Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, and Elizabeth Gonzalez James’ The Bullet Swallower all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

*

Fiction

1. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
(Knopf)

10 Rave • 1 Postive

“A deliberately provocative title that suits its protagonist, an Iranian-American poet who is painfully conflicted, heartbreakingly vulnerable, and frequently impossible … Stuffed with ideas, gorgeous images, and a surprising amount of humor … The serious fiction lover’s favorite kind of book, offering plenty to think about and discuss, all of it couched in brilliantly rendered prose that’s a pleasure to read. Let’s hope that Kaveh Akbar’s impressive debut is the first of many novels to come.”

–Wendy Smith (The Boston Globe)

2. The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James
(Simon & Schuster)

4 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Elizabeth Gonzalez James on the “weird, wild literature” of her home state, here

“Mixes elements of western novels and magical realism to deliver a wildly entertaining story that spans generations and crosses borders in a riveting family saga … While great characterization and superb storytelling make this an enjoyable read, Gonzalez’s use of magical realism elements is what pushes this novel into must-read territory. The narrative reads like a western, but the magical elements enrich the story in unexpected ways.”

–Gabino Iglesias (The Boston Globe)

3. Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn
(MCD)

3 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from Dead in Long Beach, California here

“Through the chorus, Blackburn brings us back to something inherently true about anyone experiencing this kind of loss: Our grief may seem singular, it may seem like it belongs solely to us, but that’s not exactly true. Grief is part of a larger system that connects us all to one another, and what we do with it, how we handle it, and what becomes of us after is not always fully in our control … It’s a masterful feat of storytelling for Blackburn to constantly make the reader feel as if Coral is coming full circle, only to remind us she can’t …

We’re left with a profound and surprising demonstration of how there’s no way to fully outrun or outmaneuver or out-strategize the pain of loss. Even when we truly believe we can, the despair and disrepair of the loss will bring us to our knees and turn us in on ourselves. And although the idea that we don’t move beyond grief, we only learn to live with it is common, Blackburn’s debut novel provides a new vision of just how true this is, making that truth feel brand new again.”

–Stef Rubino (Autostraddle)

**

Nonfiction 

1. The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

7 Rave • 2 Positive
Read an excerpt from The Rebel’s Clinic here

“A biography of Fanon is also of necessity a biography of his legend, which sometimes deviates considerably from his person. His support for the Algerian struggle was unwavering, and he is often remembered as a militant who once lauded anti-colonial violence as ‘cleansing force.’ But as the critic and essayist Adam Shatz demonstrates in his nimble and engrossing new book, The Rebel’s Clinic, Fanon was never as one-dimensionally bellicose as he is often taken to be, not only by his enemies but by his allies and hagiographers … As Shatz shows in this exemplary work of public intellectualism, in which he does not sugarcoat or simplify, the ingenious doctor and impassioned activist was every bit as much a victim of empire as the patients he worked to heal.”

–Becca Rothfeld (The Washington Post)

2. The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky by Simon Shuster
(William Morrow & Company)

6 Rave • 1 Positive

“Shuster paints with great sympathy a complex picture of Mr. Zelensky and his transformation … Like many writers on a tight deadline, Mr. Shuster crafted a longer book than he otherwise might have. But The Showmansurpasses all similar efforts to date and is set to be the standard by which all other works on Mr. Zelensky and Ukraine’s wartime politics will be judged.”

–Bojan Pancevski (The Wall Street Journal)

3. Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs by Benjamin Herold
(Penguin Press)

3 Rave • 3 Positive
Read an excerpt from Disillusioned here

“…presents a blistering indictment of how American suburbs were built on racism and unsustainable development ‘that functioned like a Ponzi scheme’ … Disillusioned excels in documenting the effects racial exclusion and intimidation had on suburban growth, and Herold offers eye-opening details like the fact that Compton, Calif., was once home to George Herbert Walker Bush and his young children. For readers like me, who previously only thought of Compton as a burning epicenter of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Herold reminds us that places don’t start out in disrepair. They’re shaped by forces that cause decay … As Herold jumps between cities and decades, it can be hard to keep track of the exact rulings in different cases regarding desegregation. But the patterns are clear and continuing, cementing the idea that equal rights and opportunity exist only in theory in this country, not in practice.”

–Vikas Turakhia (The Star Tribune)

Mean girls make everything better, at least when it comes to storytelling. Without them, there’d be no conflict, no plot, no grit. And only in the last two decades or so have female characters been increasingly free to be awful, which is its own kind of liberation.

With the release of the new Mean Girls musical movie, the original Mean Girls celebrating its twentieth anniversary in April, and my new book about Mean Girls’ history and legacy, So Fetch, out now, it’s the perfect time to consider why we love spiky heroines like Cady Heron and genuinely terrifying villains like Regina George.

The following books about “mean girls,” from the Cadys who can’t help being attracted to the apex predator lifestyle, to the Reginas who rule by manipulation and fear, show us the inescapable power dynamics of living in any social system. Everyone can relate: reality stars, powerful professionals, publishing assistants, nineteenth-century socialites, MFA candidates, moms, and anyone trying to survive in Hollywood.

Here are some of the best books about “mean girls,” from classics to modern tales, fiction and non.

*

Mona Awad, Bunny

Samantha Heather Mackey is a loner attending an elite MFA program on scholarship, but finds herself surrounded by wealthy girls with a cult-like devotion to calling each other “Bunny.” But everything changes when she finds herself mysteriously invited to the Bunnies’ infamous “Smut Salon,” and soon she’s leaving behind her friend Ava to join what turns out to be a social circle with a dark vortex.

Mean Girls meets Heathers meets cutthroat academia: What’s not to love?

Andrea Bartz, The Herd

There’s no better setting in which to examine mean-girl dynamics than a chic all-female coworking space (a la the once-powerful Wing). In The Herd, workspace CEO Eleanor Walsh, the quintessential girlboss, vanishes on the night she’s scheduled to give a high-profile press conference. The subsequent investigation exposes secrets and lies among the friends who have helped her to get where she is—and ridden her coattails.

The twists to come reveal the ways young professional women are taught to see each other as rivals, and the ways they struggle desperately to keep up perfect appearances, even, especially, among “friends.”

Anna Bogutskaya, Unlikeable Female Characters

Regina George herself is cited as her own genre of “unlikeable” female character in this nonfiction exploration of, as the subtitle says, “the women pop culture wants you to hate.” Bogutskaya traces the evolution of major characters from good girls to true anti-heroines, and ultimately celebrates the liberating effects of such characters, which give women permission to be their bitchiest, messiest selves.

Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl

This gripping supernatural thriller, since adapted into a Hulu series, tells the story of young publishing assistant Nella, who’s thrilled when the company she works for, Wagner Books, finally hires another young Black woman, Hazel. But their quick friendship begins to falter as Hazel becomes the new office star at the expense of Nella—maybe intentionally, maybe not.

And then some really strange stuff starts going on, indicating that whatever is happening goes far beyond their Nella and Hazel’s Cady/Regina dynamic.

Caroline Kepnes, Providence

Kepnes is known for the engrossing You series (and its maniacally compelling murderer-narrator Joe Goldberg), but here she weaves sci-fi elements into her tale of Jon and Chloe, will-they-won’t-they best friends who seem destined for a rom com ending…until he’s kidnapped by their H.P.-Lovecraft-obsessed substitute teacher. While mourning Jon’s disappearance, Chloe enters classic mean girls territory, hoping to crack the cool-kid crowd now that she’s set adrift.

Things take many weird turns from there, but at its core, Providence s about the eternal human longing for friendship and fitting in, especially during the young-adult years.

Leah Konen, Keep Your Friends Close

Mom friends aren’t immune from mean girls tendencies. In Konen’s forthcoming thriller (out February 20), newly divorced Mary is desperate for connection as she mourns her marriage and fights a custody battle, so she’s thrilled to meet Willa, a charismatic fellow mom at a Brooklyn park. After Mary reveals a secret about her ex to her new friend, Willa disappears from her life…only to reappear months later when Mary relocates to upstate New York.

Stranger still, Willa is now calling herself Annie and has an entirely new family. And then Mary’s ex suddenly turns up dead. Via this twisty murder mystery, Keep Your Friends Close tackles everything from mom cliques to mom-friend ghosting, and one scene even directly evokes the Mean Girls cafeteria.

Jessica Knoll, The Favorite Sister and The Luckiest Girl Alive

Knoll is a surefire bestseller for a reason. Her women are remarkably, unapologetically complicated, and her success only proves how eager female readers are to see themselves, at their barbed best and worst, reflected in their books. In The Favorite Sister, Knoll tackles reality TV tropes and sisterhood at their gnarliest, and in her debut, The Luckiest Girl Alive, she combines mean-girl high school politics with school shootings and the pressure to make good as a wife and mother for an incendiary commentary on modern womanhood.

Knoll knows how to make a mean girl human, and how to make a mean-girl experience meaningful.

Kirthana Ramisetti, Advika and the Hollywood Wives

Ramisetti’s novel is an Alice in Wonderland-like journey into the vertigo-inducing world of high-rolling Hollywood. Aspiring screenwriter Advika Srinivasan is working as a bartender at the Oscars afterparty when she’s suddenly whisked to the upper echelons of showbiz power via a flirtation with legendary director Julian Zelding, which quickly progresses to courtship and marriage.

Just one month after their wedding, though, Julian’s first wife, famous actress Evie Lockhart, dies and stipulates in her will that her ex’s “latest child bride” is to receive $1 million of her fortune and a mysterious film reel, but only if Advika divorces him. What appears at first to be a case of a Regina wreaking havoc from beyond the grave becomes an empowering tale of female solidarity as Advika begins to investigate her new husband’s past through his three ex-wives.

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Want to go more classic to get your mean girls fix? Wharton’s 1905 novel follows Lily Bart, a beautiful socialite struggling to maintain her place in wealthy New York circles of the Gilded Age. She lives with her aunt and longs for lawyer Lawrence Selden, but feels she must pursue someone wealthier to improve her situation; she lost her parents at age twenty, and has gambling debts but no inheritance.

Things heat up when she discovers that Lawrence used to be romantically involved with mean girl Bertha Dorset, and many North Shore High-like machinations follow from there.

______________________________

So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (and Why We’re Still So Obsessed with It) by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong is available via Dey Street Books.

Brandi Wells’ unnamed protagonist sweeps, mops, wipes down, and disinfects an office while its daytime workers sleep. “I know them all,” The Cleaner tells us. “I’ve seen the grossest things about them, their half-eaten and molding snacks, their vaguely sexual doodles.” Wells gives us the depressing realities of The Cleaner’s invisible labor, beginning with shit smears on toilet seats to abandoned sandwiches in desk drawers. In its starred review, Publishers Weekly states, “Rarely has cubicle culture been depicted in such griminess or with such glee.”

Because of the nature of her work and her schedule, The Cleaner is only apparent if she fails to clean something well—and, as fastidious as she is, she never fails. At one point she describes how she takes her time between window scrubbings so the new clarity will be a “shock.” “Once everyone notices how clean it is, they’ll realize I exist,” she tells us. “They’ll be so embarrassed they hadn’t thought of me before.”

Throughout her shift, The Cleaner digs through employees’ desks to figure out who they are (Mr. Buff uses protein powder, Yarn Guy is a knitter), and to determine who deserves help—or punishment. At one point, The Cleaner throws away a self-help book in the desk of The Intern. By its description, the book sounds awful (“a man on the cover, pointing accusingly at the reader”). So, at first, one might think, “Good! Expel whatever misogynist crap that might lie between those covers!” That is, until The Cleaner explains her reasoning: if she leaves the book, more people will start to read and heed self-help texts, take dubious supplements, go full woo-woo, and “That kind of atmosphere isn’t conducive to productivity.” She doesn’t exploit her proximity to these people through their stuff—and emails and search histories—for fun or to stick a thumb in the eye of capitalist hacks.

Instead, The Cleaner’s efforts are to keep the place humming like a well-oiled machine. Her mind, access, and inconspicuousness are her sharpest tools. “It’s not a crime to care about other people,” The Cleaner tells her one coworker, a security guard named L. L., slapdash in her approach to her job, isn’t convinced. “‘It very nearly is,’ she says. ‘The way you do it.’”

What might feel like a monotonous story about a monotonous job—a person comes and cleans, has one coworker, briefly talks to the delivery person—Wells manages to give us a page-turner plot with biting, grander implications. Here we have a person who has arguably gone whole hog on the enterprise of her career and its capitalistic value. When one’s job is their sole purpose—arguably one of America’s loudest directives—the potential threats toward life’s meaning are rampant.

When The Cleaner realizes the CEO of the company is engaging in nefarious acts that risk the health of the company, the stakes are undeniably higher for her than anyone else. While she does much to control her environment, fantasizing about the narratives she shapes through her exploits, the reality is that The Cleaner remains invisible to those she feels she knows best. The dark commentary Wells builds regarding capitalism and work is undeniable.

Wells tells us of their to-read pile, “Because of migraines, I do so much of my reading via audiobooks. I considered sending you a photo of those—most of them are new releases. But I still can’t help myself in a bookstore, love to carefully pick through their catalogue, and also peruse their staff picks. I love seeing what booksellers recommend.”

Lisa Tuttle, A Nest of Nightmares
This is the first short story collection by the fantasy and horror writer Lisa Tuttle. Tuttle famously refused the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1982 because another author had disseminated his story to Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America members and Tuttle found the “campaigning” distasteful.

In an interview in the defunct Fantastic Metropolis, Tuttle was asked of about her genre of choice. She explains, “I’m attracted to the intellectual aspect of SF—I like fiction which deals straight-forwardly with ideas, fiction which is intellectually stimulating and questioning. I like the idea of SF as ‘thought-experiment’—although mostly in a social and personal sense. I like trying to figure out what it would FEEL like to be immortal, for example, or to live in a society with dramatically different values and ideals than our own.”

George Eliot, Romola
The historical novel by Eliot is set in Renaissance Florence, just after Christopher Columbus has left Spain. There is a blind scholar, his titular daughter, an estranged brother who is a Dominican friar, a shipwreck, enslavement of adopted fathers—the works. Eliot apparently spent a year and a half researching for the book. She often went to Florence in order to capture the story. While she received £7,000, the book apparently didn’t sell well. This despite the fact that Eliot herself said of writing Romola that she did “swear by every sentence as having been written with my best blood, such as it is, and with the most ardent care for veracity of which my nature is capable.”

Kristen Ringman, I Stole You: Stories from the Fae
In its review of I Stole You, Publishers Weekly states, “Ringman (Makara) has woven her recollections of personal experiences with ‘fae creatures’ into these 14 lyrical, disturbing first-person tales, all told to victims by vampiric shape-shifting beings drawn from various mythological traditions. Ringman, who is Deaf, postulates telepathic fae-to-human connections as well as signed communication with emotional overtones that no auditory vibrations can match… Ringman successfully brings readers a few steps out of everyday reality.”

Julie Otsuka, The Swimmers
Otsuka’s novel introduces us to a group of people who know one another through their routine of swimming. The NPR review of The Swimmers explains, “When the pool is shut down for safety reasons, the collective daily rhythm of the swimmers’ lives abruptly stops. One swimmer is particularly affected by this rupture in the pattern of the everyday: her name is Alice, ‘a retired lab technician now in the early stages of dementia.’ We’re told that, ‘even though [Alice] may not remember the combination to her locker or where she put her towel, the moment she slips into the water she knows what to do.’ Untethered from the practice of those repetitive daily laps, Alice’s mind floats free. The Swimmers is a slim brilliant novel about the value and beauty of mundane routines that shape our days and identities; or, maybe it’s a novel about the cracks that, inevitably, will one day appear to undermine our own bodies and minds.”

Maru Ayase (trans. Haydn Trowell), The Forest Brims Over
The first of Ayase’s works to be translated into English, The Forest Brims Over fights the usual gender tropes in myth and storytelling when Nowatari Rui turns herself into a forest to avoid her husband using her as inspiration for his novels. As the jacket copy states, “With her privacy and identity continually stripped away, [Rui] has come to be seen by society first and foremost as the inspiration for her husband’s art. When a decade’s worth of frustrations reaches its boiling point, Rui consumes a bowl of seeds, and buds and roots begin to sprout all over her body. Instead of taking her to a hospital, her husband keeps her in an aquaterrarium, set to compose a new novel based on this unsettling experience. But Rui breaks away from her husband by growing into a forest—and in time, she takes over the entire city.”

Noor Hindi, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow.
Hindi’s poem “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,” made rounds when it was first published in Poetry in late 2020 and is understandably being posted on social media again and again since Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. “I want to be like those poets who care about the moon,” she writes. “Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.” The intensity of this poem seems to be the general tone of the forceful collection. Viet Thanh Nguyen says of Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow., “Noor Hindi wields her poetry with passion and righteous anger in this powerful, striking collection that touches the heart and the head, the body and the mind.”

Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy
Becky Spratford in her starred review of Khaw’s book in Library Journal, states, “What if the Little Mermaid laid eggs and her hatched children’s hunger laid waste to her prince’s land? Khaw’s (Breakable Things) latest novella tackles this question with a brutally visceral but seductive opening sequence.” Spratford’s verdict? “With this brilliantly constructed tale that consciously takes on a well-known story and violently breaks it open to reveal a heartfelt core, Khaw cements their status as a must-read author. For fans of sinister, thought-provoking, horrific retellings of Western classics by authors of marginalized identity like Helen Oyeyemi and Ahmed Saadawi.”

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee
Cha was an artist and author whose book, Dictee, while receiving only tepid responses upon its publication in 1982, resurfaced in the 1990s and had continues to have an enormous impact on writers, readers everywhere. In her book Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong writes extensively about Dictee. She states, “Although it’s classified as an autobiography, Dictee is more a bricolage of memoir, poetry, essay, diagrams, and photography.”

In 2022, the New York Times published an obituary for Cha as part of its “Overlooked No More” series. In it, Dan Salzstein writes of Dictee, “Through chapters named after the Greek muses, the book jumps from one protagonist to another: Cha herself; Joan of Arc; the early 20th-century Korean freedom fighter Yu Gwan-sun, who, at 17, was tortured and killed; and, perhaps most poignantly, Cha’s mother, who hovers over the book like a protective spirit. Through her, Cha explores a traumatic era of Korea’s history, including a decades-long Japanese occupation, a war that divided the country, a series of dictators and an ensuing diaspora, of which the Cha family was a part.”

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Born in 1960, Jeanette Winterson was adopted by a couple in England. By her own description, her parents were working class, with a father who was a factory worker and her mother a home maker. “There were only six books in the house, including the Bible and Cruden’s Complete Concordance to the Old and New Testaments,” Winterson’s site states. “Strangely, one of the other books was Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and it was this that started her life quest of reading and writing.”

Winterson’s parents were raising her to be a Pentecostal missionary, and, by the age of six, she was writing sermons and preaching. Ten years later, Winterson came out as gay and left home. She worked at a “lunatic asylum” to make ends meet, before going to Oxford and studying English Literature. By 23, she had written Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical novel about her young life.

Cleo Qian, LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO
Qian’s debut short story collection has received a heap of praise, including being longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence. In an interview with A. Cerisse Cohen in BOMB, Qian explains, “I wrote these stories from 2016 to 2022. In my own life, I was experimenting and testing out new identities all the time. I thought a lot about subject matter. There are many people who find literary fiction insular and narrow. I think part of the writer’s duty, in addition to being good at your craft, is to live and think broadly. Otherwise, who are you writing for?… My stories are often about characters who feel disembodied, which I also feel. I didn’t realize that until I started doing yoga and the other physical activities I mentioned. We’re glued to our phones. I write and read a lot, which is also all in my head. I have friends who are cerebral and intellectual and so fun to talk to, but we’re not very connected to our bodies. That’s unnatural. We should all be more in touch with our bodies.”

Nalo Hopkinson, The Salt Roads
Gregory E. Rutledge, in his review of Hopkinson’s book, writes, “The Salt Roads features three mortal protagonists—Mer the Ashanti-born, Santa Dominque-enslaved healer, Jeanne Duval, the mulatta lover of Charles Baudelaire, and Thais, a sex slave of ancient Alexandria, Egypt—who are bound by the bitterness of life and the salutary potential of the meandering, salty flows of the earth, which a fourth immortal protagonists represents.

Just as former Black fantasy author Charles R. Saunders recognized in Butler a true raconteur in 1984 (Bell 91), the label easily applies to Hopkinson, who manages some powerful storytelling here. What author wouldn’t when she expertly excavates the ancient Roman empire located in Alexandria, Egypt, and the Holy Land of Jerusalem, walks readers through Napoleon’s empire in France and the West Indian French colonies, and includes a fist fight, of sorts, between two West African deities of fire and water?”

James Tiptree, Jr., Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
For the uninitiated, James Tiptree, Jr. was in fact Alice Bradley Sheldon, a woman who invented the name based on a marmalade brand after years of unsuccessful attempts at publishing with versions of her own name. “A male name seemed like good camouflage,” she said. “I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.” This is because Sheldon had a wild life—she eloped, had to drop out of unmarried-women-only Sarah Lawrence College, took classes at Berkeley and made art, divorced, joined US Air Force and was promoted to major, met second husband in Paris, joined the CIA, finished college, got a doctorate. Whew! Her pseudonym successfully kept her anonymous for about a decade.

John Self writes in The Guardian, “Tiptree’s status as one of [science fiction’s] leading practitioners is justified, as is the critical cliche that each story contains enough to fill a novel. That’s not unqualified praise: Tiptree’s techniques of defamiliarization through jargon… and dropping us in medias res means the reader has to remake the world with every new story. But in the darkness of space no one can see you scratch your head and given that most of the stories require two readings to be properly absorbed and appreciated—and they merit that attention.”

Our basket of brilliant reviews this week includes Sarah Cypher on Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, Menachem Kaiser on József Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium, Becca Rothfeld on Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic, and Daniel Felsenthal on Robert Glück’s About Ed.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

*

“Shame-ridden Shams is the sun around which Martyr! moves. The writing evokes shades of Denis Johnson—in the gutted, elegiac quality of Train Dreams but also flashes of the hapless antihero of ‘Emergency.’ It is sumptuous with metaphors, at their best when animating Cyrus’s childhood … With a kaleidoscope of perspectives that illuminate almost 40 years of history, the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq War and dreamlike scenes outside of time, the novel is obsessed with how ‘meaningless’ individual suffering can become legible ‘at the level of empire,’ asking what turns a death into a martyrdom. With its scope, intense interest in the limits of language and self-aware narrative strategy, Martyr! has both focus and heft. Yet it is also unpretentiously veined with the language of sacred and poetic texts, and is studded with new poetry from Akbar writing as Cyrus …

In the hands of a lesser writer with an agenda, this material could be esoteric and tedious, but Akbar’s narrative maintains a glorious sense of whimsy: In one chapter, the ghost of Cyrus’s mother speaks with Lisa Simpson; later, a Trumpian buffoon attempts to complete a gory transaction for the Mona Lisa in a mall … Sensual, oneiric and wonderfully strange, Akbar intuits the mind’s talent for distilling meaning from the surreal. His fiction taps his expertise in conjuring an experiential purity—through metaphor and with humor that lands. He invites the reader to embrace the kind of queer sense-making that finds no answers yet rests, as Cyrus says, with, ‘All I know is I’m fascinated.’”

–Sarah Cypher on Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! (The Washington Post)

“The details are so precise that any critical distance collapses—nothing’s expected, nothing’s dulled by cliché. It is as immediate a confrontation of the horrors of the camps as I’ve ever encountered. It’s also a subtle if startling meditation on what it is to attempt to confront those horrors with words. What Debreczeni experiences is so cartoonishly cruel that it defies not description but moral comprehension. ‘Horror is always kitsch,’ he writes after an ad hoc execution, ‘even when it’s real’ …

The book’s final third—in which Debreczeni has been assigned to the “cold crematorium,” a place where inmates too sick to work are left to die—is especially staggering…Debreczeni has preserved a panoptic depiction of hell, at once personal, communal and atmospheric. Occasionally shifting tenses or even assuming omniscience, he floats among the nearly dead and the newly dead, crafting a kind of in-progress collective obituary, sketching the human beings they once were, the human lives they once had, as their corpses are carried out and flung into a lime pit … The finest examples of Holocaust literature—and Cold Crematorium is so fine it transcends its category—aren’t merely bulwarks against obscurity; they do more than allow us to never forget. They offer a glimpse, one that is unyielding and unsoftened by sentimentality, one that is brutally, unbearably close.”

–Menachem Kaiser on József Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium: Reporting From the Land of Auschwitz (The New York Times Book Review)

“A biography of the psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary Frantz Fanon is, inevitably, a biography of the world he fought to change. Fanon would no doubt have approved: As a pioneer of ‘social therapy,’ an approach that classified personal pathologies as political symptoms, he understood better than anyone that individuals are unintelligible in isolation. The maladies he treated as the director of a mental hospital in colonial Algeria, where he worked on the eve of the country’s fight for independence in the 1950s, were to him inextricable from the deadliest illness of all: the epidemic of French imperialism.

