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JUSTICE IS COMING

The Republican Party comes in for heavy shellacking throughout Uygur’s pages. The people who voted for Trump, by that account, didn’t vote for him based on policy issues or a reasoned platform. “They wanted racism, cruelty, and authoritarianism,” writes the author. They certainly got that and more. Yet, Uygur insists, that party is in power despite the fact that it consistently loses the popular vote. Most Americans “are just not fundamentally conservative”; they are opposed to social injustice

INSOMNIACS AFTER SCHOOL

Nakami’s high school’s now-defunct astronomy club is the subject of rumors involving unrequited love, tragic deaths, and subsequent hauntings, but Nakami doesn’t believe in ghosts. He just wants to find somewhere quiet to nap—he’s stuck in a cycle of insomnia that’s leaving him exhausted and bad-tempered. But since he isn’t scared of the supposedly haunted observatory, he’s pushed by his classmates to fetch some supplies from a storage cupboard located there. In the process, he discovers that i

A GALAXY OF WHALES

Fern’s father, who died three years ago, was a professional photographer who helped her discover that she could capture the world any way she wanted. Now she has her sights set on a local photography contest. To Fern’s dismay, her classmate Jasper wants to win the contest, too. Their parents run rival whale watch businesses, and the two families are “mortal enemies.” Meanwhile, Fern feels frustrated that she’s drifting from her best friend, Ivy. To make Ivy jealous, Fern asks Jasper to team up

ANGÉLICA AND LA GÜIRA

As a parting gift, Abuelito gives the child an antique güira, a cylindric metal percussion instrument. As he scrapes the güira with a metal comb, Abuelito tells Angélica about their ancestors who played the instrument before her. “This güira has power,” he tells her. “It makes the music go slow slow or speed up—fast fast.” Angélica is excited to bring this piece of her beloved Dominican Republic back home to New York City; she plays it loudly whenever she misses Abuelito. Her family and her orc

ACCOUNTABLE

Liberal Albany, California—where over half the residents are White and most are college educated—was the site in 2017 of a shocking discovery. A Korean American high school junior had created a private Instagram account and for several months shared racist, sexist memes with his 13 followers, all White and Asian boys. The targets were predominantly Black and Black biracial girls (a Black coach and Sri Lankan American boy were also victims). The violent, degrading images were even more horrific

THE QUIET COUP

The current economic landscape suffers from skyrocketing student debt, predatory lending, and stark income inequality. Baradaran, a law professor specializing in financial regulation and the author of The Color of Money and How the Other Half Banks, shows us how neoliberalism’s emphasis on corporations over people has “augment[ed] the power of corporations and capital over that of national governments,” creating an economic system that everyday citizens (and even lawyers and government official

THE HIPPOPOTAMUS THESAURUS

Each poem in the collection is a highly imaginative rhyming embodiment of a peculiar (and often downright funny) word, with poems titled “Pottle,” “Quixotic,” “Hullabaloo,” and “Flibbertigibbet” (and yes, that is an actual word). A full glossary at the end defines each word, in addition to some trickier words found throughout the book. The fun is in reading the poem for a sense of what the title word means before checking the glossary for the accuracy of your interpretation. In “Bibliopole,” th

WHAT WE'VE BECOME

In April 2018, 29-year-old Travis Reinking, “another angry white man with a gun,” drove from his home in Illinois to Nashville, where he opened fire on the late-night patrons of a Waffle House, most of them young, working-class Black and Latine people. Four died in the shooting, and Reinking eluded capture for a couple of days. When he was caught, it was revealed that he suffered from mental illness and had acted in a threatening manner before. Metzl, a Nashville-based doctor and sociologist an

LIBRARY GIRL

The women are friends, all single and childless (though not by choice), and each is a little quirky. By the time Essie’s 11, she’s read a great deal about the world but experienced little. Meeting G.E., a boy who looks just like her, makes her dream of being part of a large family. The two plot: Essie’s four mothers could marry the four male department store employees who are G.E.’s dads. The real outcome turns out to be slightly more complicated. The adult characters are drawn with broad, slig

ONLY IN AMERICA

Today, Al Jolson (1886-1950) is famous mainly as the star of 1927’s The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length synchronized-sound film. More specifically, he’s famous for singing its showstopper, “My Mammy,” in blackface, a performance that would be unthinkable today. But in his heyday, Jolson was the best-paid entertainer on Broadway (earning $5,000 weekly at one point). In Bernstein's thoughtful account, the author of Out of the Blue (2003), China 1945 (2014), and other works, doesn’t diminish

