All Reviews

FictionHistorical Fiction

Shy Creatures

Review by Chika Gujarathi

Clare Chambers’ Shy Creatures begins in 1964 in the London suburb of Croydon, where Helen Hansford works as an art therapist at a psychiatric hospital called Westbury Park. Though her mother discontentedly calls her place of work “a mental asylum,” Helen—unmarried and in her 30s—has found not only her professional calling, but also the love of her life in the very clever, handsome and married Dr. Gil Rudden. Their careful affair has been going on for years when a curious patient named William Tapping enters their lives.

Found at the age of 37—mute, half naked, and with a beard that looked like it was never trimmed—William had been living as a recluse with his aging aunt Louisa in their home in Croydon. When the police came to check on a reported commotion at the house, they discovered the two, and, for a lack of other options, called Westbury Park. Gil is eager to take on this once-in-a-lifetime case to help demonstrate a humane approach to psychiatric treatment. Helen, by Gil’s side in this mission, is thrilled to help after finding sketches that show William to be a terrific artist who loves to draw, especially birds and buildings.

Here, the story morphs into two tales running in opposite directions by means of alternating chapters. One follows Helen, now completely engulfed in the cause of restoring William’s life, as her above-and-beyond efforts to help him affect her own life and her relationship with Gil. In the other storyline, Chambers dives into William’s past, ultimately revealing a courageous secret sacrifice.

Chambers’ inspiration for Shy Creatures comes from a true story about a recluse treated at a mental hospital in 1952. Her reimagining is tenderly told, with just the right balance of melancholy and hope to keep the pages turning.

Clare Chambers’ historical novel Shy Creatures is tenderly told, with just the right balance of melancholy and hope to keep the pages turning.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Women’s Hotel

Review by Sydney Hankin

Somewhere in between a modern apartment building and a Hilton or Holiday Inn lies the Biedermeier, an unassuming hotel in the heart of 1960s New York City and the subject of Daniel M. Lavery’s Women’s Hotel. The building’s hallways bustle with women both old and young, all hailing from different hometowns, with different backgrounds and big-city dreams. As residents come and go and life plans take detours, Women’s Hotel masterfully captures the joys of community, neighborliness and circumstantial friendships that this bygone mode of living made possible.

Katherine, a Biedermeier floor manager and Mrs. Mossler’s second-in-command, might ride the elevator up to retrieve pinking shears from Carol or down to negotiate favors with Kitty. She might walk over to Lucianne’s to gossip, visit J.D. to stare curiously at her stray cat or accompany Pauline to a meeting of political activists. In Women’s Hotel, these events aren’t linked by an ongoing mystery or conflict. Instead, each resident’s experience is blended stylistically in a way that imitates the inseparability of real lives. The intentionally minimal plot allows Lavery to focus on intimately exploring this unique moment in time; in his own words, the novel should “be taken for no more than what it is: a diffuse sketch of a short-lived, patchwork commonwealth, a few impressions of a manner of living that was briefly possible for a small group of women in the middle decades of the last century.” In extracting beauty from ordinary stories easily overlooked, he’s created a memorable novel.

Lavery, a bestselling author, former Slate advice columnist and cofounder of The Toast, writes in a style reminiscent of contemporary wordsmiths Nathan Hill and James McBride. Through sentences of remarkable elegance, humor and complexity of phrase, the Biedermeier is drawn so vividly that it nearly becomes a character in itself. The women’s hotel stands tall as a deeply loved, grounding constant for its countless tenants, tenants who will always tease, entertain, support, exasperate and—above all—protect each other to no end.

Read more: Daniel M. Lavery on the universally torturous experience of moving house.

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

Libby Lost and Found

Review by Melissa Brown

We find out who we are through our favorite books, especially the ones we read as kids. Books can give us a place to hide or a place to be braver than we ever would be in real life. This is abundantly true for Stephanie Booth’s two like-minded protagonists in her debut novel, Libby Lost and Found, which takes the idea that books shape our reality and runs with it, from New Jersey to Colorado and through a magical forest where the protagonists of a beloved children’s series are stuck. 

The Falling Children series, and the mystery surrounding the identity of the series’ author, have whipped the world into a frenzy akin to Pottermania. But the anonymous author, Libby Weeks, is in trouble. Libby’s fictional (and only) friends—her characters Benjamin, Huperzine and Everlee—have been trapped in a forest since the previous book, because Libby can’t seem to write the next installment. It’s not writer’s block, it’s dementia. 