A biography of Fanon is also of necessity a biography of his legend, which sometimes deviates considerably from his person. His support for the Algerian struggle was unwavering, and he is often remembered as a militant who once lauded anti-colonial violence as ‘cleansing force.’ But as the critic and essayist Adam Shatz demonstrates in his nimble and engrossing new book, The Rebel’s Clinic, Fanon was never as one-dimensionally bellicose as he is often taken to be, not only by his enemies but by his allies and hagiographers … As Shatz shows in this exemplary work of public intellectualism, in which he does not sugarcoat or simplify, the ingenious doctor and impassioned activist was every bit as much a victim of empire as the patients he worked to heal.”

–Becca Rothfeld on Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (The Washington Post)

“The United States has a long and troubled history of manipulating psychology to control Black Americans, quell resistance, rationalize unpaid labor and justify cruelty. At the depths of chattel slavery, white physicians argued that Black people were immune to mental illness, kept emotionally healthy by the kindness of their enslavers and the fresh air and exercise provided by working in the fields. As growing numbers of enslaved people attempted to escape, this itself was classified as a mental illness, ‘drapetomania.’ Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a Southern ‘expert’ in Negro medicine, prescribed one of the cures as ‘whipping the devil out of them.’ In the decades following the prohibition of slavery, the United States found another way to use psychology to control Black Americans—and squeeze out more free labor. As detailed in the journalist Antonia Hylton’s fascinating Madness, the ‘feeble-minded’ Blacks were rounded up and placed in asylums where they were put to work as indentured servants …

Madness, though ostensibly the story of Crownsville, is really about the continued lack of understanding, treatment and care of the mental health of a people, Black people, who need it most. Near the end of her book, Hylton invokes the 2023 story of Jordan Neely. In visible distress and screaming that he was hungry, he was thrown to the floor of the New York subway by a former Marine who locked him in a chokehold and killed him. ‘I thought of Maynard when The New York Post labeled Jordan Neely “unhinged” and a “vagrant” and wrote about him as though he had been the villain in the story of his own public killing,’ Hylton notes. Though both Foster and Neely were in need of treatment, care, support and kindness, she adds, they ‘were met with almost anything but.’”

–Linda Villarosa on Antonia Hylton’s Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum (The New York Times Book Review)

“Glück is a self-professed slow writer, but he was also delayed by the burden of his book’s content—the subject was his first real boyfriend, and he had to sift through the intricacies of mourning and mortality…Time enabled him to create something uncommon and powerful. About Ed is a literary monument that harnesses memoir’s emotional honesty while indulging fiction’s stylistic latitude … The book’s subject is not only Ed but also his generation of gay men, many of whom lost their lives to AIDS. In Glück’s hands, memorializing becomes a defiant celebration of sex. Few writers have approached this task with his shameless feeling—Glück is one of the best around at portraying the mysteries of the flesh, and in About Ed, as in his previous novels, his amatory writing is magnificently precise …

The New Narrative encourages active self-questioning on the page, and Glück operates beautifully in this tradition, reconsidering and amending his recollections from the vantage of age. About Ed revisits the past through moments that he can neither forget nor firmly grasp … The parts of Ed that are barred to Bob are the core of the book’s sadness and mystery. Glück often slips into poetic spacing when integrating Ed’s prose, reminding us of the contrivance of appropriation. We’re always aware of the author’s hand, assembling and editing Ed’s words, and thus of the hard limits of our ability to inhabit and connect with Ed directly. The book makes us question whether human beings in general resist the complete soul-merging that Bob seeks through romantic sex and appropriative writing.”

–Daniel Felsenthal on Robert Glück’s About Ed (The New Yorker)

There are hundreds of thousands of kids’ books out there. Some are classics that wind up in everyone’s homes, no matter what. Others are random—given as gifts, found on the playground, purchased in bulk from the resale shop. But which books are worth your child’s time—and (arguably) more importantly, your time?

Overwhelmed by the number of both brilliant and mediocre books I have read since becoming a parent, I asked other Lit Hub staff members with toddlers to rank a few of their most memorable reading experiences on two metrics: their child’s enthusiasm for it and their own enthusiasm for it—or let’s be real and say, their tolerance for reading it over and over and over again. The result is the graph below.

Obviously, these rankings are highly subjective, and reliant on a number of shifting factors, including exact age and mood of toddler, interests of parent, and the number of times the book in question has been read in any given week/day/hour. This is also not an exhaustive list of all the books we read to our children, or that they like, or that we like, etc. To be quite honest, the graph could have been 20 times as large, but bedtime is coming.

Click on the graph to enlarge it; you will also find a list of the books on the graph, organized by descending total score, along with comments from various Lit Hub staff members, given on the condition of anonymity (to protect the feelings of gift-givers and other interested parties).

And of course, if you are someone who loves books and also a toddler-aged child or three, feel free to rank some books of your own in the comments.

The Results:

Abby Hanlon, Dory Fantasmagory  – 25 tolerability x 25 toddler enthusiasm = 50 points

All the Dory Fantasmagory books are beloved by parents and child alike in our house. Bonus points for the audiobooks being free on Spotify now.

Jon Klassen, The Skull  – 25 x 25 = 50

We all love it.

Tomie dePaola, Strega Nona – 24 x 24 = 48

Everyone can recite it by memory at this point, which helps with eye strain.

Don Freeman, Corduroy – 21 x 22 = 43

The Lisa obsession is real.

Julia Donaldson, The Gruffalo – 20 x 22 = 42

Julia Donaldson in general is great; The Gruffalo is the best and the kids love it.

Jon Klassen, I Want My Hat Back – 24 x 17 = 41

Murder bear.

Karma Wilson, Jane Chapman, Bear Snores On  – 20 x 20 = 40

A classic.

Liz Garton Scanlon, Marla Frazee, All the World – 23 x 17 = 40

Makes Mom all teary.

Derick Wilder, K-Fai Steele, Does a Bulldozer Have a Butt? – 21 x 15 = 36

Who is more immature, me or my child?

Crockett Johnson, Harold and the Purple Crayon – 17 x 17 = 34

Always a solid pick.

Lorinda Bryan Cauley, Clap Your Hands – 14 x 20 = 34

There’s something slightly deranged about this book, but I don’t hate it.

Amy June Bates and Juniper Bates, The Big Umbrella – 15 x 15 = 30

This book is nice and we all like it.

Roger Priddy, First 100 Words – 4 x 22 = 26

For…some reason…my child thinks this is called “Boring Book.” She loves Boring Book.

Dr. Seuss, Horton Hatches the Egg – 20 x 6 = 26

Great but the kids hated it.

Laura Joffe, Numeroff, Felicia Bond, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie – 8 x 18 = 26

I hated it.

Judith Viorst, Ray Cruz, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day – 22 x 3 = 25

Couldn’t get my kids to care about it, unfortunately.

Cori Doerrfeld, The Rabbit Listened – 22 x 3 = 25

A beautiful book. Kids hated it but it’ll make you cry.

Tarō Gomi, Everyone Poops – 18 x 6 = 24

Will it really help with potty training? Who knows, but I laugh at the camel poop every time.

Michael Rosen, Helen Oxenbury, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt – 12 x 12 = 24

It’s fine.

Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are – 21 x 2 = 23

I love Sendak, but my 2-year-old won’t tolerate this for more than a few pages. Maybe she’ll grow into it.

Margaret and H.A. Rey, Curious George Goes to the Hospital – 3 x 20 = 23

Our lack of enthusiasm due to it not having been updated since the 50s, so all the nurses are women and all the doctors are men.

Rod Campbell, Dear Zoo – 5 x 18 = 23

Kids love it, but it makes no sense. That’s not how zoos work.

Anna Dewdney, Llama Llama Red Pajama – 15 x 5 = 20

Another one we wanted her to like more than she did. There’s still time!

Mo Willems, the Elephant and Piggie books – 2 x 17 = 19

Two unpleasantly-drawn creatures on a white page, bellowing at each other about nothing.

Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree – 2 x 15 = 17

Maybe it was meant as an allegory for humankind’s relationship with the planet, but it reads queasily like the American expectation for parenthood, and I am not a fan. (Luckily, someone has fixed it.)

Bill Martin Jr., John Archambault, Lois Ehlert, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom – 5 x 10 = 15

Parenthood is trying enough, and now you want me to convincingly declare “skit skat skoodle doot, flip flop flee”?

Marcus Pfister, The Rainbow Fish – 4 x 10 = 14

Teaching children that the way to make friends is to give away all the things about you that are unique.

