Life takes an unexpected turn for the worse for seventh grader Aafiyah Qamar, the Pakistani American protagonist of Reem Faruqi’s novel in verse, Golden Girl.
Until recently, Aafiyah’s life was golden. She’s close with her best friend, Zaina. She’s earned a spot on the school tennis team, and her family has plenty of money. She adores compiling facts from Weird But True! books published by National Geographic such as, “Most people hide their valuables in their sock drawers”—information that Aafiyah would be better off not knowing.
Aafiyah begins taking things that don’t belong to her by accident, but then she is lured by the thrill: “I borrow things, / sort of like a library book. / I usually bring them back, / except sometimes / I don’t.” The stakes with her “itchy fingers” get higher. First, she swipes Zaina’s pineapple-scented pink lip gloss, and later, her teacher Ms. Sullivan’s cherished rainbow catcher.
While Aafiyah struggles to manage her compulsion and her feelings of shame, a disgruntled employee falsely accuses her father of embezzlement, and he is detained in Dubai on the way home from a family trip. Meanwhile, Aafiyah’s grandfather has traveled from Pakistan to Atlanta to receive chemotherapy. Suddenly, both Aafiyah’s father’s and grandfather’s welfare are on the line, and her family’s finances are strained. Everything seems on the brink of spiraling out of control when Aafiyah hatches a harebrained scheme to help, but it leads to devastating consequences.
This skillfully imagined novel is immediately absorbing. Faruqi’s lilting lines have plenty to savor, but her pages turn quickly, drawing readers easily into Aafiyah’s story. In spare but carefully chosen words, Faruqi builds a complex drama. All of the relationships, from Aafiyah’s friendship with Zaina to her relationships with her parents, her grandfather and her fellow tennis players, ring with authenticity and emotion.
Faruqi portrays Aafiyah’s struggle with kleptomania exceptionally well, including her mother’s firm but supportive response, but Golden Girl also treats other subjects with nuance and care. When Aafiyah accompanies her grandfather to his chemotherapy infusions, Faruqi offers a realistic but sensitive and hopeful depiction of a serious illness, and her incorporation of the Qamars’ Muslim faith and Pakistani heritage is just as skilled. A helpful glossary and a recipe for Aafiyah’s aloo gosht, a goat curry, add sparkle to a book that’s already solid gold.
Faruqi is the author of several picture books, including Amira’s Picture Day and I Can Help, as well as a middle grade novel in verse, Unsettled. Golden Girl cements her place as one of the brightest rising stars in children’s literature.
In Golden Girl, an absorbing novel in verse anchored in authentic, emotional relationships, Aafiyah can’t stop taking things that don’t belong to her.
By now, Karen Joy Fowler’s husband knows what to expect when his wife starts writing a book, like the bestselling The Jane Austen Book Club or the Booker Prize finalist We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. She will lament, “Oh, it’s never been so hard,” and he will remind her: “You did say that last time. And the time before that, you know.”
“Is it possible that every book is harder than the one before?” Fowler wonders, speaking from her home in Santa Cruz, California. “Or do you just not remember? I don’t have an answer to that question.”
As she does in her writing, Fowler laces her conversations with curiosity, humor and reflection. You can practically hear her good-natured wheels turning as she discusses her latest novel, Booth, an immersive, behind-the-scenes account of the years leading up to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre in 1865, by way of an investigation into the family of assassin John Wilkes Booth. The Booths were a famous theatrical family celebrated for their Shakespearian performances, especially father Junius and brother Edwin, whose 1893 funeral was described as one of “the most remarkable ever held in New York City” by the New York Times.
“As much as I am trying to argue that he is not the most interesting person in this family, I know that the narrative tension in the book is all because of John Wilkes Booth.”
Despite such a wealth of source material, and despite her husband’s reassurances, writing this book was particularly difficult for Fowler. Her despair over gun violence in the United States prompted her to choose this topic, but she didn’t want to focus on the assassin. Instead, she was interested in exploring the culpability and guilt of the Booth parents and siblings. How to achieve this delicate balance, “from the words, to the conception, to the way the book was organized,” was something Fowler “grappled with on nearly every page.”
Now she passes that same conundrum along to her readers. “I would not have written this book if John Wilkes had not killed Abraham Lincoln,” she says. “As much as I am trying to argue that he is not the most interesting person in this family, I know that the narrative tension in the book is all because of John Wilkes Booth.”
Even the book’s title is problematic. “It actually should be Booths—plural,” Fowler says, “but that’s just so hard to say. I knew that at least in America, if you saw a book entitled Booth, you would think this is a book about John Wilkes Booth. Which is exactly what I didn’t want you thinking!”
This is one of the primary reasons why the novel doesn’t depict Lincoln’s shooting in real time. “I didn’t want to imagine what John Wilkes Booth was thinking [in that moment]. First of all, I can’t—my imagination doesn’t stretch that far. But it’s still very painful to see that turning point in our history, to wonder what might have been.”
One passage in the novel, in fact, enumerates the many close calls with death John Wilkes had throughout his life, even before he carried out his tragic deed. “It was something that really struck me when I did the research,” Fowler explains. “[His death] would have been devastating for his family, but so much better for everyone else.”
The Booth clan has long fascinated Fowler, and she has featured various family members in three short stories, including “Standing Room Only,” which is about time travelers who journey to witness Lincoln’s death. A science fiction fan, Fowler was frustrated by the many stories she read in which time travelers seem to go undetected by those they encounter. “I thought, obviously not, it won’t be that way at all,” she says. “They’ll just be like tourists everywhere. I live in a tourist town, and I can spot the tourists. And then I went from that to thinking, well, there will be destination holidays, and one of them, unfortunately, will be the Lincoln assassination.”
Research, she muses, “is probably the closest we will come to time travel,” and from the start of creating Booth, she had mountains to sift through. A godsend came in the form of biographer Terry Alford, author of Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth, which Fowler calls “magnificent,” and the forthcoming In the Houses of Their Dead: The Lincolns, the Booths, and the Spirits. Alford’s biography features unique details, so Fowler reached out to ask a few questions. “He’s been researching this family for 30 years, and he sent me piles of research that would’ve taken me months and months to find on my own, if ever,” she says. “It was just mind-bogglingly generous.”
John Wilkes Booth was born in 1838, the ninth of 10 children. In 1822, his parents, Junius and Mary Ann Booth, emigrated from England to Bel Air, Maryland, where they bought 150 acres and moved a small log cabin onto the property. Junius, an alcoholic who was at times mentally unstable, was often away on tour, leaving his wife—with the help of enslaved men and women—to tend to farming and maintaining the home. The family faced poverty, hunger and disease; four of the 10 children died. Fowler portrays these ordeals with startling immediacy, especially from the perspective of young Rosalie, who watches “the household collapse into madness” and communes with the ghosts of her dead siblings.
Karen Joy Fowler, author of Booth
“I’ve had dreams about the place,” Fowler says. “In my dreams, the barn is there, and the slave cabins are there. It’s clearly a metaphor for doing research. The property [in my dreams] was beautiful, but I had a sense of menace, that something was very wrong and that it was a dangerous place to be.”
Junius eventually had a larger home, named Tudor Hall, built on the property. It’s now a museum on a fairly small lot surrounded by other houses. “There’s a lovely group of people who maintain it,” Fowler says. “It seems the ghosts have been purged.”
The name Tudor Hall is something of a touchstone, since Fowler’s love of historical fiction was inspired by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, about Thomas Cromwell and the court of King Henry VIII. “I blame Hilary Mantel for the fact that [Booth] is in present tense,” Fowler says. “Wolf Hall was so powerful that somehow Hilary Mantel has persuaded me that this is how you write a historical novel.”
