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EVERYBODY'S FAVORITE

Stone, a freelance humor and finance writer, introduces her debut essay collection with a piece about who she was in 2004, “on the cusp of puberty, preparing to plunge into a lifetime of deep, sweaty self-hatred.” She named her prepubescent shame and anxiety Madison, described as “a phantom formed by everything I’d never be” whose message to the author was, “Everything about you is wrong and gross, and everyone can tell.” The author recounts making a list of her failings, such as “cavernous por

THE PAINTER'S DAUGHTERS

As promised by the title, Howes delivers an immersive dive into the lives of Gainsborough’s daughters but also provides an intriguing backstory about his wife’s purported ancestry. The Gainsborough girls—Molly the elder and Peggy a bit younger—enjoy a fairly feral and unrestrained early childhood in Suffolk, despite their mother’s attempts to rein them in. Molly shows signs of a troubling tendency toward spells of odd behavior and confusion, which continue, and worsen, after the family relocate

GLASSWORKS

Glass—sometimes transparent, sometimes opaque, both sturdy and fragile—serves as the novel’s primary metaphor while anchoring its plot. Characters sometimes see each other with joyous clarity but often with distortions or not at all. In 1910, Boston socialite Agnes Carter renounces wealth and respectability (and perhaps her moral compass) for glass blower Ignace Novak, drawn to his talent, passion, and lucidity. The glass bee he gives Agnes will thread its way through the novel, a small detail

THE EAGLE AND THE HART

The political crisis culminating in the deposition of Richard II in 1399 by his cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke, ignited the issue of sovereign legitimacy between the houses of York and Lancaster for the next 85 years. In her probing work in four parts, with chapters titled after lines from the Shakespeare plays, Castor delves into the upbringing and character of these two very different men: Richard, the effete “spare,” becomes king at age 10 after the successive deaths of his older brother, fath

BRIGHT STARS OF BLACK BRITISH HISTORY

The author notes that from the first century, when the Romans conquered Britain, Black people have fought to create better lives for themselves and the world around them, their collective efforts making space for future generations to thrive. John Blanke was a royal trumpeter in the Tudor court who negotiated his salary by boldly petitioning Henry VIII. Olaudah Equiano, a formerly enslaved man who eventually bought his freedom, “practically invented the book tour” after publishing his autobiogr

MY POCKET BATHROOM

When you live in the big city in a small apartment with your parents and little sibling, privacy can be hard to come by, so Po treasures the one place she knows she can find it: the bathroom. However, she is often interrupted by family members in need of the facilities. Things take a magical turn when she hears a noise coming from the bathroom and sees a purple-haired, brown-skinned woman proclaiming that she is Lady Violet, Po’s toilet guardian. Lady Violet gives Po a tiny purple castle that t

HOW TO STEAL A DRAGON

In this second series entry, the Weirdoughs—werewolf Bram, Sheila the ghost, surly Mona the elf-witch, Skele-tony Le Bone, and fartmeister extraordinaire Bryan the Lion—immediately smell something rotten in Felix Frostbite, a charismatic if literally icy new instructor. The friends wind up in a good position to scupper his genuinely villainous scheme to destroy the Villains Academy—and oh yes, the world. Meanwhile, the increasingly tightknit squad disrupt exams (to the grudging approval of home

THE KILLER FLIES OF LUXOR

Blazquez was born in Cardenas, Cuba, in 1944. He began painting at an early age, using any materials he could lay his hands on—from house paint to bubblegum. When his mother decided to mail his abstract works to a Cuban celebrity painter, the reply came that the author was born with a gift and should be given “total freedom of creation.” As a child, Blazquez experienced recurring dreams of ancient Egypt, despite never having encountered imagery associated with the civilization. These dreams rem

RUMAYSA

Rumaysa is back in this sequel to Rumaysa: A Fairytale (2023), this time with a spin on the classic fairy tale “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” The purple onyx necklace gifted to her by her friend Sulieman takes her to “enchanted lands and troubled people,” those who are most in need. Among other adventures, she helps a mermaid escape captivity and saves Little Red Riding Hijab from a wolf. Yet, all Rumaysa wants is for the necklace to return her to her parents. After she rescues a young boy

HOW DOES OUR FOOD GROW?