TRUE BELIEVER

Veteran journalist Traub, author of What Was Liberalism? and The Freedom Agenda, delivers a memorable, admiring portrait of Hubert Humphrey (1911-1978). Son of a small-town South Dakota pharmacist, Humphrey graduated high school as the class valedictorian. After dropping out of college during the Depression, he returned a few years later to complete three years of classwork in two years. He also worked in a drug store to support himself and his family, and he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa

MAX IN THE CAPITAL OF SPIES

One moment, Max Fredericks is standing in Volkspark in Berlin in 2021, searching for his tutor, Brady. The next, Max finds himself in East Berlin during the Cold War in 1965…where he’s in over his head. All he has to go on is a message that Brady sent to him, decades in the future: “Volkspark West. 10:15, where wolf and girl meet.” Part of this message soon makes sense when he sees a girl being forced into a van. After a moment of frozen indecision, he decides he’ll help the girl by mounting a

INCIDENTS AROUND THE HOUSE

Set in the fictional small town of Chaps, Michigan, near the other made-up places in dread specialist Malerman’s novels, the story involves a deeply troubled family. Bela’s actual mommy has been cheating on her father, Daddo, whose friendliness and good cheer clash with his wife’s dark streak. Wrapped up in their squabbling and work demands, they’ve neglected to pay attention to Bela. Sweetly seductive in the beginning, Other Mommy offers Bela, who blames herself for the whole mess, a solution.

THE MIRROR OF BEASTS

After the destruction of the mystical land of Avalon, Tamsin, Neve, Olwen, and Caitriona fight through their grief and guilt in order to continue their battle against Lord Death, who grows stronger in his control over the dead as the winter solstice nears. Caitriona’s internalized grief is particularly well depicted, tying into her character development and her slow-burn queer romance. Tamsin and her friends begin seeking allies in the legendary Bonecutter and the Council of Sistren, and they g

PUTIN AND THE RETURN OF HISTORY

Martin Sixsmith is a former BBC Moscow correspondent and author of An Unquiet Heart, and his son, Daniel, is a historian and author of The War of Nerves. Despite the optimism in the West for the emergence of liberal democracy in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of Putin over the last two decades has assured the resurgence of the militarized autocratic model first installed during the time of the Mongols in the 14th century. As a correspondent in Moscow in 1991, Martin joi

STARLING HOUSE

Opal’s life in Eden, Kentucky, has never been easy. When their mother died, teenage Opal faked her way into getting custody of her younger brother, Jasper, and years later Opal and Jasper are still struggling to make ends meet. Jasper is an exceptionally bright and creative boy, and Opal desperately wants to scrape together enough money to send him out of Eden to a fancy private school with all the resources he deserves. Opal has always been mysteriously drawn to Starling House, a big old mansi

YESTERDAY'S SONG

The 1970s have just begun, and Cal Leonardowski, a classic rock fan who wants nothing more than to be a musician, attends the Atlanta International Pop Festival, also known as the “Woodstock of the South.” There, he meets Nainsi, a girl from Dublin who is in Atlanta working as a nanny. She wants a career in the music industry, too, ideally as a promoter. In Nainsi’s Irish upbringing, contemporary pop culture wasn’t valued (“saying John Lennon’s name in the same sentence as Jesus Christ was puni

HOW TO SHOW UP AND SHINE IN LAW SCHOOL WITH GRATITUDE, GRIT, AND GRACE

With intimacy and vulnerability, Glimp, an accomplished graduate of Columbia Law School, shares not only her own experiences—from receiving her acceptance letter and her first failed test to taking the bar with a cracked tooth in hand—but also her practices of gratitude, mindfulness, and meditation to help “1Ls” succeed. These tools go beyond simple insights into the Socratic method or exam strategies, though those are here, too. The author provides tips for developing a Super PAC (or “Personal

RABBIT HOLE

Teddy Angstrom was 16 when her older sister, Angie, disappeared after sneaking out to a party. Afterward, everything seemed to fall apart. Now, 10 years later, her father has driven his car off a bridge, and Teddy and her mother are left to pick up the pieces. Cleaning her father’s things, Teddy discovers that he was deeply invested in the online community built up around Angie’s disappearance. What began as a daughter trying to close up loose ends in the wake of her father’s death slowly devol

THE LILIES

The question of what really happened to Charlotte Vanderheyden at the Lilies Society’s Founder’s Night initiation lies at the heart of this convoluted mystery, which is told from the perspectives of four Archwell Academy seniors: Rory Archwell, Blythe Harris, Veró Martín, and Drew Simmons. A lockdown drill finds the four teenagers trapped together in a closet and caught in a time loop that forces them to relive the initiation over and over again, even though neither Drew nor Veró are Lilies. Fu