To receive such a diagnosis at 40 has the reclusive Libby coming apart at the seams of her gray sweater. She’s desperate enough to finally answer emails from a passionate 11-year-old fan, Peanut Bixton, who promises she can help save the Falling Children from the evil Unstopping and finish the series. Peanut feels deeply connected to the world Libby created, where anagrams abound, Knock-knock birds tell terrible jokes and toys with damaged souls just need a little love to be redeemed. With the internet clamoring for her blood and threatening to unveil her identity if she doesn’t release the final book, Libby gets on a plane for the first time and flies to Peanut’s quaint hometown. In Peanut, Libby finds a version of her younger self, before her anxieties took over. In Libby, Peanut finds an adult who listens and isn’t keeping secrets from her—at least not on purpose. 

Stephanie Booth’s writing is fast-paced, funny and full of feeling. Readers who enjoyed Where’d You Go, Bernadette will find a story that is equally madcap, implausible and inventive. Libby Lost and Found is a roller coaster ride that does leave the track at times, but Peanut’s dogged youthful enthusiasm carries the day and the plot. As Libby struggles to remember how to dial a phone or button her shirt, let alone what she was planning to write next, her fate, along with the fates of her Falling Children and of Peanut, grow magically, if occasionally predictably, intertwined until the end.

Libby Lost and Found takes the idea that books shape our reality and runs with it, in a madcap, implausible and inventive roller coaster ride about an author and her 11-year-old fan.
FictionPopular FictionFamily DramaDebut Fiction

The Magnificent Ruins

Review by Arlene McKanic

Nayantara Roy’s stunning novel The Magnificent Ruins caused this reviewer to think of two things. The first was my admittedly American view of India as huge, colorful, crowded, astonishingly beautiful and astonishingly ugly, unbearably hot or tortured by monsoons, with bitterly contentious politics, mouthwatering cuisine, a deeply entrenched caste system and a patriarchy so oppressive that it’s often fatal to girls and women. In The Magnificent Ruins, all of this turns out to be true.

As the novel went on, the second thing I thought of was Eminem’s song “Kim,” where he fantasizes about murdering his wife and stashing her body in the trunk of his car. This is because the Lahiris, the family at the heart of the book, are nearly that unhinged in the way they treat one another.

The book is mostly narrated by one of the Lahiris, Lila De. An editor in New York City, she was born in Ballygunge, Kolkata, and raised in her family’s mansion, a relic from the time of the British Empire. The Lahiris are Brahmins, and though the women in the family work, the men of the older generations do not; it’s beneath them. They live, more or less, off a dwindling trust fund. When Lila’s beloved grandfather dies, he leaves the great pile of a house—the magnificent ruins—to her. This discombobulates her already fractious relatives. Lila is not only a woman, but a young woman from America. She’s technically not even a Lahiri. When faced with a crisis rite, in this case the elaborate wedding of Lila’s cousin Biddy, things go nuclear.

Yet these people love Lila, and she loves them, and, nearly miraculously, so does the reader. It is a testament to Roy’s discernment and empathy that we never break with any of the Lahiris even as they behave atrociously to each other. Many of us know families like this. Indeed, some of us come from families like this, where white-hot hate, resentment and violence mingle with love, loyalty and moments of tenderness. Lila, too, shares her family’s talent for cruelty toward loved ones, but she’s American enough to be in therapy. A deliciously long book, The Magnificent Ruins is riveting from its first page to its last.

For the Lahiris, the family at the heart of Nayantara Roy’s deliciously long The Magnificent Ruins, white-hot hate, resentment and violence mingle with love, loyalty and moments of tenderness.
FictionLiterary FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

Only Here, Only Now

Review by Michael Magras

Teenage years are hard enough to get through as it is. Add a fractured family life, and the terrain gets even rockier. That’s the situation facing Cora Mowat, a Scottish girl growing up in a grimy post-industrial town along the Firth of Forth, in Only Here, Only Now, Tom Newlands’ uncompromising debut novel.

The book spans four years, from 1994 to 1998. Newlands has created a memorable character in Cora, who, at the outset, is 14 and lives alone with her mother, a wheelchair user, in Muircross, “a manky wee hellhole sat out by itself on a lump of coast the shape of a chicken nugget.” With that description, who could blame her for having her “heart set on skipping this housing estate and vanishing,” preferably to college in Glasgow?

