly.” Her brand of sharing has created a community endlessly drawn to her hilarious confessions of foibles and fears; conversations with her loving yet exasperated husband, Victor; and chronicles of her experiences with mental and physical illness. Broken (in the best possible way) (Holt, $27.99, 9781250077035), Lawson’s fourth book, is a loopde-loop of an emotional roller coaster that swoops from poetic to profane, madcap to moving and back again. She’s in fine form in this collection of essays, which offers support, humor and her take on society’s ills and wonders. Years of frustration and righteous rage are channeled into the trenchant essay “An Open Letter to My Health Insurance Company,” in which Lawson shares what it’s like to rely on medication controlled by an impenetrable and uncaring health care system. She also confides that rheumatoid arthritis, which causes her feet to swell and then deflate, has resulted in “Six Times I’ve Lost My Shoes While Wearing Them.” Her poignant account of the times a shoe has taken “a ride in an elevator without me” is a thing of hilarious beauty. So, too, are a compilation of tweets about everyday mortification called “Awkwarding Brings Us Together,” as well as stories about the book editing process, an ill-fated kayaking trip and the time a (live) squirrel fell on her head. Lawson’s more serious essays, especially her musings on her spotty memory and her family’s history of dementia, are sad and affecting. She writes with love and admiration about her grandmother, who “goes missing sometimes, lost in her own mind,” and shares her conviction that

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reviews | nonfiction treatment for mental illness is getting slowly but surely better with every generation. To wit, her diary of transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment for depression is harrowing, edifying but also hopeful. After all, she writes, “Nothing lasts forever. The good and the bad.” —Linda M. Castellitto

North by Shakespeare By Michael Blanding

Literary Criticism In his entertaining new work, North b y S ha ke s p ea r e : A Rogue Scholar’s Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard’s Work (Hachette, $30, 9780316493246), bestselling author and investigative journalist Michael Blanding digs deep into the world of Shakespearean scholarship. He chronicles the tireless research of Dennis McCarthy, an outsider in academia, about links between Shakespeare’s plays and the writings of Sir Thomas North, a member of Queen Elizabeth’s court. Blanding first met McCarthy in October of 2015, at a dinner reception after a lecture. Readers’ first reaction to McCarthy’s beliefs may be similar to Blanding’s: dismay at the prospect of yet another conspiracy theory about the true author behind Shakespeare’s work. Yet there are certainly many mysteries about Shakespeare’s life that have given rise to speculation—for example, “how a glover’s son from Stratford could have had the intimate knowledge of Italy” apparent in his plays. McCarthy’s theory seeks to explain such discrepancies. He doesn’t believe the plays’ authorship belongs to the aristocratic North, however. Rather, he thinks Shakespeare borrowed specific phrasings, plot lines and scenes from North’s published and unpublished writings. Blanding’s energetic narrative traces McCarthy’s search for more of North’s writings and his use of plagiarism software to provide evidence for their influence on Shakespeare. He also delves into Tudor history, illuminating North’s life as a traveler and aristocrat. Along the way, Blanding considers “what it takes to change established ways of thinking” within academic communities. It’s unclear if Blanding’s highly enjoyable foray into the field will have an impact on Shakespearean scholars, but at the very least, North by Shakespeare will provide readers with the tools to enter the fray themselves. The book includes McCarthy’s estimated timeline of North’s plays next to a timeline of Shakespeare’s work, which readers can use along with McCarthy’s other

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techniques to examine passages from both North and Shakespeare themselves. It’s almost as much fun as sitting in a theater. —Deborah Hopkinson

such as the women’s own letters, Wickenden invites readers to take a closer look at the path of American progress and the women who guided it. —Carla Jean Whitley

The Agitators

We Are Each Other’s Harvest

By Dorothy Wickenden

Women’s History Former Secretary of State William Henry Seward’s name occupies a plaque outside the Cayuga County Courthouse i n Au b u r n , Ne w York, and the Seward family home is now a museum where visitors can learn about the statesman’s past. But it was another Seward who quietly pushed Henry toward signing the Emancipation Proclamation. His wife, Frances Seward, was the one who befriended, supported and learned from Harriet Tubman, the famous Underground Railroad conductor whose name is also mounted on that county courthouse. Frances discouraged her husband from compromising on matters related to slavery. But as Henry ascended from the state Senate to the governorship of New York to the U.S. Senate with a position in Abraham Lincoln’s presidential Cabinet, his aspirations conflicted with his wife’s activism. Frances often felt she couldn’t be as vocal as Tubman or Martha C. Wright, who attended the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls and worked alongside Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to seek women’s suffrage. But even when Frances limited her activism out of respect for Henry, she pushed him to value the greater good over his political aspirations. In The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women’s Rights (Scribner, $30, 9781476760735), Dorothy Wickenden recounts the friendship between Seward, Wright and Tubman and the ways their influence directly shaped American history. Wickenden is the executive editor of The New Yorker and the bestselling author of Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West. She brings a reporter’s eye for detail to this complex history, which spans from 1821 to 1875 as Seward and Wright fight for abolition and Tubman serves on the front lines of both the Underground Railroad and the Civil War. Wickenden’s detailed account of these women and their friendship weaves together Tubman’s escape from enslavement, the complexities of Lincoln’s early slavery policy, the beginnings of the women’s rights movement in the U.S. and their imperfect intersections. Using primary sources

