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BIRD IS DEAD

Margaret Wise Brown’s The Dead Bird, illustrated by Remy Charlip in 1958 and then by Christian Robinson in a 2016 edition, portrayed children discussing death’s finality and enacting grown-up rituals over a deceased bird. This Dutch import is imbued with a kindred spirit, although here the childlike, direct dialogue comes from within the flock. On an overcast, gray-green day, a bird observes the still creature. This realist assures the shocked newcomers who gather that the prone bird is not sle

CHRONICALLY DOLORES

Dolores Mendoza’s family is struggling financially, and her parents’ marriage is imploding. A year ago, she was diagnosed with interstitial cystitis after a bladder accident made her a pariah. Then Mexican American Dolores meets Terpsichore Berkenbosch-Jones, who is autistic and reads white. Terpsichore wants to fake a friendship to prove to her helicopter mom that she’s capable of attending public school and can stop home schooling. The answer to their problems seems clear: Dolores will win ba

THOSE WHO SAW THE SUN

“So when you were a kid, Black people couldn’t vote at all?” Avery asks Clotie Graves, daughter of a Mississippi farmer. “Oh no, no. My goodness!” is the answer, prefacing a description of voting restrictions that leads to the ferocious reminder that “people died for us to have just the right to vote.” Now in her 70s and the operator of an African American history tour company, Graves is profiled alongside nine others, including a dentist, a bank examiner, a music teacher, and a cartoonist. The

SMALL SPECKLED EGG

Between a die-cut front cover hole exposing the titular egg on the title page and a foldout map at the end, a tern describes its life cycle from hatchling to parent as, in smaller type, the author fills in details about diet, predators, behavior, and the annual migratory cycle that takes these birds from Arctic to Antarctic regions and back. Further comments on the foldout map expand on the main narrative with references to the terns’ amazing navigational abilities, sensitivity to magnetic fiel

DIM SUM PALACE

Liddy, a round girl with plump cheeks and Asian features, is too excited to fall asleep—tomorrow her family is going to the Dim Sum Palace. “Is it a real palace?” Liddy wonders. When a heavenly aroma wafts through her bedroom door, she follows it to a grand palace, where two giant chefs are making delectable dim sum. Liddy is tiny in comparison, and when she falls into a bowl of dumpling filling, she is scooped up, folded into a bun, and served to the gigantic Empress herself (cued Asian, like

BARBARIAN'S PRIZE

Tiffany was one of a group of women kidnapped from Earth by evil aliens intending to traffic and enslave them. Their ship crash-landed on a small, icy planet where they were saved by a welcoming community of kind blue aliens consisting mostly of men. In order to survive the unbearably cold temperatures, both blue aliens and humans must implant themselves with a symbiotic creature called the khui, which has a secondary function of “resonating” when two people are a perfect match. It’s now 18 mon

TRAITOR'S RUN

Stevenson’s far-future SF series opener focuses on evil space invaders who happen to be human—an order called the Hegemony, which arose in the aftermath of a traumatic but victorious (though scarcely described in any detail) interplanetary war. Hegemony policy assures the safety of humankind by incorporating spacegoing alien civilizations in what is supposedly a protective alliance akin to the storied Federation of the Star Trek franchise. In fact, the oppressive arrangement subjugates and weak

MAGICAL AND UNUSUAL SOLAR ECLIPSE

The narrator is a little boy with light skin, brown hair, and an orange baseball cap. The adults in his racially diverse group of friends and family have planned activities to demonstrate the magical effects of a total solar eclipse. First, they go looking for objects with holes in them and gather them together on white sheets laid out on the ground. The sunlight passes through the holes, creating circles of light on the sheet. Everybody puts on protective glasses as the moon begins to slowly p

PENANCE

True crime has become such a ubiquitous genre over the last 10 years—through podcasts, television, and nonfiction books—that it’s now fodder for fiction. Clark, who was recently named to the Best of Young British Novelists by Granta, approaches the genre with both a critical eye and an instinct for the lurid. The novel is framed as a nonfiction account of the brutal murder of a teenage girl by three of her classmates, written by disgraced tabloid reporter Alec Z. Carelli, who has unethically ti

BEHIND THE SEAMS

Featuring fringe, vibrant color, and rhinestones, Parton’s fashion sense has always contributed to her immense popularity. In this effervescent, full-color volume, Parton, along with veteran music and pop-culture writer George-Warren and Seaver, the director of archive services for the author, recounts the vivid tales behind the clothes. Blocks of text run alongside photographs as Parton looks back on her poor childhood, when she was fascinated with clothing and creating makeup from foraged hou

