Linda M. Castellitto

As Christina Wyman’s heartfelt and often heartbreakingly realistic Jawbreaker opens, