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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

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

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

FLASH FLOOD

After his parents died and his grandfather refused custodianship, 17-year-old Zack ended up in foster care. He’s spent the past three years living with kindly Susan and Jon Tate. With the arrival of 14-year-old Peter three months ago, Zack’s peaceful existence has fractured. While Zack and Peter both share ADHD diagnoses, the similarities end there. Peter’s turbulent home life with his neglectful biological parents and his fetal alcohol spectrum disorder prompt him to bristle and lash out at th

THE FRAGILE BLUE DOT

In the story “The Real Manhattan,” New York–based journalist Abbie Dial scores a chance to interview a famed “climate crusader.” But just a few minutes spent with subject Tillie McBivens may beget an entirely different piece than Abbie anticipates. Such world-threatening issues as global warming play a central part in each of this book’s 15 tautly written stories. “Cowabunga Sunset,” for example, unfolds inside a dome with a virtual, programmable beach setting—a resort for people to escape the

YOUR VOICE, YOUR VOTE

Young Quetta and her mother and grandmother take a long ride on two different buses (standing room only). Once they arrive at their polling place, they see a long line of community members, and they settle in to wait…and wait…and wait. It’s a big day—Grandma has even donned her Sunday hat, though it’s Tuesday. If it’s such an important day, though, why does Quetta’s mother still have to go to work? the girl wonders. And as it begins to rain, Quetta suggests going home. That opens up a conversat

WOLF TREES

The wolf tree—that old, craggy giant of the forest—is employed as an elaborate metaphor throughout this collection, the author’s second after Bed of Impatiens (2016). Wolf trees are described colorfully in “The Wolf Tree in Film”: “Casting / shade for lovers or a villain’s fried chicken / lunch spread on gingham cloth, / and the treasure buried beneath its roots.” They harbor many kinds of life, so experts advise not to cut them down, and in the title poem, Hartsock links this idea to modern pe

BENNY RAMÍREZ AND THE NEARLY DEPARTED

Not only is Benny Ramírez the grandson of a famous Cuban American musician, but everyone else in his family has a talent, too: Papi is a well-regarded Hollywood producer, Mami has a gift for languages, older sister Cristina is a star dancer, and younger brother Manny is a promising actor. When the family inherits Benny’s estranged grandfather’s Miami home after his death, they leave Los Angeles, and the Ramírez kids enter the South Miami Performing Arts School, where Benny, who feels like he is

HOW TO LEAVE THE HOUSE

The inciting incident for debut author Newman’s raucous first novel is a simple mix-up of the Royal Mail. Natwest, a once-precocious English teen and aspiring art critic, has aged into a pretentious young adult finally headed off to university. The morning before departing his small town for the big city, Natwest anxiously awaits the arrival of a discreet package of particular length and girth, only to inadvertently swap parcels at the post office with his mother’s employer, dentist Dr. Richard

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

WAKE UP WITH PURPOSE!

“Thank you, God, for all our blessings and the chance to serve You. But goodness gracious, can’t we make March Madness just once?” So writes Sister Jean, as she’s known, who doesn’t shy away from opining about the mixed quality of the coaches with whom she’s worked as the longtime chaplain for the Loyola Chicago Ramblers. Neither does she shy from puns or pronouncements on all sorts of matters, from the utility of the iPad for studying Scripture to the power of positive thinking and even self-p

HER DARK WINGS

Seventeen-year-old Corey has grown up on the Island, where Greek gods and their mythology pervade the community’s culture and serve as their religion. Corey feels most at home when spending time with her friends and family and working in her garden. When Corey’s boyfriend, Alistair, unexpectedly leaves her for her best friend, Bree, Corey is certain they’ll now be enemies for life. But on the night of Thesmophoria, the Island’s ancient annual celebration, Bree drowns in the lake. While Corey gr

THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY WITH MURDER

When Lauren moves to Happy Valley, Pennsylvania, just before her senior year, the last thing she wants is to get involved in more drama. When she left everything she knew behind in California, desperate to start over in a new place with her mom and her mom’s new boyfriend, all she brought with her were terrible memories of an unimaginable trauma. But Lauren’s plans fail when a no-strings-attached hookup with classmate Robbie Crestmont unwittingly entangles her in something dangerous: She learns

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