Deborah Diesen, Dan Hanna, The Pout-Pout Fish – 5 x 6 = 11

Teaching children that all their problems/shitty personalities will be solved if they can only attract sexual attention from a stranger.

Jimmy Fallon, Everything is Mama – -2 x 10 = 8

Nakedly capitalist.

As the end of January creeps nearer and—depending where you are—the weeks of wintry weather may be keeping you in, you may be finding yourself in search of something bright, warm, and charming to peer at. A well-lit fireplace, perhaps, or the ineffable swirls of steam from a cup as hot water alchemizes into air. No matter your preferences, you’ll find it better with a book by your side, and what better than something brand-new, its contours unknown, its memories with you yet to be made. Below, you’ll find a whopping twenty-six new ones out today to consider.

There’s a poignant novel from acclaimed poet Kaveh Akbar, Calvino-esque literary fables from C.D. Rose, an expansive Jamaican-Canadian queer debut novel from Christina Cooke; a collection of poems by Keith Taylor that breathe life into the everyday; powerful reflections on the Holocaust, including a never-before-published firsthand account from survivor József Debreczeni and a critique of historical shortsightedness about the Holocaust’s atrocities in a provocative new book by Dan Stone; a new biography of the revolutionary writer Frantz Fanon; a blunt revelation of racism in the medical field; Crystal Hefner’s memoir of escaping from the shadow of Playboy; and much, much more.

No matter what you’re in the mood for, I hope you’ll find somewhere warm and cozy to curl up with one of these. It’ll be worth it.

*

Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
(Knopf)

“Kaveh Akbar is a radiant soul, a poet so agile and largehearted it comes as no surprise that his first leap into fiction is elegant, dizzying, playful. Martyr! is the best novel you’ll ever read about the joy of language, addiction, displacement, martyrdom, belonging, homesickness for people longed for but forever unknown, the way art as eruption of life gazes back into death, and the ecstasy that sometimes arrives—like grace—when we find ourselves teetering on the knife-edge of despair.”
–Lauren Groff

Yvette Christiansë, Unconfessed
(Other Press)

“Christiansë’s novel isn’t just a stunningly intimate, heart-wrenching history of slave life in Africa. Her protagonist’s furious yearning for freedom (‘Wishes are sometimes just stories that have nowhere to go’) becomes a haunting meditation on love, loss and the stories we choose to tell in order to survive. Gorgeous and tragic, Unconfessed ultimately reveals a confession almost too terrible to bear and impossible to forget.”
–People

C.D. Rose, Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea
(Melville House)

“A book [of literary fables] that belongs on the same shelf as Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and several works by Zoran Zivkovic, Stanislaw Lem and David Markson.”
–The Washington Post

Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon
(FSG)

“[A] perceptive biography….Elucidating the ideas and figures that animated Fanon’s thinking…the nuanced narrative skillfully illuminates how the disparate threads of Fanon’s life fit together….Shatz also provides discerning commentary on Fanon’s two masterworks….A striking appraisal of a towering thinker.”
–Publishers Weekly

Dan Stone, The Holocaust: An Unfinished Story
(Mariner)

“A holocaust history for our times, passionate as well as scholarly, and written with a sharp eye to the growing threat of the radical right in the present. Stone is not afraid to question the verities that have become attached to this most catastrophic epoch of modern history, and he challenges readers to confront its scope and enormity anew.”
–Jane Caplan

József Debreczeni, Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz (trans. Paul Olchváry)
(St. Martin’s Press)

“Devastating in the simplicity of its language, Debreczeni’s book is of immense eyewitness historical value and one of the greatest pieces of lost Holocaust literature from behind the newly descending Iron Curtain.”
–Stephen L. Ossad

Keith Taylor, All the Time You Want: Selected Poems 1977 – 2017
(Dzanc Books)

“Publication of Keith Taylor’s All the Time You Want is an important event. Everyone who has been listening for years to this essential poetic voice has reason to rejoice anew. Taylor’s arguments in favor of the ordinary communal life…introduce us to a deep and quiet understanding of how life works….And in his poems about the natural world, he has created a space one enters gladl….Reading this book is like opening a door outward into a realm whose refreshment we find we are badly in need of.”
–Richard Tillinghast

Alexander Sammartino, Last Acts
(Scribner)

“What a taut, energetic, tender, and wholly original debut novel Alexander Sammartino has written. He knows something deep about the dark heart of America that somehow doesn’t stop him from writing about it with genuine, goofy love. Somewhere, Denis Johnson and Saul Bellow are smiling because their lineage—that of honest, highwire, virtuosic writing that summons up the world with all its charms and hazards, has found a worthy heir.”
–George Saunders

Christina Cooke, Broughtupsy
(Catapult)

“After her younger brother dies of sickle cell anemia, Akúa returns home to her native Jamaica with his ashes in hopes of reconnecting with their estranged older sister, discovering both love and violence along the way. Christina Cooke’s Broughtupsy is a searing, touching, and often funny meditation on family fault lines drawn by migration, homophobia, cultural difference, and sibling order, from a talented new writer among us.”
–Emily Raboteau

Laurie Frankel, Family Family
(Holt)

“Frankel’s back! Without giving away too much of her dizzying plot, which is supercharged with cliffhanger chapter endings and parallel reveals, the novel is dedicated to the premise that not every adoption story is one of trauma—along the way we will enjoy many fine young characters (Kevin Wilson fans who haven’t yet tried Frankel should) and classic Frankelisms….Full of warmth, humor, and sound advice.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Lee Gutkind, The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne’er-Do-Wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction
(Yale University Press)

“he Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting offers an insightful overview of the recent history of creative nonfiction and the struggles that early practitioners faced in legitimizing the genre. This is a must-read for all writers.”
–Jennifer Anderson

Jacqueline Alnes, The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour
(Melville House)

“Like an episode of Maintenance Phase meets the essay collection The Empathy Exams, The Fruit Cure brings both rigorous reporting and fearless self-examination to bear on questions far beyond health, athletics, wellness, and food. What Alnes is interested in here is nothing less than the mysterious relationship between our thinking minds and our physical selves and the essential joyful horror that is having a human body.”
–Emma Copley Eisenberg

Kate Kennedy, One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls, and Fitting In
(St. Martin’s Press)

“A perceptive personal meditation on the late 1990s and early 2000s pop culture that shaped her childhood….Kennedy provides memoir by way of cultural commentary, cleverly using her hybrid approach to highlight the ways in which trends and media popular during one’s formative years profoundly influence one’s identity. Told with wit and candor, this will strike a chord with Gen Yers.”
–Publishers Weekly

Balsam Karam, The Singularity
(Feminist Press)

“The Singularity by Balsam Karam is a novel about loss and longing–a mother who misses her child, children who miss their mother, and all of those who miss their country as they try to feel the new earth in their new land. A deeply moving work of fiction from a true voice of Scandinavia.”
–Shahrnush Parsipur,

Daisy Goodwin, Diva
(St. Martin’s Press)

“Daisy Goodwin’s richly imagined world makes Diva an irresistible page-turner. Blending high drama with an artist’s eye for detail, Goodwin breathes life into [Maria Callas,] one of the greatest and most tragic stars of the twentieth century. Whether you’re an opera aficionado or simply love an epic tale of love and ambition, Diva is a pure delight.”
–Amanda Foreman

Crystal Hefner, Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself
(Grand Central Publishing)

“[Hefner’s] frank memoir scratches some of the glitter off Playboy’s notorious legacy of sexual freedom, luxury, and excess. An illuminating tell-all.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Zachary Pace, I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays about the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am
(Two Dollar Radio)

“Zachary Pace’s I Sing to Use the Waiting is an exhilarating mix, part memoir, part examination of queer identity, part investigation into corporate heteronormativity and the internalized homophobia it produces in children and others who are still growing into who they are–and so much more, all of it approached via the lenses of the singers (and their lives) whom Pace encountered at pivotal moments in their own growing up….[A] beautifully provocative, smart, and tender book indeed.”
–Carl Phillips

Brian Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters
(Scribner)

“Fluke is the intellectual equivalent of a slap across the face….Klaas’s beautifully written application of chaos theory to human experience won’t just shift your paradigm, it’ll detonate it.”
–Jonathan Gottschall

Benjamin Herold, Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs
(Penguin Press)

“Disillusioned breaks open the quiet racial injustice eating away at the heart of American suburbs. Shattering the myth of upward class mobility through meritocracy, Disillusioned shows us how white supremacy disenfranchises POCs even as they fulfill the requirements of the American suburban middle class dream—and how even…the intended beneficiaries of that dream…are starting to wonder if it’s a dream they can still afford to believe in. A necessary read for everyone in an American suburb today.”
–Michael Eric Dyson

