All Reviews

Children's & YAYA FictionYAChildren's

I Am the Swarm

Review by Tami Orendain

Every girl in the Strand family knows their magic will come when they turn 15 years old. It happened to Nell’s mother, causing her age to fluctuate day by day: Sometimes she’s a reliable adult, while at other times she’s a moody teen, even younger than her daughters. For Nell’s older sister, Mora, magic comes in the form of beautiful music that pours from her veins, leading her to self-harm.

So when the insects appear after she turns 15, Nell isn’t surprised. Ladybugs as she plays piano, stick insects during difficult conversations, wasps that match a surge of her anger—the insects become part of Nell, reflecting everything within and without. And there’s a lot to reflect. The Strand family is on edge: Their mother is completely focused on Mora, who has been institutionalized for her mental health, and their father is distant and preoccupied with work. Nell is left on her own—as if being a teenage girl, putting up with her piano teacher’s leering glances, and understanding her own changing body aren’t hard enough. As the start of Grade 10 looms, magic becomes another burden that Nell must carry on her own.

Told in intense verse, I Am the Swarm dives deep into the adolescent experience, unafraid to tackle difficult topics like self-harm, sexual harassment and parental neglect. Readers come into contact with these tough realities through Nell’s innermost thoughts. Her words, which initially appear straightforward and even meager, hide deep emotion and potent questions bubbling underneath, leaving the audience to wonder if, when and how these feelings will eventually burst through.

Through different, creative forms of magic, author Hayley Chewins explores the power, weight and importance of emotions, challenging the notion that feelings are unimportant or isolated from reality. In their attempts to understand and control their magic, characters demonstrate different ways of dealing with emotions—some devastating, some healthy.

I Am the Swarm is a powerful read that packs a range of emotional experiences into smooth, simple verses. With a compelling, original depiction of inherited magic, this book is sure to resonate with those seeking thoughtful speculative fiction.

With a compelling, original depiction of inherited magic, I Am the Swarm is sure to resonate with those seeking thoughtful speculative fiction.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

Bearsuit Turtle Makes a Friend

Review by Nicole Brinkley

I Am a Baby author-illustrator Bob Shea splashes back onto the shelf with Bearsuit Turtle Makes a Friend, a hilarious and fun story of friendship.

A turtle meets a bear—but, wait, is it a bear? After all, the turtle is a bear expert, and this bear doesn’t seem to be doing very bear-like things. Upon quizzing their new friend, the turtle considers that maybe they were wrong, and the bear is truly a bear . . . except the “bear” can’t live these lies any longer. They’re actually a turtle in a bear suit, and they lied to their new friend. Can the friendship survive this deception?

Sometimes, a book is simply joyous and funny, and Bearsuit Turtle Makes a Friend is one such book. Shea, an Eisner Award nominee and the designer of the PBS Kids logo, understands the power of subversive humor and honest truth. Combining the two makes the first of this new series a laugh-out-loud romp that won’t just have kids giggling: It will have them begging for a reread.

Shea’s spare, colorful art and conversational text work in perfect unison. Simple swooping lines expertly convey the movement of the two turtle friends. Real turtles might not have eyebrows, but Shea’s turtles make excellent use of theirs.

Fans of Jon Klassen, Mac Barnett and Mo Willems will fall in love with Bearsuit Turtle Makes a Friend. This is a must for librarians, teachers and parents looking for a delightful read-aloud to add to their collection. More, please!

Bob Shea understands the power of subversive humor and honest truth. Combining the two, Bearsuit Turtle Makes a Friend is a laugh-out-loud romp that won’t just have kids giggling: It will have them begging for a reread.

Whale Eyes

Review by Alice Cary

Young documentary filmmaker James Robinson was born with strabismus—misaligned eyes. Although his vision is twenty-twenty, his brain doesn’t fuse the images it receives from each eye. As a result, as he writes, “Since each eye sees a slightly different view, every time my brain switches between eyes, it looks like my entire world jumps.” Robinson’s Whale Eyes is an exceptionally well-done memoir about how he perceives and navigates the world, and the difficult stares he often receives.

Robinson immediately draws readers in by showing them how he sees: He instructs them to try exercises that require twisting the book, holding it upside down, reading backwards and flipping pages to let them experience afterimages. Whale Eyes shares its title with an earlier compelling, innovative short film about the same subject that Robinson created for the New York Times opinion. He explains the catchy, apt title: “We love looking at whales. And yet none of us have ever questioned the fact that we can look into only one of their eyes at a time. It felt as if the whales were afforded the acceptance that I was seeking.”