By Natalie Baszile

American History We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy (Amistad, $29.99, 9780062932563) is a tribute, an education, a family album and a celebration of Black farmers past, present—and hopefully future. Author Natalie Baszile’s interest in foods’ origins deepened when she learned that her great-great-grandfather, who was once enslaved, became a successful farmer after emancipation. The older generations of her family, she realized, “cherished their connection to the soil and understood the value in owning and taking care of land.” Curiosity fully piqued, Baszile left her job at her father’s business to write her much-lauded novel, Queen Sugar, about a Black woman in Los Angeles who inherits her father’s Louisiana sugar cane farm. But before Baszile could do justice to the fictional farming family she was creating, she had much to learn. Her years of research into Black farming history and its tools, techniques and culture culminated in the 2014 publication of her novel (which Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey adapted into an award-winning TV show) and her evolution into a passionate advocate for Black farmers. We Are Each Other’s Harvest amplifies Black farmers’ role in American history and honors their perseverance despite numerous obstacles. Many of these obstacles stem from systemic racism within policies and practices across a range of institutions, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to myriad banks and realtors nationwide. These challenges have accumulated over time, as professor of ethnic studies Analena Hope Hassberg explains in the book’s introduction, and as a result, Black farmers now cultivate less than half of 1% of U.S. farmland due to the gradual loss of massive amounts of land. But Baszile’s profiles of the Black farmers she met during her travels around the U.S. offer hope. She shares fascinating stories about family farms in North Carolina, Louisiana and California—as well as individuals forging new paths, like a classically trained chef who’s honing her food-­preservation and wool-spinning skills at a farm school in Alaska.

reviews | nonfiction Quotations from the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., Booker T. Washington and Barack Obama, as well as poems by Ross Gay, Lucille Clifton and more, round out this abundant volume. We Are Each Other’s Harvest offers moving, edifying food for thought and will whet your appetite for action. —Linda M. Castellitto

Nuclear Folly

In February of 2021, the U.S. and Russia formally agreed to extend the last remaining nuclear arms treaty between their countries. This well-told account is a timely reminder of a danger we must still live with today. —Roger Bishop

H Blow Your House Down By Gina Frangello

By Serhii Plokhy

History “We are eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked,” whispered Secretary of State Dean Rusk to national security adviser McG e org e Bundy when he heard that Soviet ships carrying missiles had turned away from Cuba. It was October 24, 1962, in the midst of the most dangerous nuclear missile crisis in history. President John F. Kennedy had given the order to attack Soviet ships before he realized they’d changed course 24 hours earlier. Kennedy was greatly influenced by Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Guns of August and wanted to avoid the kind of misunderstandings, misinformation, stupidity and individual complexes of inferiority and grandeur that had led to World War I. But here was a communication problem. The dominant narrative in the U.S. has long been that when the missiles in Cuba were removed, it was because Kennedy’s grace under pressure and skillful diplomacy had prevailed. Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy takes a different approach as he considers the many instances when both sides got things wrong in his riveting Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis (Norton, $35, 9780393540819). Drawing on KGB documents, Soviet military memoirs and more American and Cuban sources, he outlines all the times catastrophe was averted. This excellent re-creation of events begins by explaining the relationship between Cuba and the U.S. and placing the U.S.-Soviet relationship in the context of the Cold War. We see how changing details drove the daily debates as diplomatic, military and political assumptions were tested. As the meetings with his advisers dragged on for almost two weeks, Kennedy went from being a “dove” to a “reluctant hawk” and back again, always hoping for a diplomatic solution while remaining tough. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev shared a fear of nuclear weapons, and neither was prepared to pay the price for a nuclear war victory. Throughout Nuclear Folly, Kennedy “plays for time” as he considers his next move in the complex and tense negotiations.

Memoir There is pain in every divorce story, but not every divorce story can be related by a narrator as capable as Gina Frangello. Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (Counterpoint, $27, 9781640093164), Frangello’s raw, eloquent account of the demise of her marriage, is an exemplar of self-reflection, tinged with optimism about the power to recover one’s life from the depth of suffering. Long before she reached her 18th wedding anniversary in 2011, Frangello was acutely aware of “the signs you are not living the right life for you, even if your life looks unfathomably pretty and privileged compared to where you come from or in other people’s eyes.” And so she began a long-distance emotional affair with a writer and rock musician whose novel she was publishing, culminating in a full-blown relationship she concealed from her husband for nearly three years. Like many divorces, Frangello’s mutated from the early hope of relative amicability to the ugly reality of bitter conflict, as a husband who had trouble curbing his public displays of anger even in happier times set out to inflict maximum pain for her transgression. As the warfare escalated, Frangello faced the task of caring for her aging parents and underwent seven months of treatment for breast cancer. Amid this account of Job-like affliction, Frangello never shirks responsibility for the breakup. Still, casting her ordeal in the form of a trial, she makes a passionate case from an ardently feminist perspective for the rightness of her decision to abandon her husband for “the man who rewired my heart” and pleads that her effort to rebuild her children’s trust be “judged by the courts of distance and hindsight.” For all her undeniable current happiness, Frangello resists the urge to affix a happy ending to her story. Instead, she offers only a “vow to continue unfolding for as long as I breathe.” Considering all the heartbreak she has endured and the uncertainty of life she knows all too well, that modest hope seems entirely fitting. —Harvey Freedenberg