Brian Allen Carter, Bad Foundations
(Clash Books)

“Bad Foundations by Brian Allen Carr is a raw and ferocious journey into the heart of the working class. It bleeds desperation and devours hope. Brian Carr is a blue-collar Raymond Carver, a Midwest Philip Roth who opens the pulsating wound that is the myth of the American Dream.”
–S. A. Cosby

Tanja Maljartschuk, Forgottenness (trans. Zenia Tompkins)
(Liveright)

“It’s no coincidence that time and memory are the big topic today, feeding off the anxieties of the world. [The Ukrainian writer] Tanja Maljartschuk’s novel is about the giant blue whale of time swallowing everything living on its way. What she is interested in is not even disappearance but tracelessness. Both personal and political, this book rages against time and oblivion as all true literature does.”
–Georgi Gospodinov

Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum
(Legacy Lit)

“Antonia Hylton expertly weaves together a moving personal narrative, in-depth reporting, and illuminating archival research to produce a book that left me breathless. Madness is a haunting and revelatory examination of the way that America’s history of racism is deeply entangled in our mental health system. A profoundly important book that helps us make sense of an underexamined aspect of our country’s history.”
–Clint Smith

Uché Blackstock, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine
(Viking)

“Uché Blackstock has made something abundantly clear: If you want to understand a society, look at its hospitals. Dr. Blackstock, one of the most insightful and impactful public voices in medicine, shares her remarkable personal story and her profound insight regarding race, gender, and health inequality….However, this book is so much more than a compelling memoir….Armed with concrete steps for addressing inequality, readers will be inspired to become better stewards of our communities and society.”
–Imani Perry

Jenn M. Jackson, Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism
(Random House)

“In their enlightening new book, Black Women Taught Us, Jenn M. Jackson celebrates the iconic Black feminists who built a movement, and also shares their own personal story of growing and learning with these brilliant canonical thinkers. It is intimate and essential reading, a beautiful bridge connecting ancestral and contemporary Black women activists.”
–Deesha Philyaw

David Reynolds, Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him
(Basic Books)

“Who inspired Churchill as he rose to the pinnacle of power? And how did he himself seek to mold how history would view him? No one is better placed to address these deceptively simple questions than David Reynolds, and he succeeds splendidly in this magnificent book. A fresh and captivating study of the nature and crux of political leadership.”
–Fredrik Logevall

Simon Shuster, The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky
(William Morrow)

“Shuster’s book is a narrative tour de force that takes us deep behind the scenes of the Ukrainian president’s bunker during the tensest days of Russia’s war against Ukraine. An astonishingly intimate portrayal of the former comedian turned wartime leader battling to save his nation–and Europe–that nevertheless keeps a doggedly honest and critical balance. This is the Zelensky book we’ve been waiting for.”
–Catherine Belton

Like a lot of passionate readers, I fell in love with children’s books as soon as I was old enough to sound out words on a page. And, like some readers—maybe like you?—I never fell out of love. If we ever happen to bump into each other at the library, please pass me a stunningly illustrated picture book, a laugh-out-loud chapter book romp, or a young adult novel so emotionally resonant that I can’t help remembering exactly what it feels like to be a teenager; I’ll happily take them all.

I’ll be even happier, actually, to recommend a few of my favorite new children’s books to you. Hundreds of honestly excellent titles, from the simplest board books to the most lyrical and complex novels, are published for young readers every year, and it can be hard for those of us looking for a great new read for our kids, our students, or ourselves to know where to begin. (Even I, a professional children’s book author and amateur mom, get easily overwhelmed at the bookstore.)

But I hope you’ll use this column as a starting point in your search. Every month, I’ll let you know about some of the new releases that have caught my eye: the ones I can’t wait to share with my kids, the ones I admire for their artistry, and the ones I can already tell I won’t be able to put down.

Here are ten books publishing this January (except for You’re Breaking My Heart, out February 6) that I’m looking forward to enjoying throughout the new year:

*

Jordan Scott, Angela’s Glacier (illustrated by Diana Sudyka)
(recommended for ages 4-8)

This picture book—about a girl who grows up in Iceland near the glacier Snæfellsjökull—is a small marvel. Its text, by Jordan Scott, moves with the rhythms of poetry; it’s the sort of thoughtful language that quickly engages young audiences without growing stale for grown-ups after multiple readalouds. Its art, by Diana Sudyka, is similarly appealing for all ages, with breathtaking watercolor-style spreads full of playful details. And the book’s description of a child’s deep connection with the natural world will resonate even with those who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting a glacier in person. Adults who don’t speak Icelandic will be relieved to note the phonetic guide to pronouncing Snæfellsjökull at the beginning of the book; after a few recitations, both readers and listeners will be pros.

Brittany J. Thurman, Forever and Always (illustrated by Shamar Knight-Justice)
(recommended for ages 4-8)

Olivia loves her dad, and when he goes off to work as an EMT each day, she can’t help but worry about him. She sometimes sees men on the news, Black men like her dad, who don’t come home safe to their families at the end of the day, and she searches for ways to calm her fears: cooking breakfast, making art with her mom, counting the cars that pass by, and eventually braiding a bracelet for her father “to protect you always.”

Brittany J. Thurman’s gentle, expertly crafted text is perfect for sharing with even the tiniest readers, providing an opening for more complex conversations with kids who struggle with worries like Olivia’s while also offering understanding to any child who misses their parent. Shamar Knight-Justice’s illustrations of family life feel as warm and comforting as a bear hug.

Laura Gehl, Who Laid These Eggs? (illustrated by Loris Lora)
(recommended for ages 2-4)

If a young child in your life is passionate about books full of flaps to flip, you’ll need a copy or three of this vibrantly illustrated board book. The clutch of eggs on each spread can be raised to reveal the kind of animal that laid it—an ostrich, a salmon, an alligator.

But the real hidden gems are the science facts included on the inside of each flap: interesting enough to capture adult readers’ attention, concise enough to read aloud quickly before your little one slams the flap shut, and occasionally weird enough to share with friends during circle time at preschool (did you know that the pigments that color salmon eggs are the same as the ones found in carrots?).

Emma Bland Smith, The Fabulous Fannie Farmer: Kitchen Scientist and America’s Cook (illustrated by Susan Reagan)
(recommended for ages 7-10)

This picture book biography of 19th-century culinary expert Fannie Farmer should be a hit with kids who love to mess around in the kitchen. The accessible, cheerfully feminist text celebrates Farmer’s application of scientific principles to the process of preparing a meal, and the extensive endmatter is a great launchpad for any reader who wants to do more rigorous research of their own.

Recipes for two notoriously tricky cooking projects, popovers and angel food cake, are included in the text; I’m hoping they’ll give me some of Farmer’s confidence in the kitchen when my family tests them out.

Lisa Yee, The Misfits: A Royal Conundrum (illustrated by Dan Santat)
(recommended for ages 8-12)

I’ve been a devoted fan of Lisa Yee’s writing ever since I picked up her hilarious and heartwarming debut novel, Millicent Min, Girl Genius, twenty years ago. For Yee’s latest project, the first in a series, she’s teamed up with illustrator (and recent National Book Award winner) Dan Santat to create an art-filled adventure about a strange, secretive boarding school that turns out to be a training ground for a group of crime-fighting kids called the Misfits.

New arrival Olive and her classmates have to stop a villain and save the school, all while providing plenty of chuckles and thrills for middle-grade readers.

Zetta Elliott, The War of the Witches
(recommended for ages 8-12)

If my daughter were writing this list, The War of the Witches would make an appearance for sure; it’s one of her most anticipated reads of the year. It’s the fifth book in the Dragons in a Bag contemporary fantasy series—but it’s also the final book in the series, which means you can start reading Dragons in a Bag right now and zip through all five installments without having to wait a year between adventures.

Jaxon, who was first entrusted with delivering a brood of baby dragons from Brooklyn to the magical realm back in book one, goes on increasingly exciting and dangerous magical missions as the series continues, and in The War of the Witches, he’s not just saving dragons. He’s got to save the entire human realm from a creature called the Scourge that wants to drain the world’s magic.

