The captivating Sister, Sinner chronicles the life of the spellbinding, complicated celebrity evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.
The captivating Sister, Sinner chronicles the life of the spellbinding, complicated celebrity evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.
Sarah Aziza’s stunning memoir, The Hollow Half, traces her Palestinian family’s history of violent displacement and embraces their legacy of survival and love.
Sarah Aziza’s stunning memoir, The Hollow Half, traces her Palestinian family’s history of violent displacement and embraces their legacy of survival and love.
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Palestinian American author Sarah Aziza’s debut memoir, The Hollow Half, is a vulnerable account that interlaces her recovery from an eating disorder with her journey to reconnect with a family history that spans generations of violent displacement. With stunning prose, Aziza, who hails from a family of Gazan refugees, navigates effortlessly between geographies, timelines and languages to parse trauma and refuse the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Early on, Aziza describes her father’s “informal archive,” a collection of items—programs from Aziza’s college graduation, report cards, old IDs—that document his life, from his birth in Gaza to present day. In The Hollow Half, Aziza creates her own archive as she seamlessly moves between personal narrative, journalism and history. From the opening pages, we are introduced to her life as a journalist, her eating disorder and her attempts to maintain bodily autonomy within what she experiences as a carceral recovery clinic. As the book’s cover mentions, “It is not a simple thing to return to the land of the living.” The Hollow Half depicts the multiple ruptures that have occurred in Aziza’s life and is haunted not only by her present fight to recover her physical body, but also by her ancestral past. At the same time, the memoir is infused with Aziza’s family legacy of refusing occupation and displacement, and practicing life and faith. Throughout the memoir, Aziza discovers the ways language and history resuscitate her Palestinian grandmother Horea’s spirit.

Aziza’s embodied narration travels from her childhood in the heat of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to the cold U.S. Midwest, to her present adopted home in Brooklyn and her return to her homeland of Palestine. Aziza also figuratively returns to this homeland, a place tethered to her soul, through recounting her grandmother’s and father’s lives, embracing her inherited legacy of survival and love. We follow the rhythm of her explorations of the past in English and occasional Arabic, which is quite easy to understand in context and facilitates a deeper understanding of Aziza’s family and culture.

Aziza admits she is “a hungry daughter” and wants to “rescue every fragment of us.” As she tracks her movements through memory and dreaming, Aziza invokes the Palestinian poets Ghassan Kanafani and Mahmoud Darwish, as well as Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, which examines Black life and survival in the afterlife of slavery. Brilliant and surprising, The Hollow Half conveys memory as a “fight that accelerates your return.”

Sarah Aziza’s stunning memoir, The Hollow Half, traces her Palestinian family’s history of violent displacement and embraces their legacy of survival and love.
Stephen S. Hall’s Slither will make you marvel at what we can learn from snakes, if only we can swap fear for curiosity and disgust for appreciation.

The first new biography of Aimee Semple McPherson in over 30 years, Claire Hoffman’s Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson shines a bright light on the life and times of the colorful 1920s evangelist whose spellbinding preaching and healing services drew thousands to her Los Angeles temple.

Drawing on deep archival research, Hoffman skillfully sketches the contours of the life of a woman whose personality dazzled thousands and whose preaching and healing elevated her to the level of a Hollywood personality. Born Aimee Kennedy, as a young girl she seemed already poised to bring the word of God to people. By 5 years old, she knew much of the Bible by heart and would line up her dolls to preach to them. As a teenager, an encounter with her soon-to-be husband, the Pentecostal preacher Robert Semple, deepened her faith and developed her passion for healing others physically and spiritually. From that moment she “saw herself as a figure whose fate was part of a larger Christian epic,” writes Hoffman.

Following the death of one husband and divorce from another, McPherson set out on a cross-country trip, preaching at tent revivals along the way, blazing a gospel trail and landing eventually in Los Angeles, where her fame and popularity rivaled any Hollywood star’s. Follower donations built her megachurch, Angelus Temple, which filled every night with crowds clamoring for McPherson to touch them through her messages and her healing.