Indeed, readers will feel as though they’re watching events transpire in real time, with different sections told from the perspectives of not only Rosalie but also brother Edwin and sister Asia. Information about Edwin was plentiful due to his acting career, but Asia also left behind a valuable resource. In 1874, she wrote a secret memoir about her infamous brother, though it wasn’t published until 1938, long after her death. Fowler calls Asia “an incredible woman, but hard to like. . . . I would probably have wanted to make her more likable if her own words hadn’t condemned her in certain ways.” (For instance, although Asia disapproved of John Wilkes’ crime, she blamed Lincoln for going to the theater that night.) Photographs of Asia, however, continue to bewilder the author. “Nobody talks about Asia Booth without mentioning what a beauty she was,” Fowler says, “and you look at the pictures, and you just think, what are they talking about?”
Rosalie, in contrast, remains a cipher, with few details available. She never married and had some sort of “infirmity,” widely commented on but never specified. “Every time Rosalie’s name comes up, you hear, ‘What an invalid she is, poor Rose,’” Fowler laments. But these gaps in Rosalie’s history proved useful. “There was a little more freedom to imagine who she might be. She’s pretty much made up, although the things that happened to her are not. I cannot tell you how delighted I was to discover that she had a romance with a lion tamer!”
“I blame Hilary Mantel for the fact that [Booth] is in present tense.”
Although Fowler says she is always on the hunt for such “small details that I hope will bring the world more to life,” she also keeps a bigger picture in mind. When she first began to write Booth, she was primarily focused on issues of gun violence, but the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump caused a shift in the story’s significance. “I wasn’t really thinking about the Civil War, the ongoing legacy of white supremacy and the various ways in which that war has just never ended in this country,” Fowler says. “And yet, as I wrote, those things seemed more evident to me than the fact that John Wilkes Booth had a gun.”
By the time of the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Fowler had completed her manuscript. “To watch the Confederate flag being carried into the Capitol was just terrifying and heart-wrenching, having just immersed myself in what that flag meant,” she says. “I couldn’t turn the television off. I sat and watched the footage in real time, and just couldn’t believe it.”
There’s a similar sense of horror in Fowler’s visceral descriptions of how various Booth family members react to the news of John Wilkes’ horrific act: “Edwin’s first thought is not a thought, more like a blow to the head, a sense of falling, the crashing of the sea in his ears. His second thought is that he believes it. He wishes he didn’t.”
There were several post-assassination details that Fowler had to omit from the novel—such as the fact that Ford’s Theatre collapsed during Edwin’s funeral, killing 22 people. “Maybe there needs to be a second book,” she says. “Something short—a slender, poetic novel dealing with their later lives.”
After all, Fowler says, “History is full of fabulous stories.” Fabulous, provocative, challenging and necessary—such is the story of Booth.
Photos of Karen Joy Fowler by Nathan Quintanilla
In her eighth novel, Karen Joy Fowler offers a wholly original perspective on American history through the story of John Wilkes Booth’s family.
There’s an adage that says a rising tide lifts all boats. These three picture books introduce women who improved not only the lives of those around them but also the lives of generations to come.
One Wish
Fatima al-Fihri was born around 800 A.D. in what is now Tunisia, but her spirit leaps across the centuries and jumps off the page from the very first sentence of M.O. Yuksel’s lyrical recounting of her life. “Fatima craved knowledge like desert flowers crave rain,” she writes.
As readers will learn in One Wish: Fatima al-Fihri and the World’s Oldest University, al-Fihri was tutored at home, since only boys attended school. That didn’t stop al-Fihri from dreaming of creating a school where everyone was welcome. “She stood tall, determined, and strong, carrying her wish inside her.” This sentiment captures al-Fihri’s drive and becomes the book’s refrain. Drawing on a scant historical record, Yuksel crafts a fully realized portrait of the woman credited with founding the University of al-Qarawiyyin, one of the oldest continuously operating institutions of higher education in the world.
