www.passions.com

THE LOVE ELIXIR OF AUGUSTA STERN

Growing up in 1920s Brooklyn, Augusta Stern had two heroes. First, her father, Solomon Stern, a well-respected pharmacist. Second, her great-aunt Esther, who moved in with the Sterns after Augusta’s mother died and deals in medicinals in a less conventional way. Watching her great-aunt brewing healing concoctions in the kitchen in the middle of the night after seeing her father measuring out dosages and counseling patients in the back of his drugstore during the day, Augusta dreams of becoming

ASH'S CABIN

Ash has always felt like an outsider, and ever since Grandpa Edwin passed away, that feeling of isolation has only gotten worse. Their parents haven’t fully accepted Ash’s recent name change or newly shorn hair, and school isn’t much better. When Ash learns that their family plans to sell Grandpa Edwin’s old ranch, they come up with a plan: to find Grandpa’s secret cabin in the woods and stay there—forever. They earn money, watch online videos to pick up survival skills, and buy food, gear, and

WANDERING THROUGH LIFE

Leon’s approach to autobiography is pretty much the opposite of what readers may expect from the author of a successful series of whodunits. “I am feckless and unthinking by nature and have never planned more than the first step in anything I’ve done,” she announces early on, and then proceeds to illustrate this proposition by one charming non sequitur after another. After brief chapters on her family, she turns to more or less disconnected anecdotes and discussions—e.g., the tomato-selling sca

HOUSE OF BONE AND RAIN

After his mother, a low-level drug dealer named Maria, is shot in the face for encroaching on someone’s territory, her son, Bimbo, will stop at nothing to avenge her—including torturing and murdering people for information. Most of his close friends don’t want any part this. But after one of them, Xavier, is murdered and Gabe, the primary narrator of the book, barely escapes the killers, their outlook changes. Torn between loyalty to Bimbo and love of his girlfriend, Natalia, who tries to talk

PEGGY

Godfrey worked on this book for 10 years before dying of cancer in 2022; using the manuscript and notes she left behind, Jamison finished the book, immersing the reader in Godfrey’s vision of the intense and willful Guggenheim as she progresses from adolescence to womanhood: “I wanted a future of gangsters or poets; I wanted violence and beauty…” At 14, after her father—traveling with his mistress—dies on board the Titanic, Peggy, her mother, and two sisters must downsize, but they are still we

THE WAY OF THE BEAR

Still smarting from the rejection of her application for promotion to detective, Navajo police officer Bernadette Manuelito has accompanied her husband, Lt. Jim Chee, to Utah, where he plans to meet with Hosteen Desmond Grayhair and help persuade interested scientist Chapman Dulles to make a sizable donation to the Navajo Nation’s Fallen Officers Memorial Fund. On a solitary evening walk in the Valley of the Gods, Bernie is targeted by a truck that nearly runs her down shortly after she discove

THE BASTARD OF BEVERLY HILLS

The author, a film director, presents a brief but engaging and surprise-filled memoir of a man whose true identity was kept from him well into adulthood. The adopted son of Ray and Eleanor Moscatel, a Sephardic Jewish couple living in Beverly Hills, Moscatel was adopted after the tragic death of his parents’ natural son, Albert. Moscatel details how he had always been aware of the ambiguity of his origins (his parents at one point claimed was as a “test-tube baby”), and that it was only later i

ONE OF FOUR

This story centers on the mysterious diary of a soldier (with the American Expeditionary Force in France in 1917 and 1918) whose vivid account of the war never mentions his name. The diary is discovered in the present day, hidden in a Parisian bookstore, by Alex Grover, an American high-school senior on an awkward graduation holiday with his estranged dad, Walter, a retired U.S. Army veteran. The two bond over the journal’s gripping portrait of the war. The diary recaps the soldier’s training a

GALLOP TOWARD THE SUN

Popular historian Stark, author of Astoria and The Last Empty Places, offers a kind of thought experiment at the outset: What might have happened if Tecumseh, the builder of a geographically extensive and ethnically diverse Indigenous confederacy, had been successful in keeping White settlers out of the Ohio River Valley and environs? After all, for a time, when he was a young war fighter, it looked as if the Native peoples might have been able to pull it off, having inflicted “the worst massac

COMEDY BOOK

“This is a love story,” writes Vulture senior editor Fox, invoking the famous quote from Season 2 of Fleabag. The author is a proud “member of the Seinfeld generation, a term I just made up to refer to the sort of millennial who grew up watching Seinfeld and, in turn, always knowing and caring about what goes into a stand-up’s comedy.” That passion for comedy led to this book, which “focuses on comedy made from 1990 through the early 2020s. This is the period in which millennials, and then Gen