In 1926, scandal dogged McPherson when she mysteriously disappeared and just as mystifyingly reappeared in Mexico. Although rumors swirled about a possible affair, the incident only elevated McPherson even more in the public’s eye, and her celebrity grew. Hoffman’s fast-paced narrative reveals the ragged rhythms of McPherson’s later life as she maintains her fame and her ministry while struggling with financial problems, health issues and bitter family fissures. Thoroughly detailed and captivating, Sister, Sinner traces McPherson’s mercurial rise to fame and her eventual descent into ignominy.

The captivating Sister, Sinner chronicles the life of the spellbinding, complicated celebrity evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.
Prose to the People overflows with photographs, oral histories, essays and interviews that document and celebrate Black bookstores.

From age 5, thanks to her super fit, martial arts expert father, Bonnie Tsui knew what it was to be strong. “As far back as memory serves, my brother and I were drafted to join our father in training sessions,” she recalls in On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters. “Exercise was fun in our house.”

When Tsui was 8, those sessions became tinged with sorrow when her grandfather died, and her father became permanently “preoccupied with outrunning death.” And when she was in high school, he left their Long Island, New York, home for his native Hong Kong, creating a gulf between them that’s troubled the author ever since. 

In On Muscle, Tsui displays the journalistic prowess and love for sport that made 2020’s Why We Swim a bestseller as she considers how muscle powers and supports us via fascinating interviews, experiential research (including observing an anatomical dissection) and scientific exploration of the mind-body connection. She also movingly shares her experience of parental estrangement: Can her finely tuned muscles help her to emotionally stretch, flex, endure?

Remarkable interview subjects include Jan Todd, the first woman to lift Scotland’s Dinnie Stones (773 pounds) and co-founder of the expansive H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports at the University of Texas at Austin. Tsui visits Dan O’Conor, who in June 2020 began daily jumps into Lake Michigan and became a social media sensation, exemplifying how “the body can lead in elevating the spirit.” And, she wonders, “How can paying attention to muscle solve for the unsolvable circumstances of injury and illness?” Minneapolis-based adaptive yoga pioneer Matthew Sanford offers compelling answers: After a devastating car crash, he strove to engage his entire body, contrary to doctors’ recommendations to ignore the parts of his body left paralyzed. As Tsui learned, his work indeed helps students of varying abilities experience “the wisdom of bodies as a continuum.”

On Muscle will help readers attain that wisdom, too, thanks to its multifaceted celebration of muscles’ importance to body and mind, physicality and identity. Tsui has crafted an appealing, enlightening guide to understanding and appreciating our own strength.

Bonnie Tsui’s multifaceted celebration of muscles is an appealing, enlightening guide to understanding and appreciating our own strength.

Stephanie Sabbe’s Interiors of a Storyteller is as much a memoir as it is a book about design. Sabbe is from West Virginia, but she built her career as an interior designer in Nashville, Tennessee. Her affinity for Southern storytelling is clear: Woven throughout the photographs of beautiful homes are personal stories about an absentee dad, a dying mother, even an FBI raid of an uncle’s marijuana crop. “The world around me was literally going up in smoke,” she writes, “and I lay in the treehouse with a smile on my face, staring up at the sky, dreaming of my next construction project.” The home that immediately follows the story of the burning crops reminds Sabbe of her West Virginia treehouse. The Writer’s Cottage, as Sabbe describes it, is an elegant place that Sabbe designed while envisioning former first ladies Laura Bush and Michelle Obama staying there one day, perhaps on a writers’ retreat together. The book’s final chapter details where Sabbe sourced materials for each project, so inspired readers might be able to replicate some of her designs. Each home is different, but one cohesive element is the presence of books. “Books, books, and more books,” Sabbe writes. “My clients as a whole are a pretty literate group.” Interiors of a Storyteller will delight Southerners, designers and fans of storytelling of all stripes.