As Cora and her mother wait for approval on an application for a better house in Abbotscraig, a school psychologist recommends that restless Cora be “checked for anxiety, and for being hyper.” Like Newlands, Cora has ADHD, which she describes by saying, “It’s like you’re always tired but you can never rest.”  

That’s just one of the hurdles Cora has to negotiate, all of which Newlands describes with memorably earthy phrases. Her mom’s new boyfriend is “a gangly-looking thing, head like a conker” who has a missing left eyeball yet is kind to her, unlike the other “kitten stranglers” her mom has brought home. After he moves in with them, however, Cora wonders what he’s doing with CDs, alarm clocks, vacuum-packed legs of lamb and other seemingly stolen merchandise in his room.

By year’s end, a sudden tragedy upends Cora’s life and expectations. Newlands dramatizes the resulting changes in the book’s subsequent sections, first in Abbotscraig in 1996, where Cora has a relationship with a young man who’s a troublemaker, and then in Glasgow in 1998, where she is forced to confront her choices of the past four years and decide what she wants to do next. 

The book sags a bit in its middle section, but the tension and distinctive characterizations return in the novel’s final third. Only Here, Only Now may be one among many coming-of-age stories, but this winning debut is distinguished by Newlands’ sympathy for his characters and the originality of his prose.

Tom Newlands’ Only Here, Only Now is a winning coming-of-age story distinguished by Newlands’ sympathy for his characters, among them Scottish teen Cora, her wheelchair-using mother, and her mother’s shifty but kind boyfriend.
FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

Blue Light Hours

Review by Laura Sackton

In her debut novella, Blue Light Hours, award-winning translator Bruna Dantas Lobato explores how distance—between languages, cultures and places—can affect a relationship.

At the center of the story are a mother and daughter and the rituals they create to remain close to each other despite the thousands of miles between them. The unnamed daughter is in her first year at a small liberal arts college in Vermont; her mother remains at home in Brazil. The daughter goes about her mundane days and then recounts them to her mother over Skype. Her mother, in return, offers details about her own increasingly lonely life.

These exchanges between mother and daughter are both melancholic and mesmerizing. Neither of their lives are particularly interesting in the conventional sense. There are no devastating breakups or major meltdowns, no financial catastrophes or familial betrayals. The daughter does her schoolwork, makes friends with her fellow international students, eats in the dining hall, observes the unfamiliar New England seasons. The mother watches soap operas, goes to work, asks again and again about her daughter’s strange new world. 

The book, instead, probes beneath the surface: How much of a life can truly be shared over Skype? How does being apart change a relationship as foundational and important as the one between a mother and a daughter? What happens when what is shared, over time, becomes rote, empty? 

Dantas Lobato explores these questions with thoughtful nuance. Her writing sometimes feels emotionally restrained, but perhaps this is a reflection of the characters’ longing: the daughter’s longing for the particular ways her mother knows her and also for the excitement of a new, separate life; the mother’s longing for her daughter to remain close. The prose itself embodies loneliness: crisp, declarative sentences that have the flow and rhythm of poetry. Blue Light Hours is an intimate meditation on home and homesickness, belonging and wanting to belong, on what it means to leave and be left, and the many tiny ways of attempting to bridge an impossible distance.

Bruna Dantas Lobato’s debut, Blue Light Hours, is an intimate meditation on home, homesickness and the many tiny ways of attempting to bridge an impossible distance.
Children's & YAYA FictionYA

Thief of the Heights

Review by Emily Koch

Imagine a future in which no one ever sees the sky, and water is so toxic that even a drop can cause an infection deadly enough to require an amputation. Basam, Mustafa and Aarfah, three teenage engineers, live at the bottom of Muqadas, a city that is vertically stacked on top of itself and surrounded by water that causes an infection called Habar. Life improves the higher up one lives in Muqadas, so the trio is trying to finish their invention of an advanced prosthetic limb, which they hope will grant them opportunities to ascend to the upper tiers of the city. 

When they succeed, they are given the chance to move up a tier with their families. But not long after, they start to notice the inequities and injustices of their society, and part of the group begins to question their dreams of leaving their home. Will they hold their resolve to get to the top together, and try from there to make a difference for the lower levels?