Mariam Quraishi’s stellar illustrations evoke al-Fihri’s vibrant world, from the lively, loud souq filled with vendors, shoppers and workers to the sweltering sun that shines down on the builders as they turn al-Fihri’s dream into a reality. Greens, purples, reds and yellows pop against a sandy-colored desert background. A dark blue night sky is particularly striking on a spread in which war forces young al-Fihri and her family to flee Tunisia for the safety of Morocco. Years later, as a now-grown al-Fihri hunches over architectural plans and carefully chooses mosaic tiles, Quraishi frames the scene from overhead, an unusual but effective choice.
Yuksel skillfully portrays the role that al-Fihri’s Muslim faith, with its value of charity, played in shaping her dream. “Fatima knew the best way to help her community was to build a school where students, especially the poor and the refugees, could live and study for free.” The book’s back matter includes a detailed timeline of notable events in the history of al-Qarawiyyin University as well as a discussion of the school’s ongoing mission, all of which offer fodder for lively conversations about education through the centuries.
One Wish is an eye-opening account about a little-known woman’s amazing wish for education for all.
Fall Down Seven Times, Stand Up Eight
In 2002, a joint resolution of the U.S. Congress renamed Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972, a law that prohibits federally funded educational organization from discriminating on the basis of sex. Title IX is now officially known as the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act.
Jen Bryant and Toshiki Nakamura exuberantly bring the story of Mink and her many accomplishments to life in Fall Down Seven Times, Stand Up Eight: Patsy Takemoto Mink and the Fight for Title IX. After becoming the first woman of color elected to Congress, Mink co-sponsored a bill that would require schools to treat men and women equally.
Bryant excels at giving a sense of the broad sweep of history that Mink witnessed throughout her life. She grew up in Hawaii amid the Great Depression, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the campaign for Hawaii to achieve statehood and more. She also faced numerous obstacles, including frequent discrimination because of her gender and her Japanese heritage.
Bryant roots Mink’s determination in two lessons Mink learned as a child: one based on the Japanese proverb that serves as the book’s title and one derived from the tradition of the Daruma doll. Nakamura’s energetic illustrations show young Mink learning to paint one of the Daruma doll’s eyes to signify setting a new goal, then painting the other eye after achieving her goal. Nakamura, who has worked for Netflix Animation and DreamWorks TV, has a lively and approachable style, whether he’s portraying Mink frolicking through fields of sugarcane, joining her family as they listen to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fireside radio chats or rallying support for civil rights as she forcefully addresses the 1960 Democratic National Convention.
Fall Down Seven Times, Stand Up Eight transforms Mink’s life of political achievement into a rousing quest for justice and equality. Her story of nonstop perseverance will resonate with young readers and inspire them to continue working to reach their own goals.
★ Sanctuary
“Who decides who gets the condo and who gets the cardboard box?” is a question Kip Tiernan asked the world. Sanctuary: Kip Tiernan and Rosie’s Place, the Nation’s First Shelter for Women is the informative story of Tiernan’s life as an advocate for people experiencing homelessness.
Author Christine McDonnell, who has taught English to immigrants at Rosie’s Place, adeptly conveys the narrative arc of Tiernan’s life. She explains how Tiernan was raised during the Great Depression by her grandmother, who always shared food with anyone who knocked on her door and even donated her son’s shoes to a man who needed them. “In her grandmother’s kitchen, Kip learned to be generous and to care about others,” McDonnell writes.
As an adult in the late 1960s, Tiernan sold her advertising business and began working at Warwick House, a charitable organization. In 1974, she opened Rosie’s Place in Boston after seeing women disguise themselves as men to try to obtain food and temporary housing, since shelters didn’t accept women.
Victoria Tentler-Krylov’s atmospheric illustrations draw readers into Tiernan’s surroundings with immediacy and emotion. Shades of gray dominate early scenes of hungry people huddling in the snow, thankfully breathing in the steam from bowls of Tiernan’s grandmother’s soup. Tiernan’s pale pink dress and attentive gaze provides a contrast to the dreariness and adds a splash of color and hope.