Stephanie Sabbe’s Interiors of a Storyteller weaves memoir with interior design and is recommended for Southerners, designers and fans of storytelling of all stripes.
STARRED REVIEW
March 23, 2025

20 gripping reads to celebrate Trans Day of Visibility

These excellent books by transgender or nonbinary writers are perfect picks for March 31—or any day of the year.
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Beautiful, complex and affirming, Ash’s Cabin will prompt deep conversations about how best to support one another and our environment, at a time when the future is uncertain and peace can be hard to find.

Beautiful, complex and affirming, Ash’s Cabin will prompt deep conversations about how best to support one another and our environment, at a time when the future is uncertain and peace can be hard to find.

The Deep Dark is a moving and eerie graphic novel exploring identity, generational trauma and queer love.

The Deep Dark is a moving and eerie graphic novel exploring identity, generational trauma and queer love.

Jennifer Finney Boylan’s latest memoir-in-essays, Cleavage, is a sometimes funny, sometimes elegiac, meditation on gender, parenthood and coming to terms with herself.

Jennifer Finney Boylan’s latest memoir-in-essays, Cleavage, is a sometimes funny, sometimes elegiac, meditation on gender, parenthood and coming to terms with herself.

Katherine Packert Burke’s debut, Still Life, is an ode to both the sweet and thorny parts of friendship, full of biting musings on queer and trans culture, literature, art and, quite poignantly, Sondheim musicals.

Katherine Packert Burke’s debut, Still Life, is an ode to both the sweet and thorny parts of friendship, full of biting musings on queer and trans culture, literature, art and, quite poignantly, Sondheim musicals.

A bacchanalian romp from Monaco to Pisa to Paris, The Pairing is a testament to Casey McQuiston’s talent.

A bacchanalian romp from Monaco to Pisa to Paris, The Pairing is a testament to Casey McQuiston’s talent.

Akwaeke Emezi’s sixth novel for adults, Little Rot, hurtles toward devastation, but even as you anticipate the horrors ahead, the escapist thriller-style pacing will keep you pushing on.

Akwaeke Emezi’s sixth novel for adults, Little Rot, hurtles toward devastation, but even as you anticipate the horrors ahead, the escapist thriller-style pacing will keep you pushing on.

As Texas threatens LGBTQ+ people with draconian laws, KB Brookins’ memoir, Pretty, is an act of resistance against those who would silence trans writers.

As Texas threatens LGBTQ+ people with draconian laws, KB Brookins’ memoir, Pretty, is an act of resistance against those who would silence trans writers.

In Flamboyants, George M. Johnson tells the story of a Harlem Renaissance in which queerness is as integral and influential to the culture as Blackness.

In Flamboyants, George M. Johnson tells the story of a Harlem Renaissance in which queerness is as integral and influential to the culture as Blackness.

Provocative, disruptive and very funny, Authority collects the work of Pulitzer Prize winning-critic Andrea Long Chu.

Provocative, disruptive and very funny, Authority collects the work of Pulitzer Prize winning-critic Andrea Long Chu.

Rivers Solomon’s Model Home is a powerful and gut-wrenching addition to the haunted house pantheon.

Rivers Solomon’s Model Home is a powerful and gut-wrenching addition to the haunted house pantheon.

Oliver Radclyffe’s Frighten the Horses is a powerful standout among the burgeoning subgenre of gender transition memoirs.

Oliver Radclyffe’s Frighten the Horses is a powerful standout among the burgeoning subgenre of gender transition memoirs.

Through sentences of remarkable elegance, humor and complexity of phrase, former Slate advice columnist and cofounder of The Toast Daniel M. Lavery vividly imagines a 1960s women’s hotel in his debut novel.

Through sentences of remarkable elegance, humor and complexity of phrase, former Slate advice columnist and cofounder of The Toast Daniel M. Lavery vividly imagines a 1960s women’s hotel in his debut novel.