Though Thief of the Heights is her first book geared toward young adults, Son M. is well-versed in gripping narratives, having previously written for Dark Horse and DC Comics, among others. Her storytelling is excellent,  seamlessly weaving elements of Algerian and Islamic culture into this dynamic world.

Debut illustrator Robin Yao brings M.’s worldbuilding to life through their vibrant and dynamic artwork. All the characters are compellingly and uniquely designed. Emotions are easily discerned, with intense moments illustrated in monochrome shades that match the severity of the mood. Foreshadowing is sprinkled throughout the narrative and illustrations in equal measure.

While throwing a reader into a dystopian world with little context is a compelling narrative device, it may leave the reader with a simple desire for more: More time with each trio member, more time for exploring the relationships between them, and more insight into what this world will look like past the book’s last page. The ending is abrupt, but that may be the point, suggesting that it is up to us to imagine the future beyond.

Still, Thief of the Heights is extraordinary: a suspenseful, emotional sci-fi fantasy graphic novel.

Thief of the Heights is extraordinary: a suspenseful, emotional sci-fi fantasy graphic novel.
Children's & YAYA NonfictionYA

Flamboyants

Review by Mariel Fechik

George M. Johnson, who has spent their career thus far writing the books they wish they’d had when they were a teen (including the frequently challenged All Boys Aren’t Blue), has reached into history for more queer Black stories to share with Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I’d Known. “My heroes were hidden from me,” Johnson writes in the introduction to this nonfiction title. 

Across 12 essays featuring foundational figures like Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as less broadly known icons like Alain Locke, Gladys Bentley and Ethel Waters, Johnson champions the untold queer stories that were integral and influential to  the  Harlem Renaissance. Interspersed with Johnson’s own poetry and rich, vibrant paintings by artist and illustrator Charly Palmer, Flamboyants is a nuanced yet accessible primer for both teens and adults. 

But Flamboyants is not merely a much-needed history lesson, and it’s certainly not standard biographical fare. Johnson puts these figures in conversation with each other and with the present, enrichingeach essay with personal anecdotes delivered in a witty, conversational tone, and with cultural criticism that draws a direct through line from the Harlem Renaissance to Black queer culture today.

Thanks to this focus, Johnson does not tell one-dimensional stories, like the ones they heard in their own childhood. Rather, Johnson allows the subjects of Flamboyants the full spectrum of their humanity, exploring what they did, what they didn’t do, and what was done to them. “These important figures,” Johnson writes, “deserve their legacy to be told in its totality.” In this way, Flamboyants suggests that we must see those who came before us as whole people to have any hope of making sense of our present. 

 

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

Tonbo

Review by Alice Cary

Allan Say has had a long, storied career as a children’s author and illustrator. He won the 1994 Caldecott for Grandfather’s Journey, about his grandfather’s voyages from Japan to America and back, and wrote about his own childhood in The Ink-Keeper’s Apprentice. Say was born in Japan in 1937, came to the United States at age 16, and eventually settled in Portland, Oregon, in 1999. Tonbo is a contemplative, creative look back on his own life, accompanied by his beautifully luminous oil paintings. 

Tonbo follows an old man with a cane taking a morning stroll through the park. A large white bird startles him, reminding him of a toy airplane he once had as a child, which he called “Tonbo,” the Japanese word for dragonfly. Suddenly engulfed in his memories, he chases after the elusive toy, finding himself mysteriously transported to a number of places from his youth, and each person he encounters treats him as if he is getting younger. “What are you looking for, young man?” one woman asks. When a captain calls him “son,” the man laughs, saying, “Excuse me, but I may be older than your father.” 

At first, readers see everything from the old man’s perspective. We see the people he encounters and sometimes his shadow. Say’s use of color is magnificent, using mostly muted, dreamlike tones highlighted by intense blocks of color—an orange chimney and mint green roof set against a dark blue ocean; the teal blue of the sky; the green awning and pink outer wall of an ice cream shop. It is at the ice cream shop where the protagonist realizes that the young man he sees in the window is his own reflection. It’s a sophisticated, nuanced progression that may take a few readings for some children to understand, but once they do, it will seem like magic. 

