Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

Mirror Girls blends historical fiction and horror to tell the story of Charlie and Magnolia, biracial twin sisters separated at birth after their parents’ murder, and the unforeseen consequences of their unlikely reunion 17 years later.

Author Kelly McWilliams spoke to BookPage about the deeply personal experiences that inform the novel and what it’s like to write what scares you.

Can you introduce us to Charlie and Magnolia?
Magnolia has been raised to believe she’s a white Southern belle, with no knowledge of her racial heritage. When her grandmother admits the truth on her deathbed, Magnolia’s reflection suddenly disappears from every mirror: She’s unmoored after the loss of her self-conception.

Charlie begins the story in New York City, living with her Black grandmother. It’s the dawn of the civil rights movement, and she dreams of being a protester and fighting for justice. But then her grandmother falls ill and wants to be buried in the place she was born: the rural town of Eureka, Georgia, where Magnolia still lives on an old plantation.

So, at the start of the story, both girls have just lost crucial aspects of their identities. Charlie has lost her life in New York, where it was safer (though not fully safe!) for her to defy the racist status quo. Magnolia, in turn, is reeling from the revelation that despite her skin tone, she’s not, in fact, white. Both girls desperately need to find each other in order to construct a new, mixed-race identity from the ashes of their old lives.

You’ve said that your debut novel, Agnes at the End of the World, was inspired by a dream you had. How did Mirror Girls begin?
Mirror Girls is more personal than Agnes, and I think I’ve been making my way toward writing that story for a long time—possibly decades. I grew up in a mixed-race family, and families like mine always have to fight to be seen as family. I can’t tell you how many times people challenged the fact that my brother and I were blood related, just because our skin tone is different. Mixed-race families have to affirm their existence over and over to a society that often chooses not to reflect us. This story was inspired by my own childhood, my own life.

“I grew up in a mixed-race family, and families like mine always have to fight to be seen as family.”

I was also inspired by the photographs of twin sisters Marcia and Millie Briggs, who made the news as infants because one baby presented as white (complete with red hair) and the other as Black. While I found these sisters sweet and inspiring, I recognized that the world was quite puzzled and uneasily fascinated by their existence. The subtext was: What does race even mean if twins can be born with such different racial presentations? And I thought, well, I know the answer to that! In order to survive a world that is still inhospitable to mixed-race families, I had to learn the answer to reconciling my own identity, and it was hard. That journey to self-acceptance felt like a story worth telling.

Mirror Girls has quite a few excellent names for both people and places. How do you find the right names?
For the most part, I just wait for names to come to me—and I know in my gut when I’ve found the right one. Sometimes it’s instant; other times it takes months.

I struggled mightily with the name of the plantation in the book for one horrible reason: There are so, so many plantations that still stand in the South, if only as historical destinations or people’s inherited homes, that I kept imagining names that had an analog in real life, which wasn’t ideal. I probably Googled 10 different names (many ending in –wood) until I found one that didn’t already belong to some plantation somewhere. It gives you a sense of the devastating scale of slavery to have that particular problem.

Both of your novels feature sisters as co-narrators. What elements of sisterhood did you want to explore in Mirror Girls that you didn’t touch on in Agnes? Do you see any commonalities between the two pairs of sisters in each of your books?
I’ll be honest: When I wrote Agnes, I wasn’t quite ready to take on the subject of mixed-race identity. It was too raw and personal for me at that moment in my life. Nevertheless, in that earlier novel, Agnes and Beth also lose their received identities—as oppressed members of a fundamentalist cult—and must fight to claim a new life and to redefine themselves. Part of that journey means understanding each other as sisters, despite their radically different temperaments and despite the fact that, while Agnes escapes the cult, Beth initially chooses to stay.

Charlie and Magnolia fight a parallel battle in the land of Jim Crow, which frankly has always seemed to me much like a malignant cult. In a cult, oppressive leaders tear down their members, trying to bend them to their will. During Jim Crow, Black people were told that we’re second-class citizens, that we don’t deserve what white folks have. Jim Crow explicitly targeted the Black sense of self, trying to force us to accept a damaged reflection of ourselves. To survive, Magnolia and Charlie must affirm, over and over again, their own worth—but they can’t do it alone. Their sisterhood, across class and the color line, becomes a key piece of their identity. Family and familial love is the greatest antidote to a world that insists, at the top of its lungs, that Black girls don’t count and don’t matter.

In addition to exploring sisterhood, Mirror Girls also dives deep into daughters, mothers and grandmothers, and the ways each generation’s actions ripple outward and affect future generations. What drew you to exploring these ideas in this story?
Every Black family in America suffers from intergenerational trauma, especially along our maternal lines. I heard somewhere that 95% of Black Americans are direct descendants of enslaved people, and the crux of chattel slavery as an institution was the separation of children from their mothers on the auction block. That’s an ever-present truth, an inherited cultural memory for every Black mother.

“Family and familial love is the greatest antidote to a world that insists, at the top of its lungs, that Black girls don’t count and don’t matter.”

But intergenerational trauma also takes very personal forms. On the day I was born in a hospital in Maryland, my mother was recovering from a cesarean section when a nurse took me for a checkup. My mother is obviously Black, but I’m extremely light. That nurse didn’t bring me back to my mother; they brought her a Black baby boy instead! Despite our identifying wristbands, that nurse just could not believe that we belonged together. My mother injured herself hollering in the hallway for me, and that story became a huge part of our family identity. In fact, when I gave birth, I remembered what had happened to my mother and worried that if my daughter’s skin tone didn’t match mine, there’d be trouble. It’s a terrible thing to fear that the world will deny your family their basic right to be a family.

Of course, terrible things happen to Black mothers in hospitals every single day, considering the horrible mortality rate. I firmly believe that every bit of maternal suffering causes intergenerational trauma down the line. Grandmothers, mothers and daughters bear so much of that pain. But we also tell the stories that help us to make sense of those traumas. It’s our heritage, and it’s also what we must pass down to help our descendants survive.

Mirror Girls is set in Georgia in 1953, with lots of references to Charlie’s life in Harlem. What sort of research did you do for the book? Were you able to do any travel- or interview-based research?
While deciding on a setting, I read Remembering Jim Crow: African-Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South, which is a collection of oral histories. Hearing those voices, I knew I would set the story during this time of struggle, when survival depended in part on Black folks’ own belief in their self-worth. At this time, elders worked so hard to imbue Black children, who were looked down upon by white society, with a sense of pride.

What I really loved about those oral histories, though, was the amazing specificity. Who knew that Coca-Cola once advertised itself in the South for being a “whites-only” drink in some states? And the segregated water fountains just came up over and over as a source of humiliation. It was really a deep laceration to the soul, to be segregated in those mundane ways.

I had desperately hoped to get down South for this project, but the pandemic prevented me from traveling. I did reach out to a sensitivity reader from the South to help with my understanding of the place.

As for interviews, I guess I did sort of interview my own family! We have a family legend that our last enslaved ancestor, a grandmother, walked off a Georgia plantation after emancipation, which is why I set the story there. Black families have long memories, but you do sometimes have to specifically ask the elders in your life to tell them. There’s quite a bit that the older generation often keeps to themselves because the stories are so painful to speak out loud.

I loved the book’s references to three real-life figures: Caleb Hill, Walter White and Ella Baker. Why was including each of these figures important to you and to the story?
My book is in part about an imagined lynching, that of Charlie and Magnolia’s parents. I included Caleb Hill’s name and tragic fate because it’s so important that we remember that lynchings really happened, en masse, in the real world. Caleb Hill died at a time when New York’s NAACP headquarters was keeping very careful track of Southern lynchings, so it was also the exact type of event that would have formed a bridge between the South and New York at the time. Northern brothers and sisters never stopped decrying Southern brutalities, and lynchings especially.

“Knowledge is power, and feeling empowered leads to feeling less scared, in the end.”

As for Ella Baker, she’s Charlie’s role model, because she’s not only an activist, she’s also a leader in a sexist time. I imagine Charlie following in her footsteps.

Finally, as I’m a woman light enough to pass for white, Walter Francis White is perhaps my very favorite historical figure of all time. Naturally, he becomes Magnolia’s as well, as she’s establishing her identity as a biracial person. Walter White could easily pass, but he chose not to. This brother had blond hair and blue eyes! In his early years, he acted as a sort of spy, investigating Southern lynchings for the NAACP. He put himself in grave danger pretending to be white to extract information from murderers. There’s a story that, at one point, he had to jump onto a moving train to save his own life. I just love that though he could have chosen the easy way out—pretending to be white to further his own opportunities—he dedicated his life to the Black community. And he used his light-skinned privilege to do something good for others.

Your first book combined the “cult escape” narrative with a pandemic story, and Mirror Girls seamlessly blends historical fiction and horror. What do you enjoy about stirring different genres together? Are there other genres you’d love to combine in the future?
I love to stir up genres, and I think it’s because I genuinely feel that life is too messy to be captured by one genre alone. There’s also a tension that two distinct genres place on each other that leads to fruitful and interesting narratives. Genre mashups also help you to avoid writing plot points that are too cliché.