Readers who linger over Tentler-Krylov’s attention to detail will be richly rewarded. Granny’s old-fashioned kitchen brims with all sorts of gadgets, and the Depression-era fashions parading down the sidewalks outside her house are a visual feast. As Tiernan’s dedication to uplifting the lives of others grows, so does the amount of color within the book’s spreads, whether it’s through orange carrots and green vegetables on a nourishing plate or the bright stripes and floral prints worn by the women at Rosie’s Place.
Extensive back matter rounds out the book. McDonnell offers a brief but focused exploration of past and present causes of homelessness and a number of inspiring quotations from Tiernan herself, some of which are included on a memorial to Tiernan unveiled in Boston’s Copley Square in 2018. Sanctuary would sit comfortably on a shelf alongside titles such as Diane O’Neill and Brizida Magro’s Saturday at the Food Pantry and Jillian Tamaki’s Our Little Kitchen.
This thoughtful book conveys a powerful, important message: “When you listen to others, you show respect; you learn who they are and what they need.”
In these three picture books, meet women who sought to lift others up and transformed their dreams into lasting change.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor called Constance Baker Motley “one of my favorite people,” and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg credited Motley with showing her and others of her generation “that law and courts could become positive forces in achieving our nation’s highest aspiration.” However, far too few Americans know Motley’s name or her legacy, and that dearth of recognition struck Harvard professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin as “a kind of historical malpractice.” She hopes to right this wrong with her meticulously researched, fascinating biography, Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality.
The fact that Motley became such a civil rights legend is ironic, given that her father said he “couldn’t stand American blacks.” Her mother, meanwhile, advised Motley to become a hairdresser. Regal, stately and tall, Motley was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1921 to parents who had emigrated from the Caribbean island of Nevis. Despite her family’s poverty, she was raised to think of herself as “superior to others—to African Americans in particular.” Nonetheless, living in the shadow of Yale University, she received an excellent education and developed an intense interest in racial inequality. In the end, Motley spent her life trying to improve “the lives of the very people [her father] had spent a lifetime castigating.”
Motley’s trailblazing career included work as a lawyer, politician and federal judge, and at every stage of her incredible journey, readers will feel as though they have a backstage pass. Brown-Nagin excels at packing in intriguing minute details while still making them easily understood, as well as at contextualizing each scene historically. Thurgood Marshall became Motley’s mentor on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and she played a crucial role in litigating Brown v. Board of Education. The sweep of history Motley inhabited is full of many such significant moments: visiting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in jail in Georgia; serving as James Meredith’s lawyer as he fought for admission to the University of Mississippi; having a heated televised debate with Malcolm X and more. She was the first Black woman to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing 10 cases and winning nine of them. Later, she was the first Black woman to become a New York state senator, as well as the first Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary.
While Motley’s storied career is precisely explored, readers may still feel at arm’s length from the woman herself. This may be due to the fact that Motley was a notably reserved woman, although by all accounts warm and engaging. As Brown-Nagin explains, Motley cultivated an “unperturbable demeanor out of the often unfriendly, if not downright hostile, environments she encountered as a result of being a first. Through these qualities, she protected herself; only a select few could peek behind her mask.”
Motley spent years paving the way for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and later as a judge, she helped implement it in a variety of areas. Civil Rights Queen is the unforgettable story of a legal pioneer who changed the course of history, superbly elucidated by Brown-Nagin.
Harvard professor Tomiko Brown-Nagin finally gives Constance Baker Motley, a legal pioneer who steered the civil rights movement, the recognition she deserves.
A haunted, decaying mansion. A cemetery that’s being disinterred. Dead souls that seem to come back to life and beckon to teenage twin sisters separated at birth. These are just a few of the wonderfully mysterious elements in Mirror Girls, Kelly McWilliams’ second YA novel.