Eventually, the protagonist becomes his kindergartener self, back in a garden in Japan, where he finally finds his beloved airplane. Moments later, he’s an old man once more, back with his “old friends—aching hands and knees.” He encounters a group of children on a field trip and leaves them a special gift, in a lovely gesture that brings to mind the circle of life.

Tonbo is a remarkable ode to the interplay between aging and memory, and how the distant past can suddenly come to life again in the blink of an eye. It’s also a wonderful multigenerational conversation starter about how certain memories can live inside us forever. 

 

Tonbo is a remarkable ode to the interplay between aging and memory, and how the distant past can suddenly come to life again in the blink of an eye.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

Umami

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Umami, a little brown-and-white penguin, lives with lots of other penguins in a snow-blanketed village by the sea. It’s a lovely place, with one unfortunate exception: “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the penguin village ate cold fish. For dessert? Cold fish. Your birthday? More cold fish.”

The budding gastronome and eponymous star of Jacob Grant’s Umami has had enough. While the other penguins seem content with their limited menu, Umami craves variety and she’s determined to find it, even if she has to take a solo journey across the sea.

When she lands in a new place bustling with a variety of food stands patronized by all sorts of animal customers, tantalizing aromas convince Umami to dive right in. “Oh, my sweet little beak!” she thinks, “Nothing ever smelled so spectacular.” A whirlwind of gastronomic delirium ensues as the plucky penguin samples everything she’s been missing: Salty or sour, bitter or sweet, spicy or her namesake umami, Umami tries it all, her taste buds tingling as her gustatory horizons open wide. She must share these wondrous new foods with the village!

Back home, Umami nervously presents her neighbors with a surprise feast. It’s a sweet gesture—and the backdrop for hilarious tableaux in which her guests’ widened eyes and sidelong glances crescendo into glorious milk-glugging, fire-breathing, table-flopping chaos. Dramatics aside, though, they finish every bite. Perhaps Umami has a future as chef for her newly hungry village?

Grant’s art for Umami won the 2024 Bologna Children’s Book Fair Illustration Exhibition, and it’s easy to see why: It’s expressive, adorable, visually witty and the perfect accompaniment to his inspiring, amusing story about the joys of living life with flavor and gusto. Umami will prompt readers to have fun identifying dishes they recognize or choosing new ones to try, as well as spotting loads of amusing details throughout (the squirrel who’s shocked at the size of Umami’s pasta order is not to be missed). Umami is a festive treat of a book sure to make storytimes and mealtimes even more delicious.

Umami is a festive treat of a book sure to make storytimes and mealtimes even more delicious.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

Life After Whale

Review by Yi Jiang

Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, a blue whale dies peacefully while making her 90th annual migration to northern waters. Through Emmy Award-winner (for Bill Nye the Science Guy) Lynn Brunelle’s poetic writing and Caldecott Medalist Jason Chin’s splendid illustrations, Life After Whale explores how the death of the largest animal on Earth leads to a sublime explosion of new life. As a blue whale’s body—which measures up to 110 feet long, with a heart that alone weighs 400 pounds—descends to the sea floor, “a whole new world will arise,” with millions of organisms congregating to find sustenance and shelter from what scientists call a whale fall.

Death isn’t an easy topic to tackle in a picture book, but Brunelle’s gorgeous prose successfully frames the whale’s passing not as a tragedy, but as a tranquil and essential part of nature. Both old and young readers will be captivated by the strange, sublime process of the whale fall, as this magnificent creature becomes a vast forest that provides for countless fascinating inhabitants of the deep sea: hagfish, crabs, mussels, sea cucumbers and more. 

As Brunelle describes in clear, vivid language what amounts to over a hundred years’ worth of complex food chains and species interactions, Chin includes spot diagrams of processes and specific sea life that show readers what to look for in the book’s larger illustrations, which often stretch across the majority of a spread. Chin’s elegant watercolor and gouache art is crucial to the majestic atmosphere that makes Life After Whale an exemplary science book for children: With his careful details and grand compositions, the processes of decomposition and scavenging—such as a “larva of a bone-eating zombie worm” attaching itself to one of the whale’s rib bones—become beautiful and otherworldly instead of grotesque. Life After Whale is the perfect book to encourage young potential scientists to see the cycles of nature as intriguing rather than scary. Reading it ignites the kind of extravagant wonder that you might feel while exploring the moon. 