Joanna Lowell’s A Shore Thing has one of the most delightful premises in recent memory: a seaside Victorian bike trip.

Joanna Lowell’s A Shore Thing has one of the most delightful premises in recent memory: a seaside Victorian bike trip.

Homebody is a delightful, beautiful graphic memoir celebrating the journey Theo Parish took to discover their gender identity.

Homebody is a delightful, beautiful graphic memoir celebrating the journey Theo Parish took to discover their gender identity.

P.H. Low’s intriguing debut fantasy, These Deathless Shores, is a haunting modern spin on Peter Pan.

P.H. Low’s intriguing debut fantasy, These Deathless Shores, is a haunting modern spin on Peter Pan.

Based on Jewish mythology concerning the dybbuk, a disembodied spirit that inhabits the body of a living person, The Forbidden Book is a fantastic coming-of-age tale with resonant political themes.

Based on Jewish mythology concerning the dybbuk, a disembodied spirit that inhabits the body of a living person, The Forbidden Book is a fantastic coming-of-age tale with resonant political themes.

KT Hoffman’s The Prospects is a perfect baseball romance that overflows with love for the sport and its main characters.

KT Hoffman’s The Prospects is a perfect baseball romance that overflows with love for the sport and its main characters.

The campy humor, biting observations and poetic musings of Bad Habit’s heroine will leave a lasting impression on readers. This is queer fiction at its painful, honest, celebratory best.

The campy humor, biting observations and poetic musings of Bad Habit’s heroine will leave a lasting impression on readers. This is queer fiction at its painful, honest, celebratory best.

Nico Lang’s powerful American Teenager closely follows seven transgender young adults, rendering complex, searing and sensitive portraits of their lives.

Nico Lang’s powerful American Teenager closely follows seven transgender young adults, rendering complex, searing and sensitive portraits of their lives.

We would kill for another novel from Torrey Peters, author of the simultaneously heart-wrenching and deeply entertaining Detransition, Baby—but we’ll settle for a novella and three stories. Each of these pulls Peters’ style in a new direction, with the titular novella featuring a “stag dance” among isolated overwintering lumberjacks.

We would kill for another novel from Torrey Peters, author of the simultaneously heart-wrenching and deeply entertaining Detransition, Baby—but we’ll settle for a novella and three stories. Each of these pulls Peters’ style in a new direction, with the titular novella featuring a “stag…

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These excellent books by transgender or nonbinary writers are perfect picks for March 31—or any day of the year.
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If you’re reading this, chances are that you read BookPage as devotedly as I do, and you know that you won’t find a negative book review in these pages. That’s BookPage’s core philosophy: genuine recommendations only, no pans. If a book is not worth your time, BookPage doesn’t review it. The only downside to this is that BookPage readers miss out on the fundamental pleasure of an absolutely vicious review—the takedown, the hatchet job. For that, we recommend Andrea Long Chu.

Chu is a Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and critic for New York magazine whose first book, a 112-page work on gender and desire titled Females, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction in 2019. Her second book, Authority, includes 22 previously published essays, plus two new pieces, “Criticism in a Crisis” and “Authority.” The book features a quad of n+1 essays, including “On Liking Women” (Chu’s iconic 2018 essay that discusses her gender transition alongside a vast analysis of feminist philosophy over the years, which is now taught in many gender studies programs), as well as spectacularly edible pieces on Yellowstone, The Last of Us, Myra Breckinridge, Curtis Sittenfeld’s weird Hillary Clinton novel, Zadie Smith’s entire literary career and more.

If it’s possible to sum up the satisfaction of reading a Chu review, it’s that her evaluation of a piece of media—be it a single book, an author’s oeuvre, a television show or a webcomic—is so profoundly well-informed that it feels encyclopedic, which is what makes her angle-grinder critiques so valid. Even if you’re a fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Chu’s evisceration of The Phantom of the Opera is defined primarily by her clear devotion to musicals. (“The music in Phantom rarely served a dramatic end—rather, it strutted around the stage like it owned the place,” she writes.)