When Robinson was in school, reading seemed particularly impossible—like “an obstacle course”—and he vividly describes his classroom frustration and survival strategies. Meanwhile, as his eyes grew further apart, he felt increasingly stared at: “Sometimes the stares feel like a thousand little pokes. Like acupuncture coming from all directions.” Luckily, Robinson had extraordinary family support and encouragement, especially from his mother, who put her career on hold to help Robinson and his brother, who has dyslexia.

Robinson’s prose is conversational and seemingly light, yet it will leave readers with plenty of substance to ponder. The layout is often fun and always pleasing to the eye—plenty of white space and an easy-to-read font, as one might expect. Colorful illustrations from Brian Rea add to the book’s appeal and readability. Younger readers will be particularly riveted by Robinson’s school struggles, while teens and adults will be inspired by chapters explaining the author’s increasing fascination with documentary filmmaking in high school and college, as well as his advice for creating compelling stories in both film and print. Particularly intriguing are Robinson’s descriptions of his creative decisions when making videos covering subjects such as a man who lacks facial recognition abilities, or a journalist with a severe stutter. Whale Eyes is a superb memoir that champions empathy and understanding on every level.

James Robinson’s Whale Eyes is a superb middle grade memoir that champions empathy and understanding on every level.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Twist

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Colum McCann ranges widely in his fiction, from multitimeline historical novels like TransAtlantic to the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin, which followed New York City characters through one day in 1974. With Twist, McCann focuses on the present day and a timely issue: the surprising fragility of the internet, whose traffic is carried in fiber-optic cables across ocean floors, and the unseen labor it takes to keep us all connected.

Despite the contemporary time frame, Twist opens with an almost 19th-century feel as it sets up a mystery. On page one, narrator Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and would-be playwright, tells the reader: “I am not here to make an elegy for John A. Conway, or to create a praise song for how he spent his days.” Instead, he says, he’s going to tell Conway’s story, which others have gotten wrong.

That story begins with Anthony’s first meeting with the enigmatic Conway, who goes by his last name. A shipboard engineer and fellow Irishman, Conway heads a crew that repairs internet cables, often at the bottom of the ocean—a near-impossible job. Anthony has an assignment to write about the cables, and he’s in Cape Town, South Africa, to interview Conway. Although Conway invites Anthony home for dinner, where Anthony meets Conway’s partner, a charismatic actress named Zanele, and then brings Anthony on an outing to observe a group of freedivers, he gives little away.

After a storm in the Congo snaps a cable, cutting off internet access for much of Africa, Anthony joins Conway aboard as the ship chugs north along the coast to find and repair the breaks. The alcoholic Anthony, not drinking for the first time in years, begins to reckon with his own failings as he tries to get to the heart of Conway’s story, and that of Zanele.

As the title suggests, the novel features a plot twist that feels both surprising and inevitable. But in its setting, its narrative of one man’s search to understand another man’s obsession, and its division into three parts, the book is an homage to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Like that 1899 novella (which is referenced in Twist, along with the Francis Ford Coppola movie it inspired, Apocalypse Now), Twist comments on the 21st-century version of predatory colonialism: the environmental degradation that falls on the world’s poorest, and the simultaneous connection and disconnection that the internet has created. This is a lot for one novel to carry, but McCann does it seamlessly, and in the bargain creates memorable characters in both Anthony and Conway, making Conway Gatsby-like, noble in his doomed pursuit.

Like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Twist comments on predatory colonialism in a story of an enigmatic engineer tasked with repairing the underwater fiber-optic cables that carry our internet.
FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Tilt

Review by Freya Sachs

In Portland, Oregon, Annie decides to go to Ikea to buy a crib for her soon-to-be-born child—she’s waited as long as she can. But soon after she arrives in the store, there is an earthquake: the big one, long predicted on the West Coast’s Cascadia Subduction Zone fault line. Emma Pattee’s debut novel, Tilt is the intense, taut story of Annie’s day, as she navigates each step through and after the natural disaster. 

When the shaking stops and the dust settles, the only choice available is to walk, so Annie pulls herself from the collapsed aisles and sets off down the roads and bridges of the city, hoping to meet her husband, Dom, at the cafe where he works. Pattee creates a keen sense of environment, built and natural, as Annie takes in the scale of the destruction and the vast uncertainty of what could come next.

Annie’s narrative voice is striking, moving between her present moment and reflections on the past, all addressed to her unborn baby, whom she calls Bean. She tells Bean about her life in fragments and what-ifs—because what does a disaster do if not clarify what really matters? Readers will move at a rapid pace through the short chapters, urgently needing to know what will happen to Annie and Bean as they continue on their journey.

Pattee brings her expertise as a climate journalist to this remarkable debut, examining how we question our lives when the earth takes control. Ultimately, Tilt is fascinating, haunting and surprising at every turn. 

Emma Pattee brings her expertise as a climate journalist to this fascinating, haunting debut about a pregnant woman’s journey across earthquake-ravaged Portland.
NonfictionSocial Science

There Is No Place for Us

Review by Jessica Wakeman

One of the pervasive myths about people experiencing homelessness is that they refuse to work. This paints them as freeloaders deserving of stigma, a notion that rationalizes our nation’s failure to address root causes of poverty: minimum-wage pay, rising rents, scant tenant protections and the inclusion of credit scores on rental applications. The reality is that many people—over 12 million, in fact—work multiple jobs and still cannot afford safe, stable housing. 

This complicated reality of homelessness is explored in There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, a deep-dive work of reportage by Brian Goldstone. The Atlanta-based journalist followed five families for several years (including during the COVID-19 pandemic) as they struggled to keep a foothold. All of them lost stable housing because of lost jobs, car troubles, illness, rent hikes or landlords ending leases. They slept in their cars, crashed on friends’ and family members’ floors and paid hard-earned money for downright scuzzy rooms in the extended stay hotels that have become a de facto replacement for affordable housing in Atlanta.  

The families’ narratives compose the majority of this 400-plus page tome. Keeping track of their many names and experiences can get unwieldy, but Goldstone’s extensive experience reporting from the trenches is evident. Readers truly get a full picture of how many of the working poor are essentially trapped in homelessness. His forays into subjects like the history of Atlanta housing projects and how the structure of credit scores impacts housing add meat to the narrative. 

There Is No Place for Us belongs on the shelf next to Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. In illustrating how homelessness is skyrocketing in the richest country in the world, Goldstone has accomplished an incredible feat. His book is a must-read for anyone with interest in social sciences, equity and one of the defining American crises of our time.

Twelve million Americans work multiple jobs and are still unhoused. Brian Goldstone reveals the complicated reality of homelessness in his incredible There Is No Place for Us.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Theft

Review by Alden Mudge

Theft is Tanzanian-born British writer Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 11th novel and his first since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature. Set mainly in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, the story comes into focus slowly. Gurnah is an unhurried storyteller, interested in examining the quiet but complicated lives of ordinary people. His language is rarely flashy, and yet there is a submerged sense of urgency in Theft that bursts to the surface in its final section.

Theft centers on three people coming of age in Tanzania as part of the first generation not born under colonial rule. Karim’s mother quickly divorces the much older husband she has been forced to marry, leaving Karim to be raised by his grandparents and, later, his older half brother. Karim longs for the father he does not know, but he is bright and charming, and soon on a path that will eventually lead to high government office.

While in school, Karim meets Fauzia, an education student whose parents worry that she is unmarriageable because of a childhood bout of “falling sickness.” But Fauzia is in the first blush of liberation and is vibrantly alive. The awkward, good-humored courtship between Fauzia and Karim is beautifully rendered, an emotional high point of the novel.

Like Karim, Badar also longs to know his father. As a child he learns the family raising him are distant, impoverished relatives who see him as a toxic obligation. At 13, he is taken to serve in a household whose elderly patriarch despises him for unknown reasons. The lady of the house turns out to be Karim’s mother, and when Badar is unjustly accused of theft, Karim takes Badar home to live in his household and helps find him work in a tourist hotel.

In the final section of the book, the close relationships among its characters fall apart. It’s not incidental that this coincides with the arrival of British nonprofit aid organizations and tourists, who’ve come to “help” the country and “experience” its people. As an empathic reader begins to wonder who are the real thieves, Theft reveals itself to be a profound examination of lineages, legacies and lies.

Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 11th novel, Theft, is a profound examination of lineages, legacies and lies, centering on three people coming of age in Tanzania as part of the first generation not born under colonial rule.
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne

Review by Alice Cary

In a scene near the end of Ron Currie’s marvelous new novel, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, 60-something Babs looks at her adopted sister, Rita, as a wildfire approaches her home and says, “There goes the neighborhood.” The line is a testament to the ferocious dark humor that infuses this book and characterizes Babs herself, the matriarch of a Franco American crime family in Waterville, Maine. As Currie notes about her turf, “You would’ve said Little Canada had seen better days, except it never really had. . . . Poor was poor and remained so, and the rest was just calendar dates and details.”