Linda Crotta Brennan, The Selkie’s Daughter
(recommended for ages 8-12)

There are countless tales of selkies, the seal folk of Celtic legend, but this debut middle grade novel from author Linda Crotta Brennan feels fresh and surprising. Brigit is half-selkie, half-human, and completely out of place growing up in her small village on the coast of Nova Scotia. When someone in the village begins killing young seals, the selkie king takes his revenge, and Brigit sets out to try to save her family and her community.

Brigit’s narration is compelling, and the story has a sense of place so strong that when you turn the pages, you can practically feel the sea salt under your fingers.

Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, You’re Breaking My Heart
(recommended for ages 12 and up)

Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich has written a number of excellent books for younger readers, and I’m looking forward to her new genre-busting YA novel that combines emotionally resonant writing with elements of speculative fiction to explore how we come to terms with grief. Harriet Adu is reeling from sadness and guilt after her older brother’s death in a school shooting and her own subsequent move to a new high school in Harlem.

Her world is recognizable and utterly believable, but there’s a hint of the strange and fantastic shimmering at its edges that will pull readers onward as they try to figure out what’s really happening to Harriet, and whether reality is something that can—or should—be changed.

Amber McBride (editor), Taylor Byas (editor), Erica Martin (editor), Poemhood: Our Black Revival
(recommended for ages 13 and up)

A poetry anthology for teens will always pique my interest, and this one, which explores and celebrates Black culture and folklore, looks particularly thoughtful and well curated. The selections include work by classic and contemporary Black poets, which means that famous forebears like Gwendolyn Brooks and Audre Lorde share space on the page with much-loved writers working today like Ibi Zoboi and Kwame Alexander.

The editors, accomplished poets themselves, provide context at the end of each poem to guide readers of all ages who may be unfamiliar with historical references or new to the experience of reading poetry.

Sally Nicholls, Yours from the Tower
(recommended for ages 14 and up)

Historical fiction told through correspondence between teenage girls? I’m on board faster than you can say I Capture the Castle, A Brief History of Montmaray, or Sorcery and Cecelia. A UK import making its stateside debut this month, Yours from the Tower is set in late-Victorian England and Scotland, where good friends Sophia, Polly, and Tirzah have each set out on new adventures after leaving boarding school.

Sophia is tasked with finding a husband during the London Season, Polly works at an orphanage in Liverpool, and Tirzah is stuck in Perthshire with her grandmother, relying on letters from the others for entertainment. The girls’ voices sparkle with personality and humor, making this exactly the sort of novel I’d love to sink into for a few chilly winter hours.

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland, Susan Muaddi Darraj’s Behind You Is the Sea, and Rebecca Boyle’s Our Moon all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

*

Fiction

1. Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

9 Rave

“…astonishing … Never mind the fault in our stars…this is a book that exults in them … An ineffable sadness and sense of resignation hang over Beautyland, which refuses to give in to sentimentality or serendipity or the idea of everything working out for a reason. It’s the second novel I’ve reviewed in six months that invokes Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the first being, more obsessively, Ann Patchett’s best-selling Tom Lake. Adina is cast not as Emily, like Patchett’s heroine, but as the narrator, which feels deeply significant. Being an alien here might just be a metaphor for the difficult blessing of feeling enough apart from the thrum of life on Earth to report on its goings-on: to tell a story.”

–Alexandra Jacobs (The New York Times)

2. Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj
(HarperVia)

5 Rave • 1 Positive
Read Susan Muaddi Darraj’s essay on finding inspiration in the lives of ordinary Palestinians here

“Susan Muaddi Darraj’s powerful debut novel-in-stories, Behind You Is the Sea, depicts multiple immigrant Palestinian families in Baltimore, whose lives intertwine in unexpected ways. Darraj uses a kaleidoscopic point of view, dropping the reader into a character’s life at a pivotal moment, then switching to another character later in time, providing a multifaceted look at their community … Other stories illuminate the difficulties of living in diaspora, from making a living, adjusting to a different culture, experiencing racism and classism and navigating generational conflicts over changing values … moments of insight and empathy limn Darraj’s novel, shining through the sadness and tension of her characters’ lives.”

–May-lee Chai (The Star Tribune)

3. Ilium by Lea Carpenter
(Knopf)

5 Rave • 1 Pan

“While Carpenter knows how to dish out the dread that a spy story needs, what makes Ilium intriguing are the characters … This is the sort of moral ambiguity that seems to fascinate Carpenter, the way living a double life and every day making your cover, that critical and deeply embedded lie, feels real to everyone around you. It’s also what makes Ilium such an unexpectedly moving novel.”

–Chris Bohjalian (The New York Times Book Review)

**

Nonfiction

1. The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History by Manjula Martin
(Pantheon)

4 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed
Read an excerpt from The Last Fire Season here

“Powerful … Grounded…surprising … She braids together strands of various histories—a personal one, along with the larger story of humans and fire—all set against the background of the summer and fall of 2020, when both the pandemic and wildfires were raging … The range of this book coaxes us to confront our own failures of imagination.”

–Jennifer Szalai (The New York Times)

2. Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are by Rebecca Boyle

3 Rave • 3 Positive
Read Rebecca Boyle’s essay, “Motherhood and the Moon,” here

“Boyle walks the reader through a history of both Earth and humanity, from the formation of our planet and the evolution of life to the development of civilization, religion, philosophy and, eventually, science … Boyle, whose graceful writing is as lulling as a bedtime story, paints the moon as more than just a driver of physical phenomena … Boyle finds the moon in places I would never think to look. And she has convinced me that though our connection to it is ever-changing, the moon perseveres as a source of knowledge, wonder and influence—and is anything but dull … Timely … Makes the moon feel closer than ever.”

–Katrina Miller (The New York Times Book Review)

3. Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science by Benjamin Breen
(Grand Central)

3 Rave

“Breen blends fleet-footed biography with an accessible analysis of mid-20th-century research into ‘psychedelic’ experiences … Breen artfully weaves Mead’s biography with fascinating details of the sprawling psychedelics scene (producers of the TV show Flipper took acid). The result is a riveting exploration of a shadowy episode in 20th-century history.”

–Publishers Weekly

Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Ahdaf Soueif on Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Madison Ford on Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland, Lincoln Michel on Mark Anthony Jarman’s Burn Man, James Wood on Hisham Matar’s My Friends, and Richard Robinson on Gerald Murnane’s Inland.

Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

*

“In the book he brings the reader as close to this reality as can possibly be done with words. Through the painstaking accumulation of detail after detail he enables the reader who has never been to Palestine to experience life under Israeli occupation … The author shows, in cool, dispassionate language, how all of it, every step, was preset by the occupation; how the occupation’s rules and laws and regulations, its system of passes and permits, the land appropriations and boundary redrawings, the walls and watchtowers and flyovers, the neglect and surveillance, are all in place not to regulate life, but to squeeze the breath out of it …

The world has ignored the Palestinians to the best of its ability. The Arabs have, state by state, betrayed them. But the Palestinians have never stopped resisting. Every Palestinian in A Day in the Life of Abed Salama displays resistance in its most common form: under the rule of a ruthless occupying military power you continue to live; to live as a human being, as part of a community and a culture.”

–Ahdaf Soueif on Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama (Times Literary Supplement)

“While this seems a proposition that promises the speculative, Bertino prefers to ground the reader in the minutia of the human experience, allowing for a deeper excavation of the strange and wonderful and heart-wrenching realities of what it means to be alive down here on Earth … Bertino accomplishes what certain acclaimed novels bewilder us with: the ability to encapsulate an entire life within a few hundred pages. Works like A Little Life and Their Eyes Were Watching God come to mind, where we can map a life from adolescence into adulthood and leave with what feels like a birds-eye view of human complication. Is this what it feels to play God? To watch a life untangle from above, to witness the profound in the mundane? But Beautyland’s greater triumph is capturing how time passes … This is where the sorcery lives, as Adina reveals the eccentricities of human nature, and we watch Adina reluctantly succumb to their emotional weight. When Bertino writes of magic, of science fiction, of the surreal, she is writing of reality.”