I do have some combos I hope to write one day! One is a Western combined with a spy novel (actually based on the life of Walter White), but my next project is a single genre: a contemporary social satire. Genre mashups, while rewarding, are hard to pull off, and I need a short break!

In an interview, you once said that you tend to write what scares you. Do you ever have to take a break from writing because you’ve scared yourself? What makes you feel brave?
The things that scare me exist in the real world: patriarchy, white supremacy and racism, and I’m thinking about and dealing with them every single day. In a weird way, writing about those things is itself my break from the awfulness of reality. Writing what scares you is oddly therapeutic, the way nightmares are. I have to work through my thoughts about these heavy topics in order to stay grounded in my real life. It’s like a very demanding form of self-care.

When I’m finished with a book, I’ve usually worked out some of the troubles in my own head and squared my thoughts on these heavy topics and how we should respond to them. Knowledge is power, and feeling empowered leads to feeling less scared, in the end.

What will you take away from the writing of this book?
When I was in middle school, I struggled to look into mirrors, because I just could not square the racial identity that I hold so dear with my own light face. By the time I hit my 20s, mirrors and I were on better terms, but in another, deeper way, I was still avoiding a certain type of mirror: my own writing. I did not write about white passing or light-skinned existence or the struggles of mixed families. Or, I suppose, I was writing about those things, but they were extremely sublimated.

Now, in my 30s, I finally feel strong enough to write more explicitly from my own personal experience. It’s been absolutely revelatory. I’ve never felt so at peace with my own racial ambiguity, and I’m finally beginning to process and even speak about the core traumas of my mixed childhood. My book is dedicated to mirror girls of every color, everywhere—and come to think of it, that includes me.

Read our starred review of ‘Mirror Girls.’

Author photo of Kelly McWilliams courtesy of Black Forest Photography.

Author Kelly McWilliams talks about the deeply personal experiences that shaped Mirror Girls and what it’s like to write what scares you.

Family Saga, Fiction

Fiction Family Saga

Charmaine Wilkerson’s ‘Black Cake’ is a slice of love

Interview by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

“I never intended to write a story with a cake in it,” says Charmaine Wilkerson, former broadcast journalist and, with Black Cake, first-time novelist. “It just sort of walked into the story.”

And what a remarkable story it is. Wilkerson’s exquisitely written novel is a globe-trotting, multigenerational family saga set in the Caribbean, California, London, Scotland and Rome. Its rich plot—which includes a suspected murder—unfolds at an enthralling pace.

The novel begins with a short, enigmatic prologue set in 1965, then jumps ahead to 2018, when an attorney summons Byron Bennett and his estranged sister, Benny, to listen to a lengthy recording made by their late mother, Eleanor, who divulges startling secrets about her life. “Please forgive me for not telling you any of this before,” she says.

“I have always kept that recipe in a place where I keep precious things.”

When Benny was growing up, her mother taught her to make the special titular black cake, saying, “This is island food. This is your heritage.” Wilkerson, who grew up in Jamaica and New York and now lives in Rome, explains during a video call that the Caribbean fruitcake known as black cake has long been a family favorite, a descendant of “the good old-fashioned English plum pudding . . . transformed, over time, by tropical ingredients.”

Long ago, Wilkerson’s mother mailed her a copy of her recipe, filled with comments and instructions. Later, after Wilkerson’s mother died, a younger relative asked her for a copy. “I don’t think I’d looked at it for years,” Wilkerson recalls, “but I knew exactly where to find it. I’ve moved a number of times in my life. I am not the neatest person in the world, but I have always kept that recipe in a place where I keep precious things.”

Don’t expect to find the recipe within the pages of this novel, however. Wilkerson didn’t want readers to presume that this is simply a culinary tale. “It’s about the idea that there’s the story you tell about your life, about your family history, about your culture. And then there are the stories that are not told, or concealed, or not fully revealed,” she says. “The cake symbolizes the history of this family, in which the children, who are now grown, really don’t know the half of what their parents went through. Their journey of discovery is going to actually change the way in which they see not only their parents, their family history, but their own relationships.”

Warm, engaging and thoughtful, Wilkerson speaks precisely and with a hint of a lilt in her voice, a remnant from her childhood in Jamaica. Although she repeatedly states that she’s a private person, the handful of memories that she shares are reminiscent of her prose—sensory-filled, memorable and layered with meaning. She recalls her first taste of sugar cane during a school field trip, when the bus broke down next to a sugar cane farm and someone chopped up pieces for the children to taste. She also offers a tantalizing clue to how she ended up living in Rome: “Most people who end up moving to Italy and staying there move for two reasons: It’s either art history, or it’s a love story. You can guess which one.”

Read our starred review: ‘Black Cake’ by Charmaine Wilkerson

Prior to writing this novel, Wilkerson spent several years working in short fiction—notably, flash fiction. The crafting of Black Cake first began when she wrote a short scene about two teenage girls swimming in Caribbean waters in the 1960s. “They were driven by this visceral ambition and connection with nature and this determination to swim, despite the fact that they were afraid,” she says. Next, she wrote some seemingly unrelated scenes set in contemporary times. “At a certain point,” she says, “I realized they were all the same story. And that’s when I knew I had a novel, you know—that I wasn’t just all over the place. I was circling an idea.”

Like a shark, perhaps?

Wilkerson laughs, saying, “That’s me, a shark. I don’t always manage to get a bite of food, but I did this time.”

She certainly has. Black Cake is slated to become a Hulu series with Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films and creator Marissa Jo Cerar (“The Handmaid’s Tale”) at the helm—not too shabby for someone who has long dreamed of telling stories. “I’ve always dabbled and written and read,” Wilkerson says, “but the act of writing regularly and making sure that you don’t lose the thread when you have all these different voices is something that takes consistent work. I came to that fairly recently.”

“That’s me, a shark. I don’t always manage to get a bite of food, but I did this time.”

While Wilkerson’s mother gifted her with her prized recipe, her father’s work as a textile artist helped her zero in on her writerly goal. She remembers loving the smell of the dyes in his studio, and admired how he “was able to take art and turn it into a discipline.” After his death in 2013, she took one of his flannel shirts (which she still wears regularly) and finally began to write fiction. “I realized I had to stop thinking that I was being frivolous and recognize that it was work. So, I made some changes in my life.”

As a child, Wilkerson watched her father swim in the ocean toward the horizon until he disappeared, and similar imagery figures prominently in Black Cake. (Byron is a renowned oceanographer whose mother taught him to surf, and who encourages young people to “catch the wave and ride with it.”) “I think that’s what we do in life,” Wilkerson says. “We try to make a plan, but then life happens, and we try to use everything we’ve brought with us.”

Undoubtedly, she has ridden her own wave like a pro. “This is what I have wanted to do for a long time,” she says.

Photo of Charmaine Wilkerson by Rochelle Cheever

Rooted in memories of her family, Charmaine Wilkerson's debut novel explores an island of mysteries and a cake full of surprises.

Children's & YA, Picture Book

Black history made new

Feature by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

History lives and breathes, not only within us but also as we uncover new ways to see and understand the past. These picture books introduce young readers to fresh, vital perspectives on Black history.

★ Born on the Water

Readers are in for a sweeping history lesson that spans centuries in The 1619 Project: Born on the Water, an illuminating extension of the educational movement begun at the New York Times Magazine in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and Newbery Honor author Renée Watson begin this exquisite book with a framing story about a Black girl who receives a school assignment to trace her family’s roots and feels ashamed that she can go back only three generations. Upon hearing this, her grandmother gathers the whole family to explain their heritage, starting with their ancestors in West Central Africa. “Ours is no immigration story,” she says. In a series of free verse poems with titles like “They Had a Language,” “Stolen,” “Tobacco Fields” and “Legacy,” the authors convey not only facts but also feeling, a powerful mixture of pride, joy, tragedy, sorrow, perseverance and triumph.

Nikkolas Smith’s visceral illustrations bring all of these emotions to life, starting with joyous scenes of families living in the kingdom of Ndongo, “their bodies a song under open sky and bright sun.” These pages burst with the colors of turquoise waters and grassy fields of gold and green beneath warm, sunlit skies. The images are a wonderful gift to readers, offering a sense of what life was like before enslavement.

With the suddenness of a single page turn, life changes cataclysmically as these ancestors are kidnapped from their homeland and imprisoned aboard a ship called the White Lion. Shadowy illustrations convey the brutality that follows: an empty, ransacked village; people in chains forced onto a ship; faces filled with sadness and fear. One image shows a person who has jumped overboard, and Grandma explains that their ancestors are those who survived the terrible journey: “We were born on the water. We come from the people who refused to die.”

Grandma’s history continues to the fields of Virginia, where a baby named William Tucker becomes the first Black child born in the new land, and on across centuries of resistance and achievement. “Never forget you come from a people of great strength,” Grandma says. “Be proud of our story, your story.”

Born on the Water is a triumph and a history lesson that every child needs to learn.