Widdowson’s lively scenes of smiling, racially diverse people cultivating or shopping for brightly colored foodstuffs create a positive mood for this international survey, but the written portions are lacking. Not only does Jorden dangerously assert that “All berries are yummy AND good for your brain” and, nonsensically, that “Corn has ‘ears’ but it can’t talk,” her unrhymed side notes include hard-to-answer questions like “How many different kinds [of apples] have you tried?” (no examples are

CAVE GIRL’S BIG IDEA

Cave Girl has everything a prehistoric girl could want, like parents who “rock” and a pet snake. There’s just one thing she can’t stand…living in a cave. It’s too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. She’s inspired to build her own place when she sees two beavers making a dam, but her parents ignore her excitement—to her frustration. When a massive storm destroys the cave, however, the family must find a new home. All the other caves are taken, so Cave Girl shows her parents how they c

SONS OF CHINATOWN

Journalist Wong, author of Yellow Journalist: Dispatches From Asian America, first visited his father’s rural village in Guangdong province in 1994 with his extended family. His father, Sam Gee, as he was mostly known in his new home of Oakland, had been able to slip under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 via a well-rehearsed practice among Chinese seeking immigration at the time. As Wong writes, “the so-called paper son scheme” relied on U.S.-born Chinese clans to attest to immigrants’ famili

EVERYTHING I NEVER WANTED TO KNOW

Situated at the intersection of prose and poetry, Hume’s essay collection explores patriarchy’s ongoing war against girls and women. The author divides the book into two sections, the first of which deals with female physical and sexual vulnerability. In the opening essay, Hume muses on what it has meant to live in the city of, Ypsilanti, Michigan, where the weekend she moved in, “a stranger raped our neighbor in her home” and where “one in twenty-six men…are registered sex offenders.” Within a

NO ONE LEAVES THE CASTLE

When Baron Vargus Angbar’s ancestral treasure goes missing, butler Gribbinsnood Flornt must hire a bounty hunter to capture the famous wizard the baron believes to be guilty. Lured by a bard’s song, Flornt hires the Lilac—before learning that she’s 14 and in cahoots with the bard, Dulcinetta. The wizard hunt is an extended setup to get the Lilac and Netta to the baron’s castle, where they are invited by the baroness to dinner and the real mystery can begin. The narrator intrudes to occasionally

QUANTUM CRIMINALS

“There really is a Rikki.” Die-hard Steely Dan fans already knew this, but for the rest of us—who arguably fall somewhere between worshiping Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s music and not knowing it at all—it’s a fine piece of trivia. Rikki, who should not lose that number, was the wife of a Bard College professor when students Fagen and Becker wrote the song and released it in 1974. She’s not the first of the famed duo’s lyrical characters, but she’s arguably one of the least foolhardy and imp

REFLECTIONS FROM THE SHADOW OF LOS ANGELES

The author’s parents moved to Southern California as part of the “great migration of the early 1950s,” the beginning of the “golden age” of the state. He was a happy and creatively mischievous child—he learned, long before the internet demystified such things, that saltpeter could be used to make homemade gunpowder, a discovery that made for an unfortunately potent science project. His childhood had a wholesome quality; his family was obsessed with Disneyland (“our holy grail, the promised land

PERCEPTION

In the opening pages, Minda Blake, a psychic known as a “remote viewer” for a black ops government contractor, uses her ability to dig up a mysterious gold artifact in the deeply religious Dutch Reformed part of Michigan. Almost immediately afterward, she passes out, later realizing that a colleague wanted the fragment and tried to kill her. After recovering, she resolves to find the golden object and take it to the media, even if her employer will hunt her down and, in the best-case scenario,

THE CIRCLE OF WILLIS

Readers meet Leotie “Leo” Lightfoot when Ray Shipworth, an EMT, finds her passed out alone in an abandoned “party” warehouse. She was left there by her loser boyfriend, Jake. Ray gets her stabilized and to the hospital. Meanwhile, Ray is planning to propose to his airhead girlfriend, May, when she dumps him. (May and Jake deserve each other; it’s a pity they don’t get together.) Ray joins the Army and spends one tour in Iraq and another in Afghanistan. He comes home almost irreparably shattered

EVIDENCE!

Behind every great scientist is evidence. When cholera broke out in London in 1854, most people blamed the “bad, smelly air” for the rapid spread of the disease. The English physician Dr. John Snow had a “bold hypothesis.” He had noticed that cholera’s symptoms included vomiting and diarrhea, so the cause was likely what the victims had ingested rather than something airborne. All he needed was evidence! With expert pacing, Hopkinson sets up Snow’s story as a medical mystery and a race against

THE KNIFE BEFORE CHRISTMAS

The star of the season is the Cliffs Hotel, a marvelous restored Victorian mansion overlooking the ocean. Building contractor Shannon Hammer and her crew are working on plans for a Christmas Fun Zone on the grounds highlighted by a carousel and of course Santa. Shannon is close to Bill and Lillian Garrison, who own the Cliffs, and their children, who all work there except for the eldest, Logan, who is in the Navy. Logan’s stunning but awful wife, Randi, is a close friend to Shannon’s archenemy,