But oh, those details! While the action transpires over the course of eight days in 2016, a prelude recounts a seminal event for 14-year-old Babs in 1968 that explains her spirit as well as her rage against the assaults and repression that Franco American families like hers have experienced for centuries.

By 2016, Babs is mixing with Colby College trustees, trying to raise money for a “French Immersion School [that] will teach Little Canada’s children not just writing and arithmetic, but also who they are and why their community matters.” She’s got loads more on her plate, like controlling the flow of drugs into the area—with the help of the local police chief—and worrying about her two daughters, who help manage the family “business” while also dealing with their individual substance abuse disorders. Lori is as tough as her mother, but since serving in Afghanistan as a Marine, she has PTSD and sees ghosts. Sis, meanwhile, is missing and will soon be dead, Currie warns readers early on.


Why ‘The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne’ could only have been set in Ron Currie’s home state.

As Babs and Lori desperately try to track down Sis, they deal with Sis’ drunken, abusive husband while trying to protect her 11-year-old son, Jason. In the meantime, an extremely violent but equally calm character suddenly appears, announcing that his Canadian boss is about to take over Babs’ drug business. This messenger, known only as “The Man,” is a dangerous, crafty foe—reminiscent of Gustavo Fring, Breaking Bad’s drug kingpin.

Currie’s passionate prose is so sharp it practically jumps off the page, igniting plenty of page-turning action. Babs doesn’t hesitate, for instance, to tell off a snooty Colby trustee who makes disparaging comments about her heritage: “Whatever sins go along with being white, don’t pin them on me—I’ve been running from white people my whole life, like most everyone else on the planet.” Currie emphasizes that structural discrimination of the sort faced by Franco American communities is very much part of the American story, setting events around Fourth of July celebrations.

The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne is full of on-point social commentary, violence, savvy sleuthing, poignant characterizations—and loads of love and humor. With a top-notch blend of gritty mystery and bighearted drama, it’s Dennis Lehane meets Ann Patchett. Luckily for readers, it’s the first of a trilogy about this memorable clan.

With a top-notch blend of gritty mystery and bighearted drama, Ron Currie’s The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne is Dennis Lehane meets Ann Patchett.
NonfictionSocial ScienceHistoryAmerican History

The Ride

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

Journalist and author Kostya Kennedy is best known for his books about sports, including True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson and Pete Rose: An American Dilemma. With The Ride: Paul Revere and the Night That Saved America, Kennedy brings his clear prose and flair for play-by-play storytelling to unravel fact from legend in one of the best-known stories in American history: the midnight ride of Paul Revere. Timed just ahead of the 2026 semiquincentennial, Kennedy’s examination of American hero Paul Revere is informative, thoughtful and a welcome reminder that the fledgling nation’s independence was not at all guaranteed.

Kennedy sets the stage by reminding us of the stakes in mid-April of 1775, asking readers to imagine what might have happened had Revere (and other midnight riders as well) not spread the word that British redcoats had marched out of Boston in search of munitions stored at Concord: “If not for that first morning of battle—of impudent, plucky, stunning, and world-shifting Patriot success—would the rebelling American army have continued to mobilize so confidently?”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1860 poem immortalized Revere’s ride; for many of us, that’s where our knowledge begins and ends. Kennedy takes time to delve behind the myth to paint an intimate portrait of Revere himself, a silversmith and dedicated revolutionary messenger. Enhanced by photographs and period illustrations, Kennedy’s brisk, well-researched narrative provides helpful historical context as well as information about other early revolutionaries including Revere’s friend, the underappreciated Dr. Joseph Warren, who sent both Revere and rider William Dawes out the night of April 18, 1775. (Speaking of unsung figures, Kennedy also includes mention of rider Samuel Prescott and an entire chapter on Dawes.) 

From the distance of 250 years, it’s easy to forget these early patriots were real men and women, embarking on a dangerous, often controversial and uncertain enterprise. Kennedy closes with reminders that this history lives on—in places and in people. He describes climbing the steeple chamber at Boston’s Old North Church and meeting Paul Revere III, whose late father was stopped for speeding in Lexington one April night in the 1960s but did not get a ticket.

In the years to come, there will be many books about the American Revolution. But readers can’t go wrong beginning with The Ride, which would make a great family read-aloud or audio listen. Because, in a way, it all began that night with Paul Revere.