★ A History of Me

“I was the only brown person in class,” begins the young narrator of Adrea Theodore and Erin K. Robinson’s A History of Me. She feels the eyes of her classmates on her back whenever their teacher discusses slavery and civil rights. “I wanted to slide out of my seat and onto the floor and drift out the door,” she admits. Even worse, a bully taunts her after school, “If it wasn’t for Lincoln, you’d still be our slaves!”

In an author’s note, Theodore describes writing this debut picture book after learning that “some thirty years after I had attended elementary school, the way the subject of slavery was being taught was still causing harm to young black and brown children.” As the narrator of A History of Me shares her experiences in history class, she also reflects on the lives of the women in her family, including her great-great-grandmother, who was enslaved, and her mother, who spent part of her childhood in the Jim Crow South. “And so I should be grateful to go to school and learn,” the narrator says repeatedly, but it’s clear that her feelings are more complicated than simple gratitude.

Illustrator Robinson skillfully illuminates the book’s many strands of history. The narrator’s historical musings appear in sepia tones, while contemporary scenes leap off the page in vivid colors, adding a dose of energy to the tale. The narrator is a quietly thoughtful force to be reckoned with. Her piercing eyes often gaze directly at readers, and she faces down the bully with her head high, striding purposefully down the sidewalk past him.

The book concludes as the narrator discusses growing up and having a daughter of her own. A wonderful spread shows her daughter reaching triumphantly toward the sky, surrounded by a sunburst of rainbow color and empowered with the knowledge “that she is free to be anything she wants to be.”

“What happens when you are proud of where you come from?” asks Theodore in her author’s note. A History of Me is a moving reminder of what we gain when we draw strength and inspiration from the past.

Through stories of triumph and pride, two picture books challenge widely held notions about the history of African Americans.

Children's & YA, Picture Book

Children's & YA Picture Book

Winter treasures

Feature by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

Trying to make new friends can feel like being lost in a blizzard! These picture books show how snowstorms can bring friends together in lots of wondrous ways.

Words to Make a Friend

Excitement permeates every page of Donna Jo Napoli and Naoko Stoop’s Words to Make a Friend: A Story in Japanese and English, a joyful ode to friendship between new neighbors.

As a Japanese girl and her family move into their home on a wintry day, the newcomer looks out her bedroom window and spots another girl who is outside playing. She quickly unpacks her snow gear and heads out to join her. The pair don’t let a language barrier get in their way, greeting each other with a “hello” and a “konnichiwa.” As they frolic in the flurries and build a snow monster together, they toss phrases back and forth like snowballs, trading “Let’s play!” for “Asobou!” and “shiver shiver” for “buru buru.” Napoli limits the text to a few carefully chosen words of dialogue like these, allowing the beauty of the snowstorm and the girls’ delight to speak for themselves as the story unfolds with natural momentum.

Stoop’s illustrations capture falling snow so exceptionally that readers will practically feel the frosty flakes falling onto their cold cheeks. Against this backdrop, the newcomer’s bright yellow boots and red coat and her new friend’s lilac parka and pink earmuffs pop wonderfully. The girls eventually go inside to warm up, enjoy a snack and try some origami. Their fun continues with such ease that a firm friendship seems bound to form.

Words to Make a Friend captures the energy of a budding bond and a swirling snow day, extolling the fun of exploring cultural differences while highlighting the curiosity that brings two strangers together and turns them into friends.

★ Friends Are Friends, Forever

In a story inspired by her own childhood move from China to North Carolina, author Dane Liu offers a lovely tribute to friendships old and new. Her writing is lyrical and detailed. “In our town, the winter howls,” the book opens. “Heavy flakes swarm and glaze the earth.” Indeed, a storm is brewing. Just before the Lunar New Year, Dandan informs her best friend, Yueyue, that she and her family are moving far away to America.

Dandan savors every moment of their annual traditions, knowing it’ll be the last time they’ll share them. There’s a festive meal featuring her grandmother Nainai’s dumplings, a fireworks display and the fun of a special art project. Dandan and Yueyue cut snowflakes out of red paper, dip them in water and freeze them overnight, then hang their ornaments from a tree the next morning. “Our best snowflakes yet,” Yueyue proclaims. “And my last,” Dandan says quietly.

Lynn Scurfield’s art begins with enchanting, vibrantly colored scenes of Dandan’s life in China: The best friends stroll down a snowy sidewalk, their expectant faces peer up at a stovetop where “vegetables skid around the wok,” and later, their farewell hug fills an entire spread with bittersweet emotion as Yueyue whispers, “Friends are friends, forever.” A wonderfully conveyed transition spread depicts a plane flying over a big globe, from China to the United States; in the background, daytime and nighttime skies represent the change in time zones. In America, Dandan’s days are besieged by loneliness and shades of gray. One especially evocative illustration shows her asleep in bed as jagged, scrawled English words cover the page, the strange new language haunting Dandan’s dreams.

After a low point, when Dandan’s classmates snicker at the satin dress she wears on her birthday, a freckle-faced friend named Christina emerges, and Dandan’s world slowly becomes lively and filled with color again. Liu brings the story full circle to the next Lunar New Year as the new friends celebrate with an old tradition and a parting gift from Yueyue. Scurfield cleverly unites old and new in a spread that depicts Dandan’s nightstand and her framed photo of her final embrace with Yueyue as, out her bedroom window, Dandan and Christina hang paper snowflakes from the branches of a tree.

While there are many children’s books about the difficulties of moving, Friends Are Friends, Forever is an especially well-crafted tale that explores the depth of old friendships, the loneliness of being a newcomer in a strange place and the beauty of new friends finding each other.

Birds on Wishbone Street

A girl named Moe wants to make the new boy feel welcome on Wishbone Street, a friendly neighborhood filled with families of many nationalities that’s based on a real street in Toronto. Sami, the new kid, has just arrived from Syria, while Moe’s father emigrated from Ireland when he was young. Initially, Moe feels shy about introducing herself. “Do I wave? Go say ‘hi’?” she wonders. “My head is a jumble of words, all shmushed-up together.”

A snowstorm and a shared love of birds soon bring Moe and Sami together. Moe’s dad brought his pet bird to America in a hollowed-out radio—based on a true story of author-illustrator Suzanne Del Rizzo’s father—while Sami’s family raised pigeons in Syria. When Moe and Sami discover a cardinal that has been stunned by the cold during the first blizzard of the season, they cement their friendship by trying to rescue the creature, taking it to a vet with help from a neighbor. Their actions spark a collective effort to help the neighborhood birds. Everyone pitches in to make suet treats and weave winter roosting pockets; Del Rizzo includes instructions for both at the end of the story.

Del Rizzo’s unique art adds dimension to the book’s warm, welcoming neighborhood scenes. She creates illustrations with polymer clay, acrylic glaze and other mixed media, giving depth and texture to each page. Snowflakes truly seem to float in the winter sky, and the blanket used to swaddle the cardinal has realistic folds and wrinkles.

Del Rizzo also excels at presenting a community full of many intertwined familial and social connections while capturing the smaller details of the developing friendship between Moe and Sami. She expertly balances the hustle and bustle of lively outdoor scenes with more intimate indoor moments, such as when the pair share their treasures with each other, including drawings of birds, special feathers and other trinkets. In a lovely touch, Del Rizzo depicts Moe’s and Sami’s collections of keepsakes on the book’s opening and closing endpapers.

Birds on Wishbone Street is a bighearted book that will leave readers eager to discover the many treasures that new friendships hold.

Three picture books capture the magic of snow—and friendship.

Nonfiction, Self-Help

Nonfiction Self-Help

Catherine Price

Interview by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

When life handed the world lemons in the form of a global pandemic, Catherine Price found a way to make lemonade. She began researching and writing a book that would help readers define, prioritize and add more fun to their lives. For anyone hoping to make 2022 a banner year, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again provides the perfect jump-start. Instead of trying to corral the willpower and restraint that’s key to so many self-improvement plans, Price prioritizes fun, a strategy she compares to “going on a diet that requires you to eat more foods that you love.”

“We go into this self-restriction phase after the indulgence of the holidays,” Price says, speaking by phone from her Philadelphia home. “But you can make positive change in your life and have fun. In January, we feel like we have to make up for anything we did in December, instead of realizing that this is a wonderful opportunity to set a good tone for the new year by doing things that make us happier.”

Price notes that millions of people devote time and therapy to reducing stress and anxiety, but most of us contemplate fun only as an afterthought. “I’ve drunk my own Kool-Aid,” Price admits, her voice brimming with enthusiasm. “Really, fun is one of the most important things in life, and the more fun we have and the more we prioritize fun, the happier and healthier we will be.” As she writes in The Power of Fun, “It should be our guiding star.”

Read our starred review of ‘The Power of Fun.’

Price’s latest book is a natural sequel to her 2018 book, How to Break Up With Your Phone, which she wrote after realizing that she was spending hours mindlessly scrolling on her smartphone while ignoring her infant daughter. By limiting her screen time, Price created more free time—but then she didn’t know what she actually wanted to do with that time.