THE WATERS

A fairy-tale atmosphere coexists with harsh realities from the opening sentence: “Once upon a time M’sauga Island was the place where desperate mothers abandoned baby girls and where young women went seeking to prevent babies altogether.” The island is home to elderly Hermine “Herself” Zook, who fabricates medicines from wild plants that populate the wetlands separating the island from the town of Whiteheart, and her 11-year-old granddaughter, Donkey. The girl is nicknamed for the animal milk t

PLUNDER

It’s no small irony that the typeface in which federal antitrust investigator and prosecutor Ballou’s book is set is “owned and licensed by a private equity portfolio company.” So is much of the retail and service sector. In one case, the Carlyle Group bought the ManorCare company for $6 billion, which, by the magic of creative accounting, ManorCare had to pay back. Carlyle then sold much of ManorCare’s real estate and forced it to pay rent. In the end, Ballou writes, the resulting insolvency s

THE SECRET LIVES OF BOOKSELLERS AND LIBRARIANS

Patterson, Eversmann, and Mooney gather first-person testimonies from independent booksellers (including author Judy Blume, who started her Key West store when she was 78); booksellers at chain stores like Barnes & Noble; and school, college, private, and public librarians from around the U.S. and Canada. They reminisce about their early discovery of books, their passion to become a librarian, or the unexpected opportunities that gave them a chance to work in a bookstore and, for some, to o

MAMA SAID

At the heart of the book is the often fraught relationship between mothers and daughters—always complicated but made especially so by the unpredictable and deceitful behaviors typical of those suffering from addiction. Gentry maps the ways an unstable mother can unmoor her daughter, and how a girl’s innocence is dissolved by the imperative to survive and protect her vulnerable mother: “You are starting to realize that you have no solution for your mother’s depression. There is nothing you can s

BLACK RIVER

A young woman is brutally killed on the campus of Prince Albert, a private boys’ boarding school in suburban Sydney. She's assumed to be the latest casualty of the Blue Moon Killer, who’s currently at large. This victim is Marguerite Dunlop, daughter of the school chaplain and a recent graduate of a neighboring girls’ school. Reporter Adam Bowman, an alumnus of Prince Albert, is sent to cover this hot story with orders to stay out of the way of his brash colleague “Beat-Up” Benny Diamond, who’s

SOUTH OF SOMEWHERE

Unlike her two older siblings, 12-year-old Mavis has never questioned her lavish life—full of vacations and shopping trips, not to mention a home in one of Chicago’s richest neighborhoods. She also doesn’t doubt her position as the most-favored child, her wildly successful mother’s “mini-me.” Then one day, her mother disappears, and the FBI shows up. With their home seized and bank accounts frozen, Mavis’ stay-at-home dad is forced to beg for help from the once-close sister he’s ignored for the

WE WHO PRODUCE PEARLS

“We who dream / mark time by the moon, / a heavenly body containing multitudes, whose many faces mirror our own.” Writing in verse, Ho notes the diversity of the Asian American community. She alludes to the many reasons that people took the risk of immigrating to America: the wounds of colonization, unfair labor practices, and dreams of opportunities. Affirming that the Asian experience is an integral part of U.S. history, she acknowledges the oppression that Asian Americans have endured, but,

THE NEW EARTH

In his latest novel, Row introduces us to the Wilcox family, a sprawling, dysfunctional group traumatized, in various ways, by several key moments in their past. When their mother, Naomi, informs them that her biological father had been Black, Patrick and his sisters, Winter and Bering, are horrified that she's been keeping that secret for so long. Bering winds up traveling to Palestine as a peace activist, where she's killed by an Israeli sniper. Winter becomes an immigration attorney; Patrick

MYSTERY AT THE AQUARIUM

Tied in with long-distance video interviews, infodumps, and an appended multipage color photo spread to the real OceanXplorer research vessel, this series kickoff finds easily distracted fifth grader Marena Montoya volunteering as a junior science reporter for the aquarium’s newsletter—providing a tailor-made opportunity for readers to learn more about coral reefs and recent discoveries in marine biology as she researches topics for articles or makes presentations. Meanwhile, looking into a str

THE KEY TO SURVIVING SUMMER

Sixteen-year-old Moe is unhappy with her parents’ decision to spend the summer in a quaint lakeside cottage that’s filled with spiderwebs and located near a town marked by a tragic history. She doesn’t want to be away from her best friends, Amber and Julia, who are bonding at camp counselor training without her. One day, as she’s exploring the lake, Moe meets a young boy named Zeke, who shows her a cave where she finds an oddly shaped key attached to a rusty chain. Soon afterward, Moe begins to