Girlhood

By Melissa Febos

Essays Girlhood is a time of life that’s often idealized as innocent and safe. This, of course, speaks to our gendered expectations for the so-called fairer sex. But the truth about girls’ early lives is more complex. Girlhood can be exploited just as often as it is protected, and Melissa Febos brings these complications to the fore in Girlhood (Bloomsbury, $27, 9781635572520), a collection of seven memoiristic essays. The author of Whip Smart, about her time working as a dominatrix, and Abandon Me, another essay collection, Febos is a dab hand at the memoir genre. The essays that compose Girlhood tell a story of Febos’ life that reaches back to her childhood on Cape Cod and her young adulthood in New York City to examine her internalized beliefs. While her route to making sense of her own life is usually circuitous, her thoughtfulness as she reaches toward a conclusion is a delight to follow. Many of Febos’ girlhood experiences stemmed from her body developing maturely at a young age. She fearlessly interrogates her adolescent reaction to these changes and the attendant shame, voyeurism and almighty male gaze that subsumed her young life. Each essay is layered like a sfogliatelle: Recollections of a growing girl in a sexist culture lay upon her adult analyses and rich cultural references, from Greek myths to 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault. Sources listed at the book’s conclusion range widely from Black feminist and race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw to British art critic John Berger. In one of the strongest essays, “Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself,” Febos and her partner attend cuddle parties. Based on the belief that there is a primal need for human touch, a cuddle party is when strangers gather together to experience and exchange consensual, nonsexual touch. These parties prompt Febos to examine her history of accommodating and prioritizing men’s needs over her own. Girlhood offers what some may view as a dark portrayal of young adulthood, in which opportunities for degradation are seemingly limitless. And some of Febos’ later-in-life experiences, such as heroin addiction and sex work, won’t be shared by all readers. But anyone raised as a girl will be able to relate to something in Girlhood, and those who weren’t will marvel at this book’s eye-opening, transformative perspective. —Jessica Wakeman

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reviews | young adult

Somewhere Between Bitter and Sweet By Laekan Zea Kemp

Fiction For as long as she can remember, Penelope Prado has felt at home at her father’s restaurant, Nacho’s Tacos, where she cooks love into food that brings her community together. Pen wants to open a pastelería alongside the restaurant, but her parents don’t approve, so she’s torn between following her dream and disappointing them, or following their dreams and giving up on her own. Xander Amaro, the restaurant’s new hire, has never really felt at home anywhere. Originally from Mexico, he’s spent the last 10 years living with his grandfather in the U.S. without legal documentation, always looking over his shoulder, always feeling he doesn’t quite belong. If only he could track down his biological father, Xander thinks, he might finally feel comfortable in his own life.

American Betiya

By Anuradha D. Rajurkar

Fiction What are you willing to look past in order to be happy? Rani Kelkar just wants to take beautiful photographs, become a pediatrician and not disappoint her conservative Indian parents. That means focusing on school and applying to Chicago-area colleges—and absolutely no boys. But when she meets Oliver, a talented artist with tattoos, piercings and a rebel attitude, Rani quickly falls for him. However, it almost as quickly becomes clear that Oliver doesn’t understand or respect Rani’s Indian culture. What’s more, she’s lying to her parents, and her relationship with her best friend is straining under the weight of Rani and Oliver’s secret. Soon, Rani must choose between her first love and herself. American Betiya (Knopf, $17.99, 9781984897152) fearlessly portrays Rani’s struggle between honoring her Indian heritage and attempting to fit in with her peers. Debut author Anuradha D. Rajurkar evokes a sense of deep discomfort through Oliver’s behavior; every time he calls Rani “Princess Jasmine,” the words lie uneasily on the page. When Rani travels to India, Rajurkar depicts the beauty of the country and its people

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When a dangerous loan shark threatens the community, Pen and Xander must work together with their families—the ones they were born into and the ones they’ve made— to save the restaurant. Along the way, they discover exactly where they’re meant to be. Laekan Zea Kemp’s debut YA novel, Somewhere Between Bitter and Sweet (Little, Brown, $17.99, 9780316460279), is fueled by vivid imagery and evocative descriptions, from the chaos of the kitchen on a busy night to the smells of the restaurant that linger in Pen’s hair after each shift. Chapters alternate between Pen’s and Xander’s

with self-assurance while still holding space for Rani’s changing beliefs about her culture, never taking her personal growth for granted. The book’s laser-focused prose will resonate with any teen reader who has been harassed for their brown skin, struggled with first love or borne the pressure of family expectations. Rajurkar’s depiction of a young woman who attempts to shrink herself in order to satisfy the desires of others before recognizing her own inner strength is impossible to read without tightness in your chest and your heart in your throat. —Lane Clarke

The Infinity Courts By Akemi Dawn Bowman

Science Fiction Nami Miyamoto is living her dream: She is headed to college in the fall, she loves her supportive family, and she just confessed her feelings to her crush— and learned that he feels the same way. It seems like everything is falling into place. Then, on her way to a graduation party, Nami is unexpectedly and brutally murdered. But that’s only the beginning of Nami’s story. Her consciousness is revived in Infinity, an afterlife ruled by an artificial intelligence assistant

first-person perspectives as Kemp explores their nuanced personalities and never shies away from their dark places, including Pen’s depression and Xander’s anxiety about his immigration status. Kemp develops these aspects of her protagonists with respect, making them parts of their whole, complex selves. Pen explains to Xander that Nacho’s Tacos employees are a family, and this perfectly describes the cast of characters Kemp has assembled. Though the book’s villain, El Martillo, feels a bit underdeveloped, the other supporting characters are as complex and wellcrafted as the protagonists. This is a powerful, heartwarming story of family, first love and resilience. —Sarah Welch Visit BookPage.com to read a Behind the Book essay by Laekan Zea Kemp.