For Price, her most vivid experiences of fun occurred while learning to play the guitar. Once she realized that, one thing led to another: She formed a small band, began performing at open mic nights, started drum lessons and made new friends—activities she particularly relished because her work as a freelance writer is so solitary. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Price and her musical friends had numerous outside jam sessions, sometimes in bone-chilling weather. “We did this for the entire winter,” she says, reminiscing about a keyboard that is probably still covered in campfire ashes. “The fact that all of us committed to this source of fun was so meaningful. We went beyond playmates and became friends. And it all came from having a couple other people in my life who also prioritized fun.”

For The Power of Fun, Price surveyed numerous people in detail about their own fun experiences and how they felt during those moments. She calls her writing “science-backed self-help,” explaining, “I don’t like the sort of self-help that’s just platitudes. I really want there to be some evidence. I want to know exactly why I’m doing something.” However, as she dug into the material, she was shocked to discover that there wasn’t even an agreed-upon definition of fun, nor was there much research on the subject.

“This is a wonderful opportunity to set a good tone for the new year by doing things that make us happier.”

Price eventually decided to label passive entertainment, like watching TV for hours at a time, as Fake Fun and to create her own definition for True Fun—moments of what she calls “playful, connected flow” in which someone connects with other people in a meaningful way and becomes so fully engrossed in the moment that they lose track of time. There’s a lot of middle ground between these two poles, Price notes, full of enjoyable, worthwhile pastimes that simply don’t reach peak fun. Luckily, The Power of Fun includes a Fun Audit, which Price developed to help readers identify the activities most likely to spark inner joy.

Price stresses that it’s equally important for each person to recognize activities that aren’t personally fun. For instance, Price knows that she doesn’t like charades or performing improv comedy, and that while she enjoys being part of musical groups, she’s not a solo performer. “If you’ve tried something a number of times and it never generates fun for you, then maybe it’s OK to move on to the next thing,” she says. “By saying no to that, you might open up a new opportunity that’s actually fun.”

Speaking of things that aren’t personally fun—Price faced multiple challenges as she wrote about this joyful magic ingredient “during an objectively not-fun period of history.” One moment was especially memorable, when she found herself alone for several days in the midst of the pandemic. “Imagine, if you will,” she writes in the book, “me slouched in front of my laptop with about fifteen browser windows open, each containing a different research paper about the horrible health effects of loneliness and isolation, as I sat on the couch, isolated and alone.”

If you’ve resolved to get in touch with your feelings this year, these books will help you increase your EQ.

“At the same time,” Price says, “the project had a powerfully positive effect on my own life. It allowed me to weather a difficult time with my sanity intact—and in fact, with my cheerfulness intact. It gave me something positive to focus on.”

At the start of the 2020 lockdown, Price, her husband and their young daughter headed to Price’s childhood home in New Jersey, where her parents could help with child care. “It was interesting to see my daughter playing in some of the very same places that I had played as a kid. But it was also interesting to reflect on what play means as an adult,” Price says. “Having a 5-year-old is very useful for reminding yourself that there are opportunities for playfulness and connection and flow around us all the time. We just need to learn to tune into them.”

This change of focus even improved Price’s marriage. “[My husband and I] were very playful people to begin with,” she says, “but it’s been really useful for us to reframe our own experience through the lens of fun and treat it as a priority, both as a couple and individually.”

“If you’re having fun with people . . . you’re embracing your shared humanity.”

In addition to improving interpersonal relationships, Price believes this process could even heal some of the nation’s divides. “Fun brings people together,” she says. “If you’re having fun with people, you’re not yelling at them, you’re not emphasizing your political differences. You’re embracing your shared humanity.”

Price became a science writer somewhat by accident. In high school, she believed science classes were boring, hard and irrelevant. That feeling changed at age 22, when she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. “That moment of having to take control of my own blood sugar for the rest of my life, lest I suffer devastating consequences, like blindness or amputation or stroke or kidney failure, was a big turning point,” she recalls.

An added influence was Michael Pollan, Price’s mentor at the University of California, Berkeley, journalism program, who helped her discover that she likes “writing about health and science in a quirky, personal, fun way.” For one assignment, Price wrote about being diagnosed with diabetes, which led to the New York Times publishing her essay “Thinking About Diabetes With Every Bite” in 2009. Eventually, she even wrote a book about nutrition called Vitamania: How Vitamins Revolutionized the Way We Think About Food.

“Writing this book made me tune into what made me want to become a writer to begin with.”

For years Price has contemplated writing a book about hormones, a subject that fascinates her, but now she thinks she’ll choose a different topic for her next project. “I want to really lean into this fun thing,” she says. “I personally feel that my books come most alive whenever I’m telling a personal anecdote, and I love writing that way. Writing this book made me tune into what made me want to become a writer to begin with.”

Price hopes The Power of Fun will likewise help readers gather with friends and “spend January or February staging their own kind of ‘funterventions.’” Once you start noticing tiny, everyday moments, she says, “it brightens up your life, and, in turn, that buoyancy can help energize you so that you can start to seek out even bigger moments of playful, connected flow. I see it as a very self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing cycle with innumerable positive effects.”

These lessons have led to a very different life, Price explains. “Realizing what I really want to prioritize as fun has been truly life-changing. And I’m so excited to share that message with the world.”

Author photo by Colin Lenton

Popular science writer Catherine Price says to stop scrolling, put down your phone and play.

Nonfiction, Self-Help

Nonfiction Self-Help

The Power of Fun

Review by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

Fun “shouldn’t be an afterthought,” writes popular science author Catherine Price. “It should be our guiding star.” How’s that for good news?

After writing How to Break Up With Your Phone and following her own book’s advice, Price discovered that she had more free time, but she experienced a moment of crisis when she couldn’t figure out what to do with that freedom. Eventually she learned how to fill those moments with newfound fun and joy, a process that she describes in The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again. It’s a natural sequel to her previous book, as well as a similarly satisfying—and transformational—read.

Catherine Price shares the ways her own life was transformed by learning to prioritize fun.

This naturally fun and funny writer dug her dusty guitar out of the closet and became part of an enriching musical community that has changed her life. Meanwhile, Price also began researching the subject of fun, sorting out the difference between what she calls Fake Fun (such as watching TV for hours at a time or endlessly scrolling through social media) and True Fun, which leaves people feeling “nourished and refreshed.” After devouring books on the subject and querying hundreds of people about how they experience fun, she came up with her own definition of True Fun as a “confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow.” It’s a definition that holds up well throughout her discussions, allowing readers many opportunities to see how their own activities measure up.

The Power of Fun includes a toolkit for those whose leisure lives need a boost, including a Fun Audit and practical suggestions for creating your own Fun Squad; but even those whose lives are already highly entertaining will come to view and value their pastimes in a new light. Price documents her own journey of fun failures, such as improv comedy and charades, and successes, such as playing light-up badminton at night with her husband, an absurdly humorous aqua aerobics lesson in Latvia and learning to row crew at age 40, which resulted in a dramatic capsize in Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River. Price reminds readers to cherish moments of fun both large and small—even “microdoses,” such as a quick smile or an unexpected exchange with a stranger—and to make time for fun “booster shots” like vacations or annual gatherings “that fill up your fun tank and replenish your energy for a longer period of time.”

Price is a trustworthy guide with a personable voice that stands out on each page. The Power of Fun reads like a heaping serving of a tasty yet healthy snack. You’ll enjoy every bite and feel energized afterward.

The Power of Fun provides instructions for filling your life with the kind of playful, connected fun that leaves you feeling nourished and refreshed.

Children's & YA, Picture Book

Children's & YA Picture Book

The Legend of Gravity

Review by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

Charly Palmer will have young readers on the edge of their seats from the narrator’s very first words in The Legend of Gravity: A Tall Basketball Tale: “I’ve heard you young folks talking about who is the best ballplayer to ever grace the court. Like that ‘King James’ someone or other. He’s not too shabby. But have you ever heard of Gravity?”

Gravity, the new kid in the Hillside projects neighborhood in Milwaukee, walks onto a playground court and asks to join the game. He’s quickly revealed to be so talented that everyone wants him on their team. When it’s time for the citywide pickup tournament, Gravity’s team, the Eagles, employs a simple strategy of “getting the ball to Gravity and letting him do the rest.” They make it all the way to the finals, where the opposition proves tougher than Gravity can handle alone. The Eagles will have to come together to stand a chance of winning.

The Legend of Gravity is expertly told, full of suspense and humor, and Palmer fully embraces the language of legend. His titular “one-man show” of a player “once jumped so high that we were able to go out for ice cream before he came down.” Palmer introduces Gravity’s teammates by their wonderful, evocative nicknames, such as Left 2 Right (“you never know where he’s going”) and Sky High (“when he jumped, he looked like he could touch the clouds”). When Palmer reveals the narrator’s identity at a pivotal moment in the championship game, it’s a fabulous surprise that’s guaranteed to delight.