Read our starred review of ‘Authority’ by Andrea Long Chu. 

“I think that there needs to be a good reason to be that negative, probably more than just the face pleasur,” Chu tells BookPage. “When I’m writing these negative reviews, I’m not going in, first of all, trying to make them negative. I’m going in with high expectations that are dashed. And I am really trying to understand what the person is doing. I think in the best cases, I am really trying to understand what this person’s whole deal is and see them in their wholeness. . . . I think some of [the reviews] reflect the agony of recognizing someone and coming by the negativity kind of honestly.”

Considering the intensity of Chu’s work, it feels necessary to ask, what does it feel like to talk about—be interviewed about—a book like this? When you write this brutally, you’re inevitably inviting someone else to be brutal to you.

“This is the first interview that I’m doing in this press cycle, so you’re really just handing me an on-ramp to this whole experience,” she says. “I’m excited and nervous. There’s a breadth of things that I could be asked about. [When] you collect a bunch of essays together, it’s a little tricky to anticipate what someone might want to talk about, so I do feel a kind of need to, you know, square my shoulders a little bit.”

But other than that initial inclination to square up and gird loins, it’s apparent she’s not intimidated by what could come her way during the book’s promotion. That steadfastness is reflected within Authority as well, as all the essays included are printed exactly as they were originally published, regardless of whether she agrees with them now. In a few rare cases, she includes a short note to address any leftover thoughts. Her review of Bret Easton Ellis’ book White—“a deeply needless book, whose existence one assumes we could have all been spared if Ellis’s millennial boyfriend had simply shown the famous man how to use the mute feature on Twitter”—ends with her reinstating the hilarious original ending that an editor purged prior to its 2019 publication. “On Liking Women” includes a note in which Chu reflects on how the essay came about, how it was received and how “reading it today, I am irritated by the obscurity of the antagonists and the amateurish tone,” she writes, “that kind of bloggy ‘voiceyness’ was dated even then—and I am amused by how little I understood about myself, including my own gender.” (Chu’s follow-up to that essay, “The Right of Anybody to Change Their Sex,” is not in Authority—it came out too late to be included.)

“If there is a criticism of [Authority], I probably also have it, or at least there is a good chance that I do.”

To resist updating your old work shows a tremendous amount of restraint, especially when an essay is five or six years old, as many of these are. But to do so would be anachronistic to Chu. She describes each piece as being like an “artifact,” and gathered together they become an exhibition of her work to date. Each essay includes the year of publication, which Chu considers to be one of the most important elements of the book: “[This] tends to be the way that I think about an author—especially one with a breadth of work, someone like Zadie Smith,” she says. “Understanding a writer through a progression of their work is something that I am doing a lot in my day-to-day, so to get to do it a little bit for myself is actually quite pleasing. It also is a way of saying, happily, while I need to be responsible for everything that appears in the book, I don’t have to necessarily defend it, and that is a nice feeling, being able to distinguish those two functions from each other. It is actually very freeing in that way. If there is a criticism of [Authority], I probably also have it, or at least there is a good chance that I do.”

One of the collection’s two original essays, “Criticism in a Crisis,” includes some of those self-critiques. Chu has been seen as one of the trailblazers in pop culture criticism’s shift away from the concept of “art for art’s sake,” with more readers expecting their movie and book criticism to include politics, rather than shy away from it. But “Criticism in a Crisis” is ruthless toward critics who bemoan a “self-aggrandizing existential crisis” in the profession, who worry that “the health of the republic turns on one person’s review of the latest film or novel.” Rather, Chu writes, “The more relevant changes to the profession are the material ones—the decline of print, the merging of the publishing houses, the evaporation of staff writing positions, the pressure to churn out ad-supported content.”