Kostya Kennedy brings his flair for play-by-play storytelling to unravel fact from fiction about the midnight ride of Paul Revere.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Paris Express

Review by Alice Cary

“Like a knife turning the world to butter, Engine 721 bursts through the wooden buffers.” That’s how Emma Donoghue describes a real-life railway disaster in her thrilling, thought-provoking historical novel, The Paris Express. Inspired by an iconic 1895 photo of a train engine dangling out of Paris’s Montparnasse Station, the multifaceted author (Room, The Wonder), artfully blends fact with her astute imagination to create a story representing a broad slice of social concerns, including innovation and technology, as well as art. As the train hurtles toward its fate, Donoghue examines the transportation mode as a metaphor—the train is “a moving image of the unfairness of the long con of life.”

The action of the novel begins with an 8:30 a.m. stop in Granville and continues through the Paris crash that afternoon at 4:01. Chapters are organized like a train schedule, marking various station arrivals, departures and delays, while passengers arrive and occasionally move from carriage to carriage, each carriage “as intimate as a dinner party, but one with no host and guests assembled at random.”

And oh, what a dinner party this is! People of all ages, classes, races and nationalities interact, as Donoghue introduces characters based on passengers who were actually aboard that 1895 train, as well as other real-life personalities whom she “invites” aboard, and a few characters entirely of her invention. Amid the drama, Donoghue has plenty of fun, for instance, having her characters refer to the recently erected Eiffel Tower as “that monstrosity,” or writing that “Ever since that morning in Le Havre decades back when Monet daubed his first Impression, Sunrise, Normandy’s been infested with painters.”

Tension builds from the start of the journey, when a radical young woman nicknamed Mado raises the suspicions of Russian emigree and social worker Elise Blonska. Donoghue explains the technology and handling of the locomotive in riveting scenes, bringing the crew to life amid descriptions of corporate greed. Only a writer as talented as Donoghue could have readers so immersed in fin de siecle Paris while also, perhaps, musing about the motivations and movements involved in the contemporary assassination of which Luigi Mangione has been accused.

Each and every beautifully written word counts in The Paris Express, as Donoghue wonderfully illuminates the fleeting qualities of both life and art. As Henry Tanner notes: “That’s the paradox of trains. . . . They show you what you’d never have seen otherwise, but only for a tantalising second.”

Read our interview with Emma Donoghue about The Paris Express.

Each and every beautifully written word counts in The Paris Express, Emma Donoghue’s thrilling, thought-provoking historical novel inspired by a real-life railway disaster.
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

The Martian Contingency

Review by Noah Fram

Mary Robinette Kowal’s latest exquisitely crafted and meticulously researched Lady Astronaut novel, The Martian Contingency, continues her Hugo and Nebula Award-winning series set in an alternate 20th century. It’s 1970, and Drs. Elma and Nathaniel York are among the second wave of spacefarers building a permanent home for humankind on Mars. Years earlier, a meteor strike obliterated Washington, D.C. and set off an extinction-level series of climate catastrophes. Like other writers documenting humanity’s often hubristic, Ozymandian response to such existential threats, Kowal contends with whether the disparate and all too dissonant components of Earthbound society will unite to survive. But in so doing, she probes more intimate questions: What would it be like to live your life on that precipice? And how would a society built in one reality adjust to a wholly unrecognizable one?

In The Martian Contingency, Kowal emphasizes this sense of alienation through the calendar. Our celebrations and rituals are so firmly tied to the rhythms and cycles of the Earth and the moon that it is surprisingly difficult to translate them offworld. How will the Jewish Elma and Nathaniel mark Rosh Hashanah on a planet with a year of a different length, two moons and no tidal cycles? When is Christmas, Diwali or Eid al-Fitr? What do those holidays mean, anyway? Watching the piecemeal emergence of a unique spacefaring culture is both fascinating and inspiring.

The moments when the old rules fail to translate drive Kowal’s plot, which revolves around Elma’s investigation into a cover-up of a horrible event during the first wave of Martian exploration. The Martian Contingency is no Roddenberry-esque utopia; rather, it is riddled with the brutal legacies of our worst demons. From the entrenched racism of apartheid-era South Africa or politicization of pregnancy and childbirth to the casual postwar sexism of phrases like “keep the home fires burning” or the connotations of referring to the Mars base as a colony or settlement, Kowal’s Martian pioneers cannot escape the myriad traumas we humans have inflicted on each other over the years. The result is a deeply personal novel about whether the human race will survive and, if it does, what it will be.