Palmer’s impressionistic art perfectly conveys the story’s energy. The first time we see Gravity, it’s in a close-up of his black-and-white sneakers and lanky legs striding onto the court. An especially epic spread depicts Gravity soaring into outer space while his teammates on the court stare up at him in awe. His orange basketball glows against the deep blue background and alongside several warm-toned planets. Palmer alternates between spot art and full- and double-page illustrations, and the effect is reminiscent of the way televised sports broadcasts move from close-ups to full-court coverage. Readers will feel like they have courtside seats as they listen in on team discussions and watch the Eagles’ strategy play out.

The Legend of Gravity is a riveting rocket of a tale. Like a memorable championship game, it deserves to be revisited over and over again by legions of devoted fans.

This riveting rocket of a tall tale makes readers feel like they have courtside seats to a basketball game of mythic proportions.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Honor

Review by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

At age 14, Smita Agarwal and her family were forced to leave Mumbai after a horrifying incident of religious persecution. They immigrated to Ohio, and now, 20 years later, Smita has grown up to become a world-traveling journalist who writes about gender issues. As Thrity Umrigar’s Honor opens, Smita is asked to cover an assignment in Mumbai—“the one place she had spent her entire adult life avoiding.” Readers will find themselves completely immersed in the sights, sounds and smells of India, a place that Smita acknowledges can be “cosmopolitan, sophisticated, but also resolutely out of step with the world.”

Similar to her central character, bestselling author Umrigar grew up in Bombay (now Mumbai) and immigrated to the United States at age 21. Ever since, she’s been writing “to make sense of the world and to make sense of my own, often contradictory emotions and feelings.” In this spirit, Honor is a multifaceted examination of Smita’s love-hate relationship with her native country, a place that fills her heart yet is besieged with assaults on women. As one character comments, “We Indians are in the Dark Ages when it comes to the treatment of women.”

That issue is thoroughly explored through the lens of Smita’s assignment: the case of Meena, a Hindu woman suing her brothers after they killed her Muslim husband and then burned and disfigured her. Smita travels to Meena’s remote village and befriends the impoverished woman and her toddler daughter. She interviews the brothers, the police and the village chief, who emboldened Meena’s brothers to commit their atrocities. While Meena and Smita live in completely different worlds, Smita increasingly realizes the parallels in their lives and in the ways they have been treated as Indian women.

Throughout the novel, Smita is escorted by a wealthy single man named Mohan, who adores his country and is eager to reintroduce its glories to his charge. She is resistant, however, and their constant tug-of-war about India’s pros and cons results in a well-rounded portrait of a complicated country.

Suspense deepens as Smita and Meena await the court verdict, and there’s a horrifying aftermath that seems largely avoidable. Not surprisingly, romance develops between Smita and Mohan, and the blend of passion alongside brutality sometimes makes for an uneasy mix. Nonetheless, readers are likely to remain engaged with the story and its well-drawn characters.

Whether she’s writing about the bright lights of Mumbai or the poverty of village life, Umrigar excels at creating engaging situations and scenes. Readers will appreciate this novel’s deep understanding of the many complexities of Indian society.

Thrity Umrigar’s novel offers a well-rounded portrait of India, a place that can be “cosmopolitan, sophisticated, but also resolutely out of step with the world.”

Children's & YA, Picture Book

Children's & YA Picture Book

Good things in small packages

Feature by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

As Christmas approaches, cuddle up with picture books that pack a surprising amount of holiday cheer into a mere 40 pages. They’re perfect for sharing with the little bundles of joy in your life: young readers!

★ Tiny Reindeer

Chris Naylor-Ballesteros’ Tiny Reindeer isn’t just small. In fact, he’s hoof-high to Santa’s “big, stamping, snorting reindeer.” Naylor-Ballesteros takes the tiny theme and runs with it, revealing entertaining new delights with every page turn.

Tiny Reindeer yearns to be useful, but clever vignettes depict him tangled in reins and harnesses, taking an unexpected bath in a water bowl and covered in tape and twine after attempting to wrap gifts. Then he stumbles upon a letter from a girl asking Santa for a little reindeer to go with her small sleigh, which was crafted for her by her grandfather. “He wanted to make a reindeer too,” she writes, “but couldn’t in the end so my sleigh won’t ever fly anywhere.”

Naylor-Ballesteros handles the death of a grandparent subtly and with touching sensitivity as Tiny Reindeer realizes this is his time to shine. Clad in a jaunty hat and scarf, he takes a flying leap into the back of Santa’s sleigh, parachutes down the girl’s chimney (using her letter as his chute) and then faces his most challenging obstacle yet: climbing the stairs.

During this busy time of year, it’s easy for children to feel overlooked or left out of adults’ hustle and bustle. Young readers will adore Tiny Reindeer’s determined attempts to fit in and stand out. Naylor-Ballesteros paces his story perfectly, and every player, including the girl, Tiny Reindeer and Santa himself, gets their moment in the spotlight. Tiny Reindeer is a wonderful addition to the Christmas picture book canon that reminds us of the special gifts we all have to offer, no matter how tiny we might be.

The Christmas Owl

A unique blend of fact and fiction, The Christmas Owl follows a little owl during an incredible true journey that took place in 2020.

After delivering a spruce tree from Oneonta, New York, workers erecting the Christmas tree display at New York City’s Rockefeller Center discovered a saw-whet owl, the smallest owl species in the northeastern United States, huddled in its branches. The public was enchanted by the tiny hitchhiker, who was transported to a wildlife rehabilitation center in upstate New York run by Ellen Kalish, where he was given the name Rockefeller—Rocky for short.

Co-authors Kalish and Gideon Sterer (The Midnight Fair) transform this incident into a magical holiday tale centered on Little Owl as she tries to learn the meaning of Christmas. Ramona Kaulitzki’s illustrations set a festive mood from the start as Little Owl flies out ahead of a group of animals—moose, rabbit, skunk and squirrel—galloping through falling snow. In the distance, a village nestles in the valley below, dotted with towering evergreen trees. One of the trees is Little Owl’s home, destined to be cut down and transported far away. Kaulitzki’s art is bathed in beautiful shades of deep blue, giving each page a wintry glow. Warm touches of yellow, including twinkling lights and the yellows of taxis, trucks and workers’ jackets, add to the effect.

The book focuses on Little Owl’s perspective every step of the way. Her wide eyes reflect wisdom and surprise simultaneously, whether she’s gazing around at a strange new urban landscape or looking up into Kalish’s kind, welcoming eyes at the wildlife center. Little Owl’s innocent confusion about Christmas, a new word she hears from both humans and her woodland friends, reflects many children’s sense of wonder about the season. As Kalish nurses Little Owl back to health, the owl ponders, “Could Christmas be caring? Could Christmas be kind?”

Fascinating back matter provides a nice contrast to the anthropomorphized tale. Kalish describes exactly what happened to the real Rocky, including her release into the wild to begin migrating south. The Christmas Owl is an intriguing fable that offers young readers much to contemplate, including the impact of human actions on the natural world.

Zee Grows a Tree

How do Christmas trees grow so big and tall, anyway? Zee Grows a Tree cleverly weaves the details into a fictional story that juxtaposes a child’s growth against that of a Douglas fir.

On the day that Zee Cooper is born, a seedling pokes up from the soil at her family’s tree farm. Her parents put it in a pot labeled “Zee’s Tree,” and their baby girl learns to love and nurture it as it grows alongside her, eventually inspiring her to want to become a botanist when she’s an adult.

Author Elizabeth Rusch excels at showing similarities between Zee and her tree. At age 4, Zee is shorter than the kids in her class. “Everyone grows at different rates,” Zee’s father tells her. She repeats his reassuring words as she measures her tree, which is also shorter than the other trees. Rusch adds touches of drama throughout, depicting Zee going to great lengths to protect her fir from extreme heat and cold. Rusch also incorporates brief factual notes about fir trees on various pages, as well as more extensive information at the end of the book.

Will Hillenbrand’s lively illustrations infuse each page of this quiet, measured story with action and emotion. As the tree thrives, Zee soars through the air in a tire swing, heads off on the school bus and bounces a soccer ball on her knee. Hillenbrand expertly portrays the strong bond that Zee feels with her tree, capturing the curiosity, concern and compassion on her face as she inspects the sapling. When she camps alongside it during a heat wave, her lantern casts a lovely glow as she reads aloud to her tree, her gray cat curled up at her knee, ice cubes spread around the tree’s trunk to ward off the effects of drought.

Although Zee Grows a Tree ends on a seasonal note (don’t worry, Zee’s tree stays firmly planted in the ground), this informative tale will be enjoyed by young naturalists at any time of year.

Find more 2021 gift recommendations from BookPage.

Share these delightful picture books with the bundles of joy in your life.

Arts & Culture, Essays, Nonfiction, Self-Help

Nonfiction Self-Help Essays Arts & Culture

Lighting the way forward

Feature by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

If you’ve been feeling down, take heart. Environmental icon Jane Goodall remains hopeful, so surely we readers can, too. Her wisdom, along with four additional books, fills this season with inspiration and empowerment.

★ The Book of Hope

Jane Goodall may well be Earth’s ultimate cheerleader. In The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times, she professes steadfast hope for both humanity and our planet that’s rooted in “action and engagement,” not simply wishful thinking. In straightforward, easy-to-digest prose, she writes that each one of us can make a difference, and that “the cumulative effect of thousands of ethical actions can help to save and improve our world for future generations.”

The book is framed as a series of conversations between Goodall and Douglas Abrams, a truly engaging thinker and writer who took a similar approach in the first title in the Global Icons series, The Book of Joy, in which he facilitated conversations between the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Readers will be drawn into The Book of Hope as Abrams arrives at Goodall’s home in Tanzania for dinner, bearing a bottle of whiskey. Their subsequent chats span the globe; they talk at the Jane Goodall Institute in the Netherlands, and eventually, because of COVID-19 restrictions, they connect via Zoom as Goodall gives Abrams a virtual tour of her childhood home in Bournemouth, England.

Their discussions are focused yet wide-ranging as Goodall explains the four main sources of her hope: “the amazing human intellect, the resilience of nature, the power of youth, and the indomitable human spirit.” She admits that she briefly lost her way after her husband Derek Bryceson died in 1980, saying, “Grief can make one feel hopeless.” Abrams and Goodall’s talks deepen after he unexpectedly loses his father to lymphoma and, later, his college roommate to suicide. “We are going through dark times,” Goodall says early in the book. For this reason and many more, The Book of Hope is a gem of a gift.

The Lightmaker’s Manifesto

If you’re yearning to become a true change-maker, then turn to Karen Walrond’s extremely helpful The Lightmaker’s Manifesto: How to Work for Change Without Losing Your Joy for a profound nudge. Walrond definitely walks the walk, having ditched her career as a lawyer to become an activism coach. As an Afro-Caribbean American immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago, she says, “my work is underpinned by an ongoing desire to fight discrimination and foster interconnectedness through the sharing of stories and images of beauty.”

After a colleague tried to pressure Walrond to break the law, she found herself at a crisis point in her career and spent months trying to figure out what to do next. She proceeded in a structured, analytical way—a process that she shares in narrative form, as well as in a “Lightmaker’s Manual” section of prompts and exercises to help readers make their own decisions. She confesses early on, “In my not-so-distant past, I had come up with a pretty extensive list of reasons why an activist life wasn’t for me.” But when she realized that she loved to speak, write and take photos, she searched for a way to put all these talents to work.

She bookends her account by discussing the beginning and end of a trip to Kenya sponsored by the ONE Campaign to fight poverty and preventable disease, describing the joyful rewards of her new career. “We can do this, my friends,” she says in her encouraging and authentic way. “There’s no end to the light that we can make.”

★ The Matter of Black Lives

The Matter of Black Lives: Writing From The New Yorker, co-edited by New Yorker editor David Remnick and staff writer Jelani Cobb, is a standout among recent books about race, notable for its historical perspective and breadth as well as for the excellent writing of its many renowned contributors. The first entry, for example, James Baldwin’s 1962 “Letter From a Region in My Mind,” marked a turning point for The New Yorker’s coverage of racial matters. It is a riveting, astounding essay, describing in a highly personal way Baldwin’s meeting with Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam. In a foreword, Cobb notes, “Baldwin’s essay was, for many readers, a jolt, a concussive experience. . . . As an indictment of American bigotry and hypocrisy, tackling themes of violence, sex, history, and religion, the piece continues to resonate more than a half century later.”

The same can be said of so many of these essays. Journalist Calvin Trillin shares a fascinating 1964 account of a white man questioning Martin Luther King Jr.’s Christianity during a flight between Atlanta, Georgia, and Jackson, Mississippi. Some essays are simply pure pleasure, such as Andrea Lee’s 1983 piece “Quilts,” about her trip to see family in Ahoskie, North Carolina, and her desire to buy a handmade quilt.

The Matter of Black Lives is a treasure chest of essays guaranteed to provoke, dismay, delight and inspire.

Chicken Soup for the Soul: I’m Speaking Now

Sometimes it can be equally enlightening to read the words of the not-so-famous, like congressional staffer Jasmine J. Wyatt, who had a stark realization after an oral surgeon informed her that she had fractured her jaw after years of grinding her teeth. Wyatt mused that she had “morphed into a Black wallflower, gritting my teeth to keep from saying the wrong thing, at the wrong time. A silencing of myself over and over, until I thought I had nothing valuable left to say.” Thankfully, those days of silencing have lost their power over Wyatt and many others, as evidenced by Chicken Soup for the Soul: I’m Speaking Now: Black Women Share Their Truth in 101 Stories of Love, Courage and Hope, which is filled with short but commanding essays written by a variety of Black women sharing their personal experiences.

These essays—and a few poems—are grouped into categories such as “Family & Food for the Soul” and “Identity and Roots,” and each piece begins with a quotation from a well-known figure, including Michelle Obama, Misty Copeland and Audre Lorde. Some offerings are nuggets of love, such as journalist Rebekah Sager’s tribute to her father, who raised her single-handedly, his actions lighting the way for Sager to raise her son “with dignity, vision, empathy and grace.” Other pieces feature insightful yet amusing journeys of self-discovery, like Rachel Decoste’s account of moving to Dakar, Senegal, and on her first day there, suddenly belting out a song from The Lion King. “I was mad at myself for starting my journey to the Motherland with a Disney soundtrack. . . . How colonized was my mind that this was the first tune that came to my spirit?”

The many voices featured in I’m Speaking Now rise up like a powerful choir, offering melodies that will stay with you.

Shedding the Shackles

British textile artist Lynne Stein admits that when she plans vacations, instead of craving beaches or cuisine, she seeks out local craft traditions, hoping to get a firsthand look at Yoruba tribal beadwork or Middle Eastern metalwork. She eventually decided to investigate the narratives surrounding the craftwork of female artists in Indigenous and marginalized communities, and the result is Shedding the Shackles: Women’s Empowerment Through Craft, an around-the-world-tour that showcases a variety of talent, traditions and history and provides an enlightening look at the transformative powers of female creativity.

The book begins with short entries focusing on individual artists and specific craft techniques, such as the increasingly popular Boro and Sashiko forms of Japanese stitching. There’s a profile of English artist Lauren O’Farrell, who coined the term “yarnstorming,” a type of knitted street art that has become wonderfully widespread. Readers also learn about arpilleristas, Chilean women who create three-dimensional appliqued textiles to document their lives as well as to shed light on human rights abuses and violence, especially during the regime of Augusto Pinochet. Vibrant photographs accompany each entry, focusing on both the artists and their exquisite craftsmanship.

Stein includes longer discussions of female enterprises that are not only art but also a means of survival, such as Monkeybiz South Africa, founded in 2000 to empower underprivileged women as bead artists. Their funky 3D creations quickly became a worldwide hit and have been included in numerous international exhibitions.

After perusing these pages, readers may adjust their own vacation plans to allow time for learning about and appreciating local art traditions.

Four books guide readers in building a better world, with wisdom from Jane Goodall, activist Karen Walrond and many more.

Children's & YA, Middle Grade

Children's & YA Middle Grade

Graphic gifts children will adore

Feature by Alice Cary & Hannah Lamb & Justin Barisich & Kevin Delecki & Sharon Verbeten

by Alice Cary, Hannah Lamb, Justin Barisich, Kevin Delecki, Sharon Verbeten

The range of graphic novels and nonfiction for children gets better, more exciting and more popular with each passing year. Even the choosiest young reader won’t be able to resist the charms of these wonderful books.

Marshmallow & Jordan

For the reader who carefully arranges their stuffed animals at the head of their bed every morning—and knows each and every one of their names

Growing up in Indonesia, Jordan is a talented basketball player who lives for the sport. She’s even named after her dad’s favorite player. After an accident two years ago, Jordan is also a paraplegic and uses a wheelchair. Although she’s still the captain of her school’s team, an official rule means she’s not allowed to participate in games against other teams. In spite of her teammates’ sincere efforts to make her feel included, it’s just not the same.

Jordan’s life changes when she discovers an injured young white elephant at a park one day after basketball practice. She names him Marshmallow and, with help from her veterinarian mom, nurses him back to health. Jordan and Marshmallow become fast friends, but it’s soon clear that the connection between them runs much deeper. Marshmallow obviously needs Jordan’s help, but as it turns out, Jordan needs Marshmallow too.

As Jordan leans on Marshmallow, he helps her begin to swim, and eventually she discovers a new athletic passion: water polo. But a worsening drought threatens the local water supply and the use of water for recreational purposes like swimming. Could there be a connection between Marshmallow and the much-needed rain?

Marshmallow & Jordan is a practically perfect graphic novel. Jordan’s strong spirit and earnest emotional vulnerabilities make her an appealing and relatable hero, and Marshmallow is irresistibly adorable as his big blue eyes shine with emotion. Lush and lovely, Alina Chau’s delicate watercolor illustrations are rendered in warm pastel tones. The book’s text is fairly minimal, so her images pull a great deal of the narrative weight, making this an ideal choice for young readers still gaining verbal confidence and fluency who would benefit from the unique interplay of words and images that graphic novels offer.

This beautifully rendered tale, with its fluffy, marshmallow-sweet images, is all heart.

—Sharon Verbeten

Another Kind

For the reader who has always felt a little out of place—except within the pages of a great book

Inside a hidden government-run facility called the Playroom, six creatures known as Irregularities are living out their childhoods quietly tucked away from society. There’s Omar, who’s half yeti; Sylvie, a will-o’-the-wisp; Newt, a lizard boy; Jaali, who can transform into a Nandi bear; Clarice, a selkie; and Maggie, who might be the daughter of Cthulhu. When the group’s secrecy is compromised and their safety endangered, government agents decide to move them to a more secure location.

Along the way, the powerful youngsters end up fending for themselves in a totally unfamiliar world filled with ordinary people who are totally unfamiliar with them. To survive, they must hide their unusual features and abilities—and avoid detection by dangerous forces that are hot on their trail. When the merry misfits meet other Irregularities and uncover rumors about a place called the Sanctuary, a place where they’ll all be safe, they’re determined to find it and make it their new home.

Trevor Bream’s narrative touches subtly on weighty themes, including gender identity, bullying and feelings of abandonment. At every turn, the story emphasizes the importance of self-acceptance and a sense of belonging within a community—empowering notions for young humans to consider.

Illustrator Cait May’s art is gorgeous. Just as Bream grounds their supernatural characters in emotional realism, May’s linework anchors this fantastical story in a detailed, realistic aesthetic. There’s a lightheartedness in her use of color that’s perfectly suited for a tale that never loses sight of its young characters’ optimism and hopefulness.

Another Kind is a magical graphic novel that movingly demonstrates the power of being different.

—Justin Barisich

★ The Secret Garden on 81st Street

For the reader who knows that if you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden receives a contemporary update in this thoughtful graphic novel.

Mary Lennox is a loner, and she likes it that way. She doesn’t have friends in her everyday life, but she makes up for it by immersing herself in technology, especially via her cell phone and online video games. Her parents, who both work in Silicon Valley, aren’t home much, which doesn’t help Mary’s isolation. When they’re killed in a tragic accident, Mary must go live with her uncle, whom she barely knows.

Uncle Archie keeps his New York City mansion tech-free, and Mary has an understandably hard time adjusting to his rules. But with help from her cousin, Colin, and her new friend Dickon, Mary begins to restore the rooftop garden at her uncle’s house. Gradually, Mary starts to acclimate to—and then thrive in—New York, working through her grief and forming meaningful connections along the way.

Adapting a beloved classic to a new form and setting is no small task, and it’s clear that author Ivy Noelle Weir and illustrator Amber Padilla did not take the challenge lightly. Their love for Burnett’s original novel shines through on every page and makes The Secret Garden on 81st Street a truly heartwarming experience. Padilla’s playful, cartoonlike style lends itself wonderfully to expressing the happiness and contentment that Mary slowly finds. Weir’s prose is refreshing and modern, with just enough nods to Burnett’s best-known lines to preserve the story’s classic roots.

Best of all, Weir revisits many of the themes of Burnett’s novel through a contemporary lens, approaching each character’s journey with sensitivity. Colin stays in his room all the time because of anxiety, while Uncle Archie is grieving the loss of his husband, Masahiro. These updates blend perfectly with some of the most powerful elements from the original story, such as the slow transformation of the garden and the ways that nature and human connection have the ability to heal us.

The Secret Garden on 81st Street is a beautiful and respectful new vision of a long-treasured tale.

—Hannah Lamb

Salt Magic

For the reader who would be more that willing to pay the hero’s price for a thrilling, out-of-this-world adventure

Hope Larson (A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel) teams up again with illustrator Rebecca Mock, her partner on Compass South, to create Salt Magic, an absorbing and fast-paced historical fantasy adventure.

There’s a hint of The Wizard of Oz to Salt Magic, which begins in our world, then launches its hero on a quest into a new, magical world before she finally returns home again. Twelve-year-old Vonceil is the youngest of five children on an Oklahoma farm in 1919. She is a determined and appealing character whose boredom and angst simmer on every page, perfectly conveyed through her many evocative facial expressions and especially her piercing eyes.

As the story opens, Vonceil’s beloved brother Elber has finally returned from World War I after two long years away. Physically and mentally, he’s a changed man, and he seems to have no time for the fun he used to share with his littlest sister. Vonceil feels more alone than ever when Elber marries his sweetheart, Amelia, a local girl. Before long, however, a mysterious, wealthy woman in white named Greda appears in their small town. Greda was Elber’s nurse and lover in Paris, and she is so enraged to learn that Elber has married someone else that she curses his family’s farm, turning all of their precious fresh water into salt water.

Vonceil feels responsible for Greda’s curse, having hoped that Elder would have a fabulous romance with someone from France and resented Amelia for marrying him instead. When she realizes that Greda is a salt witch, she sets out in the dark of night to try to make things right. So begins a fantastical journey that leads Vonceil to uncover not only Greda’s secrets but also numerous revelations about her own ancestors, culminating in a dangerous bargain to save the family farm and Elber’s life.

Mock’s illustrations make every enchanting, dangerous moment pop. Even a close-up of a seemingly simple handshake between Vonceil and Greta conveys the importance of their dire agreement. Other scenes expertly dramatize the desolate landscape Vonceil traverses, the inescapable power of the all-important salt crystals she discovers and the many strange creatures she encounters along the way.

Salt Magic is a feast of a tale that treats readers to an epic battle between evil forces and a courageous, persistent young hero.

—Alice Cary

Other Boys

For the reader who needs to hear that they are never as alone as they sometimes might feel

Damian Alexander’s debut graphic memoir, Other Boys, is a powerfully compelling portrait of a boy learning to understand and accept himself.

Damian has always felt different. He and his brother live with their grandmother in a small apartment, because when they were very young, their father murdered their mother. Damian has also always enjoyed things that he thinks boys shouldn’t like, such as dolls, flowers and tea parties. He’s repeatedly been told that he’s too “girly” to fit in with boys, but girls often excluded him from playing with them because he’s a boy. His struggle to understand where he belongs has followed him all the way to middle school.

As he starts seventh grade at a new school, Damian has decided that the best way to avoid being bullied is to give his classmates absolutely nothing to bully him about. Damian is not merely planning to speak only when spoken to or to keep his voice to a whisper; he’s not going to speak at all. To anyone. But his silence doesn’t go unnoticed, and his grandmother arranges for him to see a therapist. With the therapist’s help, Damian begins to understand that he isn’t weird, strange or wrong. Meanwhile, he’s also discovering that not all boys are bullies, and some are even, well, pretty cute. The only way that Damian will find his place is by staying true to himself and finally speaking up.

As he narrates in the voice of his seventh-grade self, Alexander skillfully uses flashbacks to fill in his personal history. His bright color palette balances the book’s darker elements, and his figures’ slightly enlarged faces keep readers focused on the emotion of each panel. Other Boys will be a life-changing read for any young person who is questioning their identity or searching for where they belong.

—Kevin Delecki

Find more 2021 gift recommendations from BookPage.

Just try to resist the charms of these delightful middle grade graphic novels, perfect for gifting.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

The Postmistress of Paris

Review by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

“I suppose I prefer being in the thick of it,” American heiress Nanée Gold explains when asked why she hasn’t fled the dangers of Nazi-occupied France. She’s a flamboyant, daring character who flies a Vega Gull airplane and entertains friends with her beloved dog, Dagobert, who barks ferociously whenever he hears the name “Hitler.”

In The Postmistress of Paris, Meg Waite Clayton fictionalizes the fascinating story of Mary Jayne Gold, a wealthy American socialite who spent the early years of World War II helping to finance and shelter 2,000 Jewish and anti-Nazi refugees near Marseille, France, and aiding in their escapes over the Pyrenees. Gold worked with American journalist Varian Fry as part of the Emergency Rescue Committee, obtaining fake passports and planning escape routes to Spain and Portugal for luminaries such as Marc Chagall and Hannah Arendt. Clayton is well versed in this era, having written bestsellers The Race for Paris, about two female American journalists in 1944 France, and The Last Train to London, about the Kindertransport rescue.

Clayton excels at creating fictional worlds, weaving historical details with lively dialogue and rich scene-setting details. Readers meet Nanée in 1938 as she flies into Paris on a freezing cold night, quickly swaps out her wool stockings for silk and throws on several strings of pearls. She’s headed to a surrealist art exhibition, where she sees the works of Salvador Dalí and plays party games with André Breton. Danger is at the doorstep, but life is a joyful whirlwind for Nanée—until the Nazis invade Paris, abruptly forcing her to escape to the countryside near Marseille, where she rents a villa to house her artist friends.

Nanée falls in love with fictional Jewish German photographer Edouard Moss, a widower with a young daughter named Luki. Much of the novel focuses on Nanée’s attempts to rescue Edouard from a French labor camp, reunite him with his daughter and get the pair out of the country. While Clayton superbly crafts banter, parlor games, romance and philosophical discussions among her cast of talented, intellectual characters, her writing is at its sharpest whenever Nanée faces great danger—which is often. Tension builds throughout the novel, culminating in a grueling, dangerous escape attempt that’s full of surprises. Fans of Kate Quinn and Kristin Hannah will want to dive right into The Postmistress of Paris.

Meg Waite Clayton superbly crafts banter, romance and philosophical discussions, but her writing is at its sharpest when Nanée faces danger—which is often.

Design, History, Nonfiction

Nonfiction History Design

Gift books that explore little-known, reexamined and secret histories

Feature by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

History fans have big treats in store this year, including groundbreaking books on American history and baseball, plus visual extravaganzas devoted to legendary women and design innovations. There are even lessons in how to survive a sea monster attack—because you just never know.

Relics

Relics: A History of the World Told in 133 Objects is my idea of the perfect coffee-table gift book. Billed as “four billion years in the palm of your hand,” it’s small enough not to be cumbersome, weighty enough to be substantial and full of colorful photos and intriguing text. Open it to any random page and get lost in the images of tiny relics and their histories, ranging from a 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid fragment to a tiny piece of Winston Churchill’s faux leopard-skin hand muff. (Poor circulation in his later years caused Churchill’s hands to get cold.) The book is part of the Mini Museum project, intended to share a collection of hand-held bits of wonders from around the world—a whole exhibition, Polly Pocket-style.

Young and old will be enticed by the variety of natural, historical and cultural tidbits, including a specimen of petrified lightning from the Sahara, a piece of a Martian meteorite, coal from the Titanic and a morsel of Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s wedding cake. Enjoy at your leisure, with no museum crowds invading your space.

★ Original Sisters

Award-winning artist Anita Kunz certainly made the most of her COVID-19 lockdown: She began researching and painting portraits of more than 150 extraordinary women from ancient times to the present, many whose stories have been lost to history or whose glory has been stolen by men. The result, Original Sisters: Portraits of Tenacity and Courage, brings these heroines to life in wonderfully bold portraits, each accompanied by a paragraphsummarizing her notable life. These portraits are so vivid that readers will feel as though they are meeting these women face-to-face—and believe me, you will feel their power.

You’ll recognize many women’s names, like Temple Grandin, Nina Simone and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but others may be new, such as Amanirenas, the partially blind African warrior queen who defeated Augustus Caesar. Patricia Bath, the first Black female ophthalmologist, invented a medical device to remove cataracts. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee was a Chinese American suffragist who led a parade on horseback in New York City to advocate for voting rights. A wonderful gift for friends, family or yourself, Original Sisters is an inspiring springboard for further study of these noteworthy souls.

★ The 1619 Project

For any lover of American history or letters, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story is a visionary work that casts a sweeping, introspective gaze over what many have aptly termed the country’s original sin: the moment in 1619, one year before the Mayflower arrived, when a ship docked at the colony of Virginia to deliver 20 to 30 enslaved people from Africa. While many books have addressed enslavement and its repercussions, few, if any, have done so in such an imaginative, all-encompassing way, incorporating history, journalism, fiction, poetry and photography to show the cataclysmic repercussions of that pivotal moment.

A superb expansion of the New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project” issue, this book contains 18 essays as well as 36 poems and stories that examine how slavery and its legacy of racial injustice have shaped the U.S. over the last 400 years. Each piece was curated by MacArthur “genius grant” winner Nikole Hannah-Jones, who pitched the original “1619 Project” to the Times and won the Pulitzer Prize for her contribution to it. The book’s many talented contributors include Ibram X. Kendi, Terry McMillan, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, ZZ Packer, Darryl Pinckney, Claudia Rankine, Jason Reynolds, Bryan Stevenson and Jesmyn Ward. Seven essays are new, and existing essays have been substantially revised and expanded to include additional details. Black-and-white portraits have also been added—both historical and present-day images—as another way of allowing readers to look history in the eye.

A new concluding essay from Hannah-Jones explores economic justice, and her wonderful preface is a special standout. It’s a powerful, personal essay in which she notes that she is “the daughter and granddaughter of people born onto a repurposed slave-labor camp in the deepest South, people who could not have imagined their progeny would one day rise to a position to bring forth such a project.”

The sheer breadth of this book is refreshing and illuminating, challenging each and every reader to confront America’s past, present and future.

‘The 1619 Project’ is excellent on audiobook. Read our starred review!

Make Good the Promises

As Hannah-Jones writes in The 1619 Project, “Slavery was mentioned briefly in the chapter on this nation’s most deadly war, and then Black people disappeared again for a full century, until magically reappearing as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a speech about a dream.” What happened in between? Make Good the Promises: Reclaiming Reconstruction and Its Legacies, edited by Kinshasha Holman Conwill and Paul Gardullo, attempts to fill in those gaps, leading readers through Black history from 1865 to today.

Presented by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the book has a beautifully rendered and highly accessible narrative that’s also methodically organized, with helpful timelines, colorful illustrations and photographs. The book does a particularly good job of laying out the long view of events and their consequences while shining a light on more recent incidents, such as #SayHerName, George Floyd’s murder and the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Make Good the Promises is a distressing yet essential, enlightening read.

How to Slay a Dragon

Medieval historian Cait Stevenson admits that she has sometimes “trampled over scholarly conventions in ways that will leave other medievalists curled up in agony.” But armed with her passion for the Middle Ages, she has carved out a unique niche for herself, straddling the worlds of scholarly and popular history. Her fervor is contagious in How to Slay a Dragon: A Fantasy Hero’s Guide to the Real Middle Ages.

In a tongue-in-cheek but firmly historical way, Stevenson addresses the stereotypical events that happen in popular media set in and inspired by the Middle Ages, like saving a princess, digging for treasure, slaying a dragon and defeating barbarian hordes. Her writing is informative yet humorous (there’s a chapter titled “How to Not Get Eaten”), so even if you’re not a gamer or “Game of Thrones” fan, you’ll find yourself riveted. In a section on bathing, she notes, “Twelfth-century abbess and prophet Hildegard of Bingen went so far as to suggest that natural hot springs were heated by the underground fires of purgatory, cleansing bathers’ souls as well as their bodies.” Stevenson may not be able to tell you where to find real dragons, but readers will have a blast getting ready for their quests.

★ The Baseball 100

Major League Baseball fans, you just won the lottery. In The Baseball 100, noted sports writer Joe Posnanski presents 880 pages of sheer baseball bliss, discussing the history of the game by examining the lives, obstacles and achievements of his nominations for the 100 greatest players of all time, including MLB stars and players from the Negro Leagues. It’s a true masterwork, and his writing is so good that it’s likely to engross even those who know nothing about the sport.

Avid baseball fans will easily become absorbed in these pages, and when they reemerge, they’ll be all too ready to debate Posnanski’s rankings. He’s prepared for this, writing, “I stand firmly behind them, and I expect you to come hard at me with vigorous disagreements. What fun would it be otherwise?” In fact, the author even teases, “I have a list of more than 100 players who could have made this list. I think I’ll save them in case the Baseball 100 ever needs a volume 2.” Perhaps he’d better start writing now.

Patented

At over 1,000 pages, Patented: 1,000 Design Patents is thicker than an old phone book but much more fun to thumb through. Architectural designer Thomas Rinaldi frequently found himself getting lost in “odd internet searches” of design patents, eventually realizing that he was uncovering “a design historian’s El Dorado, a proverbial rabbit hole of unfathomable depth.” He sifted through more than 750,000 patents issued from 1900 to the present to come up with this collection of visual treats.

The patents are presented chronologically, with line drawings and key information such as the date and designer’s name. It’s an interesting mix of many universally owned, everyday objects—ranging from teapots to barbecue grills, from salt and pepper shakers to the Fitbit—along with patents for much larger things, such as Pizza Huts and Boeing airplanes, unusual entries like the Mars Rover and famous designs like Eames chairs.

For some, this will become a trusted reference, but Patented will also appeal to historians, engineers and kids interested in how things used to look, plus anyone passionate about design, innovation and technology. One could even turn the pages and play a “name that item” game. Some are a cinch to guess, while others, like a 1930 “ozonizing apparatus,” will likely leave you stumped. Once you start browsing, however, you may find yourself hooked.

Find more 2021 gift recommendations from BookPage.

History fans have big treats in store this year, including groundbreaking gift books on American history and baseball, plus visual extravaganzas devoted to legendary women and design innovations.

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Alice Cary

★ Born on the Water

★ A History of Me

Words to Make a Friend

★ Friends Are Friends, Forever

Birds on Wishbone Street

★ Tiny Reindeer

The Christmas Owl

Zee Grows a Tree

★ The Book of Hope

The Lightmaker’s Manifesto

★ The Matter of Black Lives

Chicken Soup for the Soul: I’m Speaking Now

Shedding the Shackles

Marshmallow & Jordan

Another Kind

★ The Secret Garden on 81st Street

Salt Magic

Other Boys

Relics

★ Original Sisters

★ The 1619 Project

Make Good the Promises

How to Slay a Dragon

★ The Baseball 100

Patented

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