Indeed, Chu argues that in order to have excellent criticism, you must pay writers more. (I think you can expect that any number of book reviewers will soon have the essay wallpapering their offices.) Chu attributes much of her success to having consistent work, which allows her and her editor to push her work to the next level. “I’ll do some exploratory reading on a topic,” she says, “and then my editor and I will get together and try to be like, what is the bad question that is being asked about this—or like, either wrong or insufficient or misleading? In cases of more established authors, there can be a very obvious answer to that question.”

“I really like those moments in reading where you’re reminded that someone actually wrote this.”

To an invested reader of literary fiction, Chu’s evaluations of novelists are always her best work. She writes about Smith, Maggie Nelson, Ottessa Moshfegh and others consummately, consumingly—and at the precise moment in their careers when you’d be tempted to shruggingly accept that the author is just going to do what they’re going to do, and either you like it or you don’t. That’s when Chu steps in and pushes back, because someone has got to talk about how much Hanya Yanagihara tortures her poor gay characters, or how much Moshfegh writes about poop.

“The ‘takedown’ quality of it is, in a way, a kind of byproduct of a desire to really try and see what’s going on with an author,” Chu says. “That, to me, is where it can be the most valuable, rather than just attacking for the sake of attacking. Not that I am completely against such a thing. But I’d like to think it’s in service of, I don’t know, a very aggressive form of friendship. . . . The moment when you start to notice, as you read through someone’s oeuvre, words that they use too much, or a metaphor that is the same between two different [works]—Rachel Cusk loves to describe things as glittering, for instance. It’s a very important part of [her work] and often a very key moment. I could write a couple hundred words about the meaning of the word glittering in Rachel Cusk’s work. . . . I really like those moments in reading where you’re reminded that someone actually wrote this.”

Authority reveals that to be critical is not necessarily about gathering all the information you possibly can in order to poke holes in a piece of art, but more about organizing the knowledge you’re tending and then applying it to the media you’re consuming. Why do you love what you love, and why do you devote yourself to your own personal temples of entertainment? Chu asks a lot of her subjects, but she asks just as much of herself, and the result is the finest criticism of our time.

Photo of Andrea Long Chu by Beowulf Sheehan.

 

 

 

The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic thinks of her blistering critiques as an “aggressive form of friendship.”
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In Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer’s Families and the Search for a Cure, author Jennie Erin Smith is walking a two-way street. The families of mostly poor and working-class Colombians afflicted by a rare neurological condition serve as a narrative framework that allows Smith to tell the technical story of decades of groundbreaking brain research. But the research and the rare condition also serve to introduce the reader—and scientists and journalists around the world—to a multigenerational saga that is a compelling story in itself.

Valley of Forgetting illustrates the lives of families from the hills around Medellin whose parents and cousins succumb to aggressive forms of Alzheimer’s disease, with symptoms first popping up in patients’ 30s and 40s. Doctors and researchers, both from Colombia and abroad, have spent decades trying to learn from the families, in the hopes that this unusual concentration of a rare form of the illness could lead to a cure. The book brings together tales of Big Pharma, academic colonialism, professional jealousy and medical ethics, all with the coincidental backdrop of the epicenter of an international drug war.

It also raises tough-to-answer questions. Should patients at the highest risk for early-onset Alzheimer’s be told of their genetic precondition? Is it moral for those patients to have children, knowing the risk of passing on the genes is high? What does the global medical community owe poor people who participate in clinical trials?

Two elements of the story stand out. First, the dedication with which the Colombian team has obsessively tracked and sought out new families over the course of decades, traipsing through militia-infested rural areas to add to their family trees and find new potential carriers. Second, the devotion of Smith herself, who has spent years inside the homes of both the patients and the researchers, and in exam rooms and other intimate spaces that give the author a stunning level of vivid firsthand detail.

Smith’s bright, crisp portraits of both the studiers and the studied make the various scientific stumbling blocks encountered along the way all the more upsetting. The Alzheimer’s community, after all, had pledged to find a cure by 2025.

The deeply personal and deeply technical Valley of Forgetting creates a memorable portrait of the families afflicted with a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease, and the researchers trying to cure it.

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