from Earth named Ophelia. (Think Siri or Alexa, but much more vengeful.) Determined to stop Ophelia’s plans to destroy humanity, Nami joins the rebellion. In the midst of their struggle, she must come to terms with what it really means to be alive. It’s not surprising that a book set in an afterlife would grapple with weighty, philosophical themes, but the cerebral tone of The Infinity Courts (Simon & Schuster, $19.99, 9781534456495) sets it apart from its YA genre fiction peers. Ethereal and thoughtful, this story is as much about emotion as it is action. Nami is motivated by her feelings, which makes her a stubborn, sometimes reluctant hero. When she first arrives in Infinity, she must wrestle with grief, loss and forgiveness, all from the other side of her own death. Her participation in the rebellion is shaped by her ever-evolving beliefs about what defines good and evil during a war and who deserves to be saved. Though Nami’s fellow rebels are outwardly committed to freedom, author Akemi Dawn Bowman also establishes the internal desires that drive each of them. The narrative raises age-old questions about the individual versus the community but proposes a range of answers rather than one definitive solution. The shifting beliefs of Nami and the other rebels propel the plot forward while impressively reflecting the mutable, unpredictable nature of humanity. Best known for realistic fiction, including her Morris Award finalist debut novel, Starfish, Bowman combines the psychological with the heart-pounding in her powerful leap into science fiction. Featuring an imaginative world, a terrifying villain and a complex heroine, The Infinity Courts

q&a | charlie jane anders

That Way Madness Lies Edited by Dahlia Adler

Short Stories Since 2016, Hogarth Press has enlisted well-known writers to reinvent Shakespeare’s plays for a modern readership. Editor Dahlia Adler undertakes a similar project in That Way Madness Lies (Flatiron, $18.99, 9781250753861). Adler notes in her introduction that “to say Shakespeare did not do marginalized people any favors is an understatement; many of us still live with the effects of his caricatures and common story lines today.” With this anthology, she intends to correct that imbalance. The YA authors gathered here “have deconstructed and reconstructed an inarguably brilliant but very white and very straight canon,” giving Shakespeare the same treatment Edgar Allan Poe received in Adler’s previous anthology, His Hideous Heart. Some stories include an accompanying note that illuminates the author’s approach. Patrice Caldwell explains that Hamlet’s gothic overtones led her to recast Hamlet as female (and Hamlet’s uncle as a vampire), while Adler’s own story seeks to reclaim the figure of Shylock from The Merchant of Venice’s anti-Semitism. Caldwell isn’t the only writer to give her story a bit of supernatural flair either; Lindsay Smith’s exploration of Julius Caesar incorporates witchcraft and dark sacrifices. The contributors take varying liberties with their source material. A.R. Capetta and Cory McCarthy’s “Some Other Metal” is set in a theater, but their version of Much Ado About Nothing applies a queer, science fiction approach to the romance at its center. Kiersten White’s “Partying Is Such Sweet Sorrow” recounts the plot of Romeo and Juliet through text messages but remains (for the most part) faithful to the spirit of the original. Other stories—such as Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka’s “Severe Weather Warning”—conceal their Shakespearean roots so deeply as to be almost unrecognizable without the aid of context and some winking allusions. (Their story contains a cat named Ariel.) The majority of the stories stand capably on their own merits but will be enriched by familiarity with—or better yet, reading alongside—Shakespeare’s original plays and sonnets. Budding writers may even be inspired to put their own spins on the Bard of Avon’s timeless tales. —Norah Piehl

Spaceship, take me away Charlie Jane Anders’ YA sci-fi adventure explores the high cost of a heroic destiny. Charlie Jane Anders, the Nebula and Locus Award-winning author of two novels for adults, All the Birds in the Sky and The City in the Middle of the Night, turns to YA with Victories Greater Than Death (TorTeen, $18.99, 9781250317315), the first book in a new trilogy. It’s the story of Tina, a seemingly ordinary girl who is actually the clone of a legendary alien war hero, Captain Thaoh Argentian, whose troops hid her on Earth until she grew old enough to rejoin the epic intergalactic battle between good and evil. When Tina’s heroic destiny finally comes calling, it turns out to be nothing like she imagined. Why did you decide to make the switch to YA? I’ve loved young adult fiction for as long as I can remember. Young adult books have been some of my most vivid and inspiring reading experiences. I often find that YA can deal with political themes and issues like queer identity in a smarter and more forthright way than adult novels can, because teens aren’t as scared of these topics. Tina spends the first part of the book dreaming of the day she’ll be transported into a life where she’s the hero. I think her desire—to escape, to be swept up by a grand destiny, to have a defined purpose and to know what that purpose is—is something a lot of teen readers are going to find really relatable. Did you ever feel this way when you were a teenager? Oh yeah, that was pretty much the only thing I felt when I was a teenager. All I wanted was to have a spaceship swoop down and take me away. I used to fantasize that the TARDIS from “Doctor Who” would appear and I’d get invited to come along on a tour of the universe. I wrote Victories Greater Than Death for my teen self, who would have loved this story about leaving behind this whole ridiculous planet (and who also really needed to see positive depictions of LGBTQ+ kids in fiction). At one point, someone tells Tina, “Being a superhero is easy. Being a real person? That’s hard.” Which parts of being a “real person” does Tina struggle with? I think this is the core idea of the book. Tina is obsessed with living up to the legacy she’s inherited

and fulfilling her heroic destiny, and she doesn’t want to think about what that might cost her. She wants to be able to save everybody and protect the helpless all on her own—and she doesn’t realize that she’s stronger and better if she leans on other people. There’s a scene halfway through the book in which Tina really confronts the downside, the cost, of being a hero and saving people, and it’s a huge shock to her. That scene wasn’t in my outline and I hadn’t planned on it at all, but as soon as I wrote it, I knew it had to be a huge turning point. ©SARAH DERAGON

is a mesmerizing series opener that’s sure to lead to a thrilling, expectation-shattering sequel. —Tami Orendain

I loved how, everywhere the crew goes, no matter what species they talk to or how different their culture or values are, nearly all the characters in the book introduce themselves with both their names and their pronouns. Why did you decide to make that custom so (literally) universal? It just made sense to me. If you have a device that can translate any alien language, then it ought to be able to make sure there are no misunderstandings of any kind—and getting someone’s pronouns wrong is a kind of misunderstanding. This ended up feeling like wish fulfillment to me: a world where nobody ever gets misgendered or labeled against their will. There’s a temptation to view every story that features spaceships and super­computers as “futuristic,” but in fact, much of this book involves the crew investigating and learning about the galaxy’s past. What roles do history and the past play in this story? The future is nothing but the product of the past. When I think about the fictional worlds I’ve gotten obsessed with, the thing they all have in common is a rich and complex history, with lots and lots of old wounds that were never fully healed. Part of what made me feel like this series was starting to click was when I came up with a fun explanation for the ancient mysteries the characters were trying to solve and the Seven-Pointed Empire, which is the oppressive regime that fell hundreds of years ago. I wanted there to be a lot of wild, gonzo backstory that people could keep uncovering. —K.J. Witherow Visit BookPage.com to read our review of Victories Greater Than Death and an extended version of this Q&A.

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feature | earth day for young readers

MAKE EVERY DAY EARTH DAY Climb a tree, splash in a creek, dig in the dirt, bask in the sun—and take these books along as you discover all the marvels of nature. Six wonder-filled books explore our responsibility to preserve and protect this beautiful planet. To introduce a child to Earth’s natural splendor, start with Once Upon Another Time (Beaming, $18.99, 9781506460543, ages 4 to 8). This poetic ode, written by Charles Ghigna and Matt Forrest Esenwine, is short on text but packs an understated, powerful punch about stewardship. Without an ounce of sanctimony, it vitally conveys how humans have transformed Earth’s landscape. Opening with idyllic scenes of snowy mountain peaks, rivers running through golden canyons and wild animals grazing in a lush valley, the book pivots to show how humans have filled these vistas with highways, skyscrapers, smog and machinery. Colombian artist Andrés F. Landazábal’s luminous illustrations span the long sweep of history, depicting everything from the cosmos, when “Earth and moon / and stars awakened,” to a modern cityscape observed by a child through their apartment window. Once Upon Another Time concludes with a stirring call to action, urging readers to “take a step outdoors. / Breathe in air that once was shared / by monstrous dinosaurs!” Scenes of kids playing in a city park, exploring a meadow and camping under the stars will appeal to readers’ senses, urging them to hold an oak leaf, taste the rain, smell the clover and listen to the bees. This stellar book is sure to send kids outdoors equipped with new ways of observing and appreciating their surroundings. For readers ready to dig a little deeper, Hello, Earth! Poems to Our Planet (Eerdmans, $18.99, 9780802855282, ages 5 to 9) is the perfect next step. In a collection of appealing and accessible poems,

Newbery Honor author Joyce Sidman examines geology, the solar system, natural history and geography. Several pages of back matter, including short scientific explanations of each poem and website links and suggestions for further reading, complete the package. Sidman’s verses zoom through our planet’s long history, with stops in a jungle teeming with wildlife, a seemingly barren desert and more. In “Big and Small,” Sidman writes, “We need to figure out / the way / we fit together.” Many of the poems gently speak to the need for respect: “Earth, / you are our ship / through light / and darkness. / We will honor you.” Spanish-born Argentine illustrator Miren Asiain Lora’s art depicts vast spaces in which humans are small figures amid wide-angle landscapes, a subtle but effective reminder of our place in this big world. Her spreads are bathed in slate blues and earth tones, so splashes of warmth from erupting volcanoes or the beams of a lighthouse really pop. Hello, Earth! is an excellent handbook for the youngest of Earth’s caretakers. Yearning to transform an ordinary day into an extraordinary adventure? Micha Archer’s Wonder Walkers (Nancy Paulsen, $17.99, 9780593109649, ages 3 to 7) is an exceptional, radiant tribute to the power of curiosity. On a bright, sunny day, a girl and a boy lounge inside on the couch and pose a magical question: “Wonder walk?” This is their code for a special journey they’ve obviously taken many times before. Once outside, they ask—but don’t answer—a series of “wonder” questions that are guaranteed to perplex and delight: “Is the sun the world’s light bulb?” “Are trees the sky’s legs?” “Is the wind the world breathing?” Archer’s exceptional collage illustrations are full of vibrant colors and textures, from striations in underground rocks and roots to swirling clouds at sunset. This book is about not only observing and pondering but also actively exploring, and on page after page, the young explorers peer into a cave, climb a massive tree, run through a valley and sink their toes into a sandy beach. Wonder Walkers is chock-full of joy, beauty and creative thinking, certain to encourage young readers to head straight outside and dream up their own imaginative questions. For the ultimate outdoor adventure, nothing beats a camping trip. In Fatima’s Great Outdoors (Kokila, $17.99, 9781984816955, ages 4 to 7), Fatima Khazi is looking forward to her first such expedition after a difficult week at school dealing with microaggressions from her classmates and culminating in a bad grade on her math quiz. On the drive to the campground, excitement

HELLO, EARTH! (EERDMANS BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS) TEXT © 2021 JOYCE SIDMAN. ILLUSTRATIONS © 2016 MIREN ASIAIN LORA. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER.

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feature | earth day for young readers builds as Fatima, her parents and her older sister snack on homemade samosas and belt out Bollywood tunes. Once the family arrives at the state park, however, things don’t exactly go smoothly. Fatima’s father puzzles over tent setup until Fatima suggests they read the instructions, and then she has a hard time falling asleep after spotting the frightening shadow of a spider. Despite the setbacks she encounters, Fatima’s time spent in nature, which includes wilderness chores like gathering kindling, makes her feel like a “superhero” and reminds her of “how she used to feel in India: She had fun, she didn’t feel sad or scared, and she loved how adventure was around every corner.” Ambreen Tariq’s writing is buoyant and full of wonderfully specific details, such as Papa’s “bear claw” hand on Fatima’s shoulder and Mama’s fearlessness in the face of creepy-crawlies. Stevie Lewis’ illustrations make each page sing, and her background in film animation especially shines when depicting the Khazis’ emotive faces. Lewis’ use of light is also splendid, from the golden glow of late afternoon sun through the trees’ canopy to the tiny sparkles of fireflies under the gleaming moonlight. A closing spread shows the Khazis posing for a photo on a beach near a group of people holding a banner that reads, “Brown People Camping,” a real organization founded by Tariq to promote diversity in the outdoors. Fatima’s Great Outdoors seamlessly combines a celebration of adventures in nature with the story of an Indian American family navigating their new life in the United States. Treaty Words: For as Long as the Rivers Flow (Annick, $14.95, 9781773214962, ages 10 to 17) is an unusual book. At 60 pages, it’s longer than most picture books, and with minimal text, it takes its time in a quiet, purposeful way, just like the flowing river at the heart of its story about an Indigenous girl and her Mishomis (grandfather) who spend a day together by the river in front of his home. The granddaughter is a city girl, but her Mishomis’ small parcel of land is “the closest thing to home for her.” Not only is her Mishomis an outdoorsman, taking a backpacking

FROM FATIMA’S GREAT OUTDOORS, WRITTEN BY AMBREEN TARIQ, ILLUSTRATED BY STEVIE LEWIS, PUBLISHED BY KOKILA ILLUSTRATIONS COPYRIGHT © 2021 BY STEVIE DANIELLE LEWIS

trip for six weeks each spring, but he’s also actively involved in a host of environmental projects, including sturgeon restocking and territorial mapping. On this spring day, as they listen to the sounds of trees rustling, geese honking overhead and ice breaking on the river, the girl recognizes the “privilege to be there in that moment, witnessing this intense transition.” Author Aimée Craft’s language is exquisitely lyrical. An Anishinaabe/Métis lawyer in Manitoba, Canada, a professor at the University of Ottawa and a leading researcher on Indigenous law, Craft writes beautifully about our responsibilities as Earth’s caretakers and the importance of treaties, which Mishomis calls “the basis of all relationships.” Anishinaabe illustrator Luke Swinson uses seemingly simple shapes filled with gentle gradients of color; there’s a stillness to them that perfectly complements Craft’s text. This contemplative book is reminiscent of a great sermon, providing a springboard for deep thought. As Craft writes, “Every person was born with a set of spiritual instructions or understandings, my girl. It’s what we do with it that defines us as human beings.” Imagine having a chance to roam around with Temple Grandin, a Colorado State University professor renowned for her pioneering research on animal behavior and her work as an autism spokesperson. That’s exactly the treat in store for readers of The Outdoor Scientist: The Wonder of Observing the Natural World (Philomel, $18.99, 9780593115558, ages 8 to 12). This unique book is memoir, science guide and activity book all rolled into one. Perfect for independent readers, it’s Grandin’s personal invitation for children to become citizen scientists while exploring nature. The many projects she suggests (seashell wind chimes, pine cone animals and so on) are straightforward, with no fancy equipment required. “I’ve always been curious about pretty much everything in nature, especially when some sleuthing is required,” Grandin writes. As a kid, the outdoors were her sanctuary, “away from everyone trying to make me catch up in reading and writing.” Grandin’s childhood stories are fun as well as fascinating, as she describes hours spent unsupervised, playing and exploring with her siblings— and family photos are included. Discussions in each of the book’s six chapters (rocks, the beach, the woods, birds, the night skies and animal behavior) are wonderfully far-reaching, spanning everything from the pet rock craze of the 1970s to whether marbles are made of marble. Each subject transitions effortlessly to the next. Short sidebar biographies touch on other relevant scientists as well, emphasizing their childhoods and including kid-friendly facts. Did you know, for instance, that Charles Darwin was seasick nearly every day during the five years he spent aboard the Beagle? Grandin’s enthusiasm for citizen science is contagious, and readers of all ages will adore spending time with The Outdoor Scientist. After all, as Grandin reminds us, “You don’t have to be a professor or a professional” to make a difference—“just someone who cares about the environment.” —Alice Cary

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q&a | carlie sorosiak

Unidentified meowing object Carlie Sorosiak reveals how she created one of the year’s most memorable middle grade narrators. Carlie Sorosiak wrote her first middle grade novel, I, Cosmo, from the perspective of a family’s golden retriever. Leonard, the titular narrator of her second novel, is a cat—but he’s not just any cat. He’s actually an alien who crash-landed on Earth, intending to take human form but accidentally ending up as a cat. Now a girl named Olive might be his only hope of returning home to the stars. How did the inspiration for this book come to you? A cat came first. I’d just finished writing a book about a dog, so I thought that a cat book would make for a natural follow-up! At the same time, I really wanted to write about a friendly alien. It occurred to me that I could blend the two characters together. (Aren’t cats sort of alienlike anyway?) The idea made me giggle. When I start to giggle about a story, I know I’m headed in the right direction.

During the initial drafts, I found it difficult to maintain a balance between them. However, that never took away a single ounce of fun! It was joyous to write from Leonard’s perspective—partially because it was so intellectually challenging and partially because I loved thinking about human customs that might baffle or delight an alien. For example, poetry! While I was writing, I was also preparing to teach an undergraduate poetry class, so Leonard’s variation on William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just to Say” found its way into the novel. I can’t tell you how much I cracked up just thinking about an alien cat writing poetry.

How did you approach During his time on Earth, inhabiting both LeonLeonard is fascinated by seemingly mundane ard’s alien mind and his objects such as cheese feline form? It was certainly a challenge! sandwiches, raincoats and I write chronologically, Swiss Army knives. How did so I began with Leonard’s you decide which objects moment of arrival, when would catch his attention? he finds himself transHonestly, I just really love cheese sandwiches! As for formed into a cat on Earth. I wondered what would the rest of the objects, many shock him about his body. of them represent simple His tail? His claws? What pleasures and general would delight him? Leonhumanness. At one point, I ard’s perspective bloomed think I also Googled “funny from there. He has these human objects.” During drafting, Google is my catlike instincts (to destroy the curtains, for example), best friend. but for the first half of the novel, he actively fights Tell us a little bit about against them. Olive. How did her relationMy own family has two ship with Leonard develop polydactyl cats, Bella and as you wrote? Leonard (My Life as a Cat) Duncan. Duncan has big At the beginning of the book, Walker, $17.99, 9781536207705 Ages 8 to 12 Leonard energy, and I drew when Olive rescues Leona great deal of inspiration ard in a storm, she’s feeling Science Fiction from the way he moves and exactly the same way I did when I was 11: incredibly the way he approaches the world so curiously. The cat on the cover of Leonard odd. An outsider on Earth. And she’s absolutely even looks quite a lot like him! obsessed with all kinds of animals, including cats. Throughout the novel, Leonard and Olive start to What was fun about writing from Leonard’s bond in deeper and deeper ways. They’re both perspective? What was challenging? outsiders—in Leonard’s case, quite literally! They’re Writing this book was a perpetual balancing act. both curious and compassionate and a little bit The narration is mostly alien, but every once scared of what life might bring. But now they have in a while, the cat slips in (as cats tend to do). each other.

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What do the concepts of home and family mean for Leonard and Olive? Did your own understanding of home and family evolve as you worked on the book? One of my favorite lines in the book is, “You don’t have to be born into a family to call it your own.” I believe that wholeheartedly, and over the course of the novel, Olive and Leonard come to believe that, too. They develop this found family, together on Earth. I’ve always been interested in what constitutes a home, as I’ve moved a lot over the years and I often have trouble feeling grounded. But compassionate people ground me. Animals ground me. Friends can be your home. I wouldn’t necessarily say that my understanding of home and family changed as I worked on Leonard, but the book did cement many of the things I feel. Hold your loved ones close. You can be weird around them, and they’ll still adore you. In fact, they’ll adore you because of your you-ness. What do you think—and what do you hope— could be out there among the stars? As a storyteller, I’m particularly fascinated by the Voyager golden record and the sounds of Earth that NASA chose to capture, include and send into space to represent humanity. Aliens are definitely out there. It’s a statistical probability. Whether they’re fluffy, catlike and dream about cheese sandwiches . . . well, that’s perhaps another story! —Linda M. Castellitto Visit BookPage.com to read our starred review of Leonard (My Life as a Cat).

reviews | children’s

The One Thing You’d Save By Linda Sue Park Illustrated by Robert Sae-Heng

Narrative Poetry In The One Thing You’d Save (Clarion, $16.99, 9781328515131, ages 8 to 12), a teacher named Ms. Chang invites her students to participate in a thought exercise. If their house caught fire, what one thing would they choose to save? Each child, along with Ms. Chang, considers, chooses and then explains their selection. The responses vary widely, ranging from the practical (a wallet, an expensive laptop) to the sentimental (a beloved hand-knit sweater, the program from a New York Mets game) to the lifesaving (an insulin kit). Newbery Medalist Linda Sue Park (A Single Shard) presents the story through narrative poems made up of first-person internal monologue and spoken dialogue. The students’ interactions

range from playful to serious, lighthearted to profound, as they consider which objects are most important to them. Rich with youthful attitude, Park’s verses provide a wonderfully nuanced portrayal of the preoccupations, loves, losses and aspirations of a diverse group of children and their teacher. Debut illustrator Robert Sae-Heng’s grayscale images envision the objects the students describe, as well as scenes of their homes, the classroom, the night sky, the city and more, though the scenes never include the speakers themselves. Occasional full-spread

illustrations offer wordless moments that encourage the reader to rest and contemplate before moving on. As the characters discuss, share and interpret their ideas, The One Thing You’d Save forms a delightful portrait of a group of learners in community with one another. In a brief note, Park explains that her verses are variations on a Korean poetry form called sijo, which traditionally consists of three lines of 13 to 17 syllables. She writes, “Using old forms in new ways is how poetry continually renews itself, and the world.” It’s impossible not to feel a sense of renewal from this thoughtful book. —Autumn Allen

Lucha wrestlers El Toro and La Oink Oink work together to clean up El Coliseo in Raúl the Third’s Tag Team (Versify, $9.99, 9780358380399, ages 4 to 7), a high-flying early reader with colors by Elaine Bay. The 2021 Pura Belpré Illustrator Award winner for ¡Vamos! Let’s Go Eat, Raúl the Third lives in Boston.

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Libertie: A Novel By Kaitlyn Greenidge

(Algonquin Books, 9781616207014, $26.95)

APRIL 2021 Broken (in the best possible way) By Jenny Lawson

(Henry Holt and Co., 9781250077035, $27.99)

“Lawson speaks to all of us who are weird, wacky, and unafraid (but, really, often afraid) to share our quirks with the world. Some chapters of this book moved me deeply, where it felt as though she was narrating my own life. Other chapters made me ugly laugh, the type that turns strangers’ heads in public. I’m so happy I was given the opportunity to start 2021 with this book. It set the bar high for hope in the year to come, and for the books that will be read.” —Jasmin Brooks, The Bookery Manchester, Manchester, NH

Of Women and Salt: A Novel By Gabriela Garcia

(Flatiron Books, 9781250776686, $26.99) “Gabriela Garcia has delivered a gripping novel that moves between modern-day Miami and revolutionary and post-revolution Cuba to tell the stories of four generations of women whose past traumas continue to play out in current times. It’s a story of strength, immigration, and the unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters. Of Women and Salt took my breath away on multiple occasions and continues to take hold of my thoughts.” —Pat Rudebusch, Orinda Books, Orinda, CA

The Night Always Comes: A Novel By Willy Vlautin

(Harper, 9780063035089, $26.99) “The Night Always Comes is urgent. For two days and two nights, Lynette’s future rests on a tightly plotted race through the gentrified and changing districts of Portland as she tries to secure what she believes to be a better life for herself and for her mother and brother. Willy Vlautin writes with honesty and generosity about people who are just a step ahead of disaster. He makes us care for lives that are singularly defined by the challenge of earning a living wage while navigating the circumstances of society, family, and self. Vlautin is a necessary writer for our times.” —Christine Kelly, Sundance Bookstore, Reno, NV

Indie Next List titles sold as ebooks at participating stores.

“Libertie is a beautifully written, immersive historical novel inspired by the story of a Black doctor and her daughter who lived in a free Black community in Brooklyn during the Reconstruction era. It is also a profound meditation on what it means to be truly free—whether born free or formerly enslaved, whether in America, Haiti, or Liberia—while struggling against grief, sexism, racism, colorism, or classism. Libertie’s quest to forge her own path is a much-needed inspiration!” —Alyssa Raymond, Copper Dog Books, Beverly, MA

Raft of Stars: A Novel By Andrew J. Graff

(Ecco, 9780063031906, $26.99) “Raft of Stars is an engaging comingof-age story that will appeal to a wide range of readers. Believing they are murderers, two young boys go on the run in northern Wisconsin. As the adults in their lives set out to find them, questions of guilt, hope, and the future rise to the surface. With characters that come alive and a setting that is real enough to feel, touch, and smell, Graff’s novel has action and emotion as well. Filled with themes of family and friendship, this warm-hearted adventure is sure to be a winner!” —Betsy Von Kerens, The Bookworm of Omaha, Omaha, NE

Gold Diggers: A Novel By Sanjena Sathian

(Penguin Press, 9781984882035, $27)

“Gold as a drug. Gold as a metaphor for the glittering hopes and burdens new immigrants put on their children’s shoulders. Gold as the thread weaving history, memory, and imagination, a meditation on how the past blends into the present. Gold as the object of an improbable heist. There is so much in this book, but it is first and foremost an extraordinarily good yarn, the story of two generations of American-Indian immigrants trying to become Americanized while clinging to a fetishized, culturally commodified India. There is love, drugs, alchemy, and stories about the gold rush, both the forty-niners and the new gold diggers of the tech bubble. It’s fun and fast-paced, except when you stop short for a sentence so evocative you want to dwell on it. A seriously good book by a seriously talented writer.” —Françoise Brodsky, Shakespeare & Co., New York, NY

Mother May I: A Novel By Joshilyn Jackson

(William Morrow, 9780062855343, $27.99)

“I’m a huge Joshilyn Jackson fan, and she’s written another fast-paced, exhilarating read with Mother May I. This domestic thriller is comparable to a roller coaster, taking you to dramatic, earth-shaking highs before dropping your heart into your stomach on the lows. I quickly devoured this book but didn’t miss its poignant, timely message. Powerful, smart, thrilling—a new favorite.” —Beth Mynhier, Lake Forest Book Store, Lake Forest, IL

Northern Spy: A Novel By Flynn Berry

(Viking, 9780735224995, $26)

“This emotionally rich espionage story set in present-day Ireland looks at a country divided, the invisibility of motherhood, and the bonds of family that can supersede all else. It is the story of two sisters, one a paramedic and one a BBC news service employee. When one sister is apparently part of an IRA attack, the other refuses to believe it and sets out to prove her sister’s innocence. I read this in one sitting—compelling is not a strong enough adjective for this thrilling novel!” —Mary Lee Delafield, Warwick’s, La Jolla, CA

The Elephant of Belfast: A Novel By S. Kirk Walsh

(Counterpoint, 9781640094000, $27)

“The Elephant of Belfast is a gem of historical fiction involving a young female zookeeper and an elephant during the Belfast bombings in 1941. The beautiful writing weaves an intricate balance between themes of loss, identity, and resilience during a difficult time. A wonderful book for those who need an element of surprise and who believe the love between animals and humans can make us whole.” —Kathy Detwiler, Buttonwood Books and Toys, Cohasset, MA

When the Stars Go Dark: A Novel By Paula McLain

(Ballantine Books, 9780593237892, $28)

“No matter what the genre, McLain is a masterful storyteller. Her protagonist in this latest novel is one of the most authentic and powerful characters I have ever experienced. Anna Hart, a missing persons detective, shares not only her knowledge as an expert on missing children but she lays bare her own personal demons as she struggles to find a teen who has disappeared. I was captivated from page one and couldn’t stop until I finished this intense and provocative story. Absolutely mesmerizing!” —Stephanie Crowe, Page and Palette, Fairhope, AL

Find more independent bookseller recommendations at IndieBound.org