Mary Robinette Kowal’s fascinating, inspiring The Martian Contingency observes the emergence of a unique spacefaring culture.
NonfictionNatureEnvironment

The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue

Review by Priscilla Kipp

In these alarming times of devastating wildfires, raging floods and apocalyptic windstorms, it might feel like a contradiction to place the words “climate” and “hope” in the same sentence. Yet this global crisis is all the more incentive to welcome and learn from The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street. Journalist, travel writer and climate activist Mike Tidwell brings these daunting issues down to a local, very personal level on the street he has called home for more than 30 years. 

Takoma Park, Maryland, is a vibrant Washington suburb, known for the majestic trees that once lined and shaded its streets. In the new century, intensifying droughts, rains, heat and wind began taking their toll, stressing the trees in Tidwell’s neighborhood. Spring came too soon and summer stayed too long. Oaks dropped branches and their lush leaf canopies withered. Ambrosia beetles invaded the weakened trees to feast on vulnerable roots. Ivy vines took hold and began their strangling climbs upward. 

When the city cut down and removed the dying trees, leaving stumps like “mute tombstones” lining the streets, Tidwell’s neighbor Ning Zheng, a Chinese American scientist, wondered where they all went. Finding land to bury thousands of dead trees deep underground, to shelter their carbon for years and provide such carbon offsets to industry, becomes Ning’s quixotic mission. Meanwhile, Tidwell explores the controversial possibilities of geoengineering the atmosphere (reflecting sunlight away from the planet), and he begins searching for ways he and his fellow imperiled humans can actually do something. 

As deer proliferate in the new, season-defying warmth, so do their ticks, and the Lyme disease they cause. A long-suffering victim of chronic Lyme himself, Tidwell organizes neighborhood tick hunts. Solar panels, heat pumps and electric vehicles begin to multiply. “Electrify everything!” is the new mantra. With farmers facing systemic crop failures due to weather extremes, backyard and even curbside vegetable gardens start to flourish, now minus the trees’ shading shadows. 

Like Ning, whom Tidwell nicknames the “tree undertaker,” there are other heroes in this epic fight: Tidwell’s neighbor and friend Congressman Jamie Raskin is one. Having survived the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, the loss of his son and his own cancer diagnosis, the Democrat is an inspiring, fervent agitator for federal help with climate change. 

Like a friend with a gentle, coaxing voice—and an eloquent pen—Tidwell contrasts the ominous threats of climate change with the promising ideas and works of individuals and their communities. He insists we find a group to join, as strength in numbers is the only way to score wins in this fight. The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue leaves readers with a cautious optimism, an empowering sense of hope and a greater appreciation for our trees.

The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue inspires a cautious optimism about our planet’s future, an empowering sense of hope and a greater appreciation for our trees.
Children's & YAYA FictionYA

The House No One Sees

Review by Mariel Fechik

Once upon a time, there was a little doll who lived in a house perched on the corner of a busy street with bright lights. The road was so busy and the lights so bright that no one could see the house. The doll lived with a princess who slept and slept and almost never woke up. The doll tried to wake the sleeping princess, but once the princess opened her eyes, she called the little doll terrible names. The little doll ran from the house and found a new version of home. But some part of her remained, buried deep in the foundation of the house that no one saw.

The doll is really Penelope Ross, a 16-year-old girl trying to both outrun and unravel the memories of a childhood spent in the trenches of her mother’s drug addiction. On the night of her 16th birthday, surrounded by friends, Penny is finally feeling the sense of normalcy that the doll never could—until the sleeping princess sends a text, summoning her back home.

In the tradition of Carmen Maria Machado, whose acclaimed memoir, In the Dream House, details an abusive relationship through surrealist vignettes, Adina King’s debut novel The House No One Sees depicts a young person who has built a labyrinth of trauma and grief and must subsequently learn the art of both deconstructing and reconstructing her life. Machado’s memoir quotes the artist Louise Bourgeois: “You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.”

Written in a hybrid form of verse and prose, Penny’s story comes in nonlinear pieces. In the present, Penny navigates her way through the house and a flood of memories, while the details of her past are filtered through poems. Though King’s metaphors occasionally become muddled, this figurative exploration of the effects of parental drug addiction is brilliant. After all, trauma and its aftermath is not usually a legible experience: It exists in the margins of a life, coloring everything contained in between. The House No One Sees is not a perfect book, but it is an important one that might offer a guiding light to countless other little dolls.

The House No One Sees offers a guiding light to readers through its depiction of a young person who has built a labyrinth of trauma and grief.

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