–Madison Ford on Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland (The Brooklyn Rail)

“Many writers are content to light one or two well-placed lyrical firecrackers in a short story. Others, like Mark Anthony Jarman, set off entire fireworks displays on every page. ‘Propane slept in the tank and propane leaked while I slept, blew the camper door off and split the tin walls where they met like shy strangers kissing,’ opens the visceral ‘Burn Man on a Texas Porch,’ the first entry in Burn Man, an anthology of 21 stories culled from Jarman’s four-decade career. The rest of the story is, like many of Jarman’s tales, a hallucinatory rummaging through the mind of a broken man. After receiving skin grafts that ‘didn’t quite fit,’ the narrator fumes: ‘Hate is everything they said it would be, and it waits for you like an airbag.’ In Jarman’s stories and sentences, things seem always ready to explode …

The archetypical Jarman narrator is a bedraggled man dragging around a big aching heart. He might be a petty thief, a hockey scout, an addict or a bloodstained soldier … When I read these stories, I scribbled down two names: Barry Hannah and Denis Johnson. Then I turned to the book’s introduction, by John Metcalf, which speaks at length about the influence of both on Jarman’s prose. But let me be clear: Jarman is no mere imitator. He may have the crackling syntax of Hannah, Johnson’s gift for shocking yet poetic images, and the penchant for loners and misfits of both, but Jarman’s voice rings unique.”

–Lincoln Michel on Mark Anthony Jarman’s Burn Man: Selected Stories (The New York Times Book Review)

“As he walks, Khaled reprises the history of their intense triangular friendship, the undulations of their lives, and the shape and weight of their exile. Exile turns countries into temporalities: the place you came from and the place you find yourself in become the time before and the time after … In two novels and a memoir…Matar has found different ways of narrating the aftermath of this most decisive wound. He has written that absence is not empty but ‘a busy place, vocal and insistent.’ His work speaks eloquently of this loud absence and its unstopped complexities. One of them is obvious enough: the momentous event of Matar’s life happened first to his father and only secondarily to him. Matar’s writing is painfully alive to this asymmetry …

It’s one thing to live in the shadow of a daunting parent, a predicament many children know. It’s a different dilemma to live in the ghostly shadow of that greatness, where the challenging patriarchal achievement is always beyond reach—legendary, lost … The shape of Matar’s lifelong quest inevitably places a narrative emphasis on the shock of his own abandonment: the father leaves home. But in another, quieter motif that runs through Matar’s work, the decisive break is not when the father leaves but when the son does … It’s as if Khaled is both Telemachus and Odysseus, at once son and father, abandoned and abandoning. Khaled made the mistake of leaving home when ‘no one should ever leave their home,’ and the price he pays for this sin will be a kind of long imprisonment in England. The mysteriousness of Khaled’s inertia, his woundedness—both a literal wound and a figurative one—turns Matar’s narrative into a deep and detailed exploration not so much of abandonment as of self-abandonment. Who is this man? Khaled remains obscure in his inertia and his hesitation—damaged, adrift, cut loose. Exile has split him into different versions of himself, and he cannot quite tell the story that would make the parts cohere again.”

–James Wood on Hisham Matar’s My Friends (The New Yorker)

“The reissue of Australian author Gerald Murnane’s fiction is introducing new readers to this most idiosyncratic and formally adventurous of novelists, now in his 80s. Postmodernism is at a nadir, but Murnane’s nested, self-reflexive narratives may be placed alongside the fabulations of Nabokov, Calvino and Borges, once grouped under that label. Murnane is known for not straying far from Goroke in Victoria—he is the anti-type of globe-trotting literary celebrity—but like those writers, and some of the modernists before them, he is a dreamer of other worlds. His work uncompromisingly blurs the frontiers of memory and imagination; it is not for the faint-hearted. Inland, originally published in 1988, was the last novel Murnane wrote before a mysterious creative hiatus. The reader of other republished novels, such as Tamarisk Row (1974) or Border Districts (2017), now finds an important missing link. Inland is a novel that, in even more absolute terms than these books, disrupts realist conventions about setting and sense of place. Murnane is a fastidious exponent of the prose sentence, which he often treats as a report of a remembered image. From the interconnected pattern of these image-sentences we gradually infer not a place out there, but the landscapes of a solitary mind …

Inland is a love letter that looks out, looks within and looks back to ‘that other world which is in this one’ (as Paul Éluard put it). When the narrator writes ‘I saw,’ he is not limited to perceiving an object or remembering an image; nor even to remembering himself once remembering or seeing himself once seeing. In Greek, the verb to see is idein. Murnane is constantly thinking and seeing in idealities: things that exist only as creations of the imagination.”

–Richard Robinson on Gerald Murnane’s Inland (The Guardian)

How far would you go to be part of something greater than yourself? My third novel, Here in Avalon, follows two very different sisters as they fall under the spell of a mysterious midnight New York City cabaret troupe that may or may not be a cult, and may or may not be a gateway to another world.

In writing Here in Avalon, I was inspired not only by immersive theatre productions like Sleep No More (which, as I have written before, attract a highly cult-like fandom of their own) but by a rich tradition of novels and stories about ordinary human beings trying—whether through travel, religion, or political experiment—to transcend the seemingly mundane world they’re living in, and to seek enchantment outside their everyday lives.

*

William Morris, News from Nowhere

An early classic of soft science fiction, News From Nowhere (1890) is the best-known novel by William Morris, the nineteenth-century English socialist, utopian, and artist. A futuristic vision of a better world, inspired by Morris’s own political ideas, News from Nowhere follows a young socialist, William Guest, who finds himself transported to a far-off land where private property, marriage, divorce, and a whole host of other social constructs simply don’t exist, and where people live and labor in harmony with nature.

Less of a plot-driven story than a meditation on Morris’s conflicted political and aesthetic ideals, News from Nowhere nevertheless challenges us to imagine what another life might look like outside the confines of post-Industrial Revolution capitalism.

Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes

Published in 1913, just a year before the author’s death in World War I, this short, lyrical novel tells the story the titular adolescent Meaulnes who one night chances across a mysterious historical costume party on an elegant estate, where he falls in love with one of the attendees, only to find himself unable to find the chateau—or the girl—again: a loss that becomes an obsession.

What starts as a seemingly magic-tinged story about a vanishing castle turns out to be a story about the all too worldly Meulnes himself: whose passion for what he cannot have leads him to lose the very things he loves most.

Rosemary MacAulay, The Towers of Trebizond

Perhaps most famous today for its outlandish first sentence (“‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, climbing down from that animal on her return from high Mass.”), this 1951 travelogue-cum-novel is far more thoughtful and melancholy a work than its early comedy suggests.

Ostensibly the story of a young Englishwoman, Laurie, who travels through Turkey with her eccentric Anglo-Catholic missionary aunt, in part to get away from an adulterous love affair, The Towers of Trebizond ultimately transforms into a book about the contentious relationship between Laurie’s passion for her lover and her inchoate yearning for a faith she cannot fully understand.

Norman Rush, Mating

What if we could figure out another, better, way to love? This question haunts the unnamed American graduate student who narrates Rush’s 1991 novel about sexual and communal politics. Our narrator is in love with the older, wiser, and potentially far more foolhardy social scientist Nelson Denoon, who has, according to rumor at least, founded an experimental matriarchal society in the Kalahari Desert.

Unsure of who she is and what she thinks about life, her thesis, or anything at all, our narrator lets her passion for Denoon lead her into a quest not just for love, but for a better way to live.

R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries

Equal parts campus novel and cult story, R.O. Kwon’s 2018 The Incendiaries follows Phoebe Lin, a failed piano prodigy coping with the loss of her mother, as she falls under the influence of John Leal, a mysterious half-Korean activist whose equally shadowy organization, Jejah, may in fact be more cult-like than he lets on.

A novel about the close connection between love and violence, and how those who prey upon the world’s lost and loneliest souls use that connection to their advantage, The Incendiaries is currently in development as a limited series.

Emma Cline, The Girls

Emma Cline’s 2016 debut novel is a loose retelling of the story of the Manson Family and their 1969 murder of Sharon Tate. Set in the anarchic and freewheeling summer of 1969, The Girls follows a group of disaffected seekers under the erotic and spiritual influence of Russell Hadrick: the novel’s stand-in for Charles Manson. At once clear about the dangers of the girls’ new life and honest about the power of its thrall, The Girls is a poignant reminder that our hunger for transcendence and our capacity for transgression are never far from one another.

David Burr Gerrard, The Epiphany Machine

A cult story of a different kind, the late David Burr Gerrard’s second novel—inspired by since-shuttered New York speakeasy bookstore Brazenhead Books—reimagines its notoriously eccentric proprietor as the bombastic Adam Lyons: the possessor of an unprepossessing but inexplicably powerful machine capable of tattooing personalized “epiphanies” on users’ forearms: truths visible to everybody but themselves.

When young Venter Lowood, whose parents’ lives have been destroyed by use of the machine, seeks out Adam—and gets drawn into a web of violent deaths surrounding the device—he finds that the machine may upend his life, too.

______________________________

Here in Avalon by Tara Isabella Burton is available via Simon & Schuster.