Life After Whale is the perfect book to encourage young potential scientists to see the cycles of nature as intriguing rather than scary. Reading it ignites the kind of extravagant wonder that you might feel while exploring the moon.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

Miss Leoparda

Review by Norah Piehl

Miss Leoparda, a delightful fable written and illustrated by Natalia Shaloshvili, opens with the titular character secure in the embrace of her treetop bed, surrounded by quiet rolling hills, which she traverses every day in her work as a bus driver. Miss Leoparda reliably shuttles a variety of animals—many of whom wear fetching hats and other winsome accessories—to do “their animal business.” It’s an idyllic image of communal life: Every seat on the bus is taken, and rabbits, zebras, cats, bears, elephants and even a rather suspicious-looking wolf peacefully share space with one another.

One day, a gas-guzzling, exhaust-spewing car zips past the slow-moving bus, drawing the animals’ attention: “That was amazing!” they exclaim. The novelty of new technology lures the animals, one by one, away from the bus and behind the wheels of their own individual cars. But soon the streets are clogged with traffic, the skies are choked with smog, and the animals are increasingly irritable. Even Miss Leoparda’s beloved tree is targeted when it’s time to expand the roadways to make room for what some might call progress.

Miss Leoparda refuses to give in to this hollow enticement, however, and she eventually finds a creative, sustainable solution to restore her community and the environment at the same time. The message feels organic rather than heavy-handed, reinforced by the pleasantly hazy illustrations created in acrylic paint and watercolor crayons. Shaloshvili’s artwork is as expressive in its landscapes—the greenery of Miss Leoparda’s original habitat contrasting with the dour gray of the traffic jam—and on a more intimate scale, as the animals’ expressions, somewhat reminiscent of Jon Klassen’s illustrations, manage to be both deadpan and surprisingly expressive. This one’s sure to get budding environmentalists eager to enact change in their own communities. 

A delightful fable, Miss Leoparda feels organic rather than heavy-handed, its message reinforced by Natalia Shaloshvili’s pleasantly hazy illustrations created in acrylic paint and watercolor crayons.
Children's & YAMiddle GradeChildren's

Turning Twelve

Review by Alice Cary

Fans of Kathryn Ormsbee’s first graphic novel, Growing Pangs, will be delighted by heroine Katie’s return in Turning Twelve, an immersive, probing coming-of-age story that brings to mind the adolescent angst of Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Ormsbee effectively mines her own childhood for material. 

Katie is growing up in a Baptist household in Kentucky in 2004. She’s a homeschooler who struggles with anxiety and OCD, as well as everything else that happens at that age, both mental and physical. 

“Being twelve isn’t turning out like I’d planned at all. I kinda wished I’d stayed eleven,” Katie admits. Her two best friends are moving away, leaving her lonely and isolated in her church youth group. At the children’s theater, she dreams of getting the role of Annie, but instead, is cast as an orphan side character. One of Katie’s biggest alarms is her growing attraction to Grace, a pretty, funny new friend she meets in the Annie production. “I didn’t know I could get crushes on girls,” Katie says. Her feelings grow even more complicated at church and in youth group, where she is told that anything besides love between a man and a woman “breaks God’s heart. It makes him cry.”  

Molly Brooks’ illustrations draw readers right into Katie’s dilemmas, and the structure and pacing of the story creates a meaningful interplay between the actual events and Katie’s roiling emotions. Katie’s red-headed, braces-filled expressions are relatable and help readers identify with her highs and lows, adding drama to each page, while Brooks’ use of red, purple and orange are striking, serving as a dynamic anchor for the graphic novel’s energy and flow. 

Katie’s struggle with her emerging sexual feelings and her relationship with religion are particularly well done. Several figures provide helpful, empowering examples, including Katie’s older sister, Ashley; her therapist, Dr. Clara; and a woman whom Katie babysits for, a successful lawyer who shows her that careers can be exciting and fulfilling. As she observes people at a more progressive church and hears news about progress in gay rights legislation, Katie starts to realize, “Maybe theatre isn’t the only place in the world where I can be myself.” 

Katie is just the sort of lively, inquisitive friend that a 12-year-old might yearn for. With its exhilarating combination of prose and illustrations, Turning Twelve will make readers clamor for more of Katie’s adventures. 

 

With its exhilarating combination of prose and illustrations, Turning Twelve will make readers clamor for more of Katie’s adventures.

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