As if slowly building terror and suspense weren’t enough, the book is also an exceptional work of historical fiction set in 1953 Eureka, Georgia. McWilliams’ genre blending works remarkably well, although perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise, since the days of segregation and lynchings were a horror show. What better way to confront this era than with a horror story?
As in McWilliams’ first book, Agnes at the End of the World, two sisters narrate Mirror Girls. Charlie and Magnolia are born in 1936 to Marie, who is Black, and Dean, the wealthy white heir to Heathwood Plantation. Their young parents are murdered as they drive north to be married, leaving behind their infant daughters. Marie’s mother takes darker-skinned Charlie to live in Harlem, where she becomes a civil rights activist. Meanwhile, Dean’s mother raises light-skinned Magnolia as a privileged white Southern belle in their crumbling plantation. The girls have no idea about each other’s existence until Charlie brings her dying Nana back to Eureka, setting the plot explosively in motion.
Once Magnolia learns that she is Black, she realizes that she will have to choose between continuing to live a lie or embracing her heritage as well as her twin sister. Her choice becomes a matter of life and death: After Grandmother Heathwood dies, Magnolia is unable to eat, drink or see her own reflection in a mirror. This is an effective device; as Charlie notes, “It never ceases to haunt me—the unpredictable ways colored folk are reflected in a white eye.”
McWilliams is an excellent stage manager, pacing the action well and keeping the stakes high. The sisters’ alternating voices immerse readers in what life was like during Jim Crow for both white and Black people, and Magnolia’s emerging consciousness is especially well done. A few characters, including Grandmother Heathwood and Magnolia’s beau, Finch, sometimes seem stereotypical; however, even they ultimately have a few surprises up their sleeves.
Mirror Girls is a spine-tingling, empowering look at justice and civil action that urges readers to be aware, to be true to themselves and to take action. As Magnolia observes, “As twin sisters, white and Black, we are a symbol of coming victory. A promise of change.”
This story of biracial twin sisters separated at birth and the reckoning that comes when they reunite is a remarkable blend of historical fiction and horror.
“I write about foods with a strong sense of place,” notes a character in Black Cake. The same could be said about its debut author, Charmaine Wilkerson, whose exquisitely paced family drama begins on a small unnamed Caribbean island in 1965 and quickly shifts to 2018, where it makes stops in London, Scotland, California and Rome. Readers will quickly find themselves immersed in a mysterious, gripping journey, one that unfolds in brief but bountiful chapters and even includes a suspected murder.
When Eleanor Bennett dies in 2018, she leaves a recording with her lawyer, instructing her two adult children to listen to its full eight hours together. Her son, Byron, is a renowned ocean scientist working on mapping the ocean floor, and his sister, Benny, is a bit of a lost soul who left the family eight years ago. “You children need to know about your family, about where we come from, about how I really met your father,” Eleanor says. “You two need to know about your sister.”
This revelation is shocking; Byron and Benny had no idea that such a sister existed. In addition to her deathbed message, Eleanor has also left a black cake in the freezer for Benny and Byron to share “when the time is right.” The confection, a Caribbean version of plum pudding, is a family favorite and figures prominently—and creatively—throughout the novel.
The sea is a strong presence in Black Cake, its hidden depths paralleling the many veiled events of Eleanor’s past. The innate pull of the ocean, especially warm Caribbean waters, influences and transforms several of Wilkerson’s characters. As the family lawyer muses about Eleanor’s oceanographer son, he says, “The oceans are a challenge. And what about a person’s life? How do you make a map of that?” In Eleanor’s case, that map is full of surprises, and Wilkerson skillfully charts its course, showing “how untold stories shape people’s lives, both when they are withheld and when they are revealed.”
Wilkerson navigates multiple points of view and time frames while addressing—always with just the right touch—issues of domestic violence, race, sexual identity, colonialism, prejudice and more. Fans of family dramas by Ann Patchett, Brit Bennett and Karen Joy Fowler should take note. Black Cake marks the launch of a writer to watch, one who masterfully plumbs the unexpected depths of the human heart.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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