THE ART COLLECTOR

It’s 1987: Andy Warhol has recently died, the Iran-Contra Affair is on the news, and artist Seal Larson lies dead on Manhattan concrete. Emma Quinn, a history professor at Columbia University, had found a lot of common ground with Seal, her 30-something neighbor. Like Emma, the visual artist lived alone, and she shared Emma’s passion for art, music, and nightlife. The academic had thought that they were great friends and trusted each other, but upon Seal’s sudden, violent death, she learns her

LIKE THE APPEARANCE OF HORSES

This book follows several generations of one family—as well as a few others in their orbit—from the aftermath of World War I into the early days of the 21st century. It’s the final book in a trilogy, following The Sojourn (2011) and The Signal Flame (2017), but it can be read alone. The narrative moves backward and forward in time, which seems fitting for a novel in which the past looms as large as it does here. It opens in the 1930s, with Jozef Vinich, protagonist of The Sojourn, living in Pen

WE ARE NOT ALONE

Thirteen-year-old Sam Kepler Greyson is dealing with “Big Things™”: His Hodgkin’s lymphoma is in remission, but his best friend, Oscar Padilla, recently died of brain cancer. When Sam returns to school, he’s greeted with hostility—thanks to a rumor spread by “former friend, current jerk” Kevin Bellman, who claims that he lied about having cancer. Moreover, he’s partnered with Cat Pellegrini—whose clique peripherally includes Kevin—for eighth grade’s annual California History Project. To cope, S

GILM!

Geoff Smith and his dad have recently relocated from hot, sunny Houston to cold, rainy Portland, Oregon. Not only is the weather difficult to adjust to, but Geoff—a budding guitarist and singer-songwriter—must also cope with the separation from his band mates. The only good thing about the move is his new history classmate, Corinne Shelby. When Corinne challenges Geoff to “write me a song that rhymes something with the word ‘film’”—and promises to take him on a date if he succeeds—his heart soa

HEAD FAKE

Mikey Cannon grew up in a racially diverse stretch of Los Angeles and played basketball in games where he was “the only white boy” (“I could set up plays like a pro”). Mikey was 15 years old when his mom died. A year later, he entered the Friedman Psychiatric Hospital suffering severe depression—a condition exacerbated by his dad’s tough love. His dad, a decorated high school basketball coach, considered Mikey his great disappointment. Now, at 25, Mikey has weathered two more hospital stints an

THE CEMETERY OF UNTOLD STORIES

Alma Cruz has had a successful career as a novelist and professor. Upon retiring from academia, she vows she’s done with writing as well. She wants most of all to return from the U.S. to her family’s homeland, the Dominican Republic, and live quietly. But what to do with those boxes full of notes and manuscripts for the books she didn’t get around to writing? Alma buys a plot of land in a working-class neighborhood in the Dominican Republic. Before she builds a casita to live in, she builds a c

THE GOOD DAUGHTER SYNDROME

The author writes that her tumultuous relationship with her mother inspired her to write this book, which aims to help others “break free, guilt free” from dysfunctional dynamics. She defines a “Good Daughter” as a deferential woman with poor boundaries and little confidence and a “Difficult Mother” as a controlling, critical figure who’s impossible to please and may have a personality disorder or addiction issues. Difficult Mothers, she says, may have experienced shame and trauma that perpetua

BIRD NERD

Nyla Braun, unkindly dubbed “Encyclopedia Braun” by her classmates, is taking the spring birding tournament between Anderson Elementary’s City Birders and Penn Elementary’s Burb Birders very seriously. She’s determined to count the most birds and learn all the bird songs and calls, allowing her to leave Anderson “on a high.” Becoming obsessed with her interests isn’t new—but this time, she also wants to improve her social status by leading the City Birders to victory. Nyla’s dreams start to com

PONY CONFIDENTIAL

Twenty-five years after 12-year-old Penelope Marcus rode into the woods with Frank Ross, the owner of High Rise Farms, newly revealed evidence suggests that she bashed him to death. She’s arrested, extradited from California to New York, and uprooted from both Laus, her estranged husband, and Tella, the daughter who struggles with mental health issues. After her arrest, we meet the beloved pony she had been riding on that fatal day, who’s gone by so many names over the years—Houdini, Sequoia, O

WHISKEY TENDER

Taffa, a member of the Yuma Nation and Laguna Pueblo, is the editor-in-chief of River Styx magazine and director of the MFA creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Like many Native people, she and her family have faced a concerted effort to remove them from the land, customs, and culture that are their inheritance. In the 1970s, the author’s parents made a pointed, if tortured, decision to leave their Quechan family to pursue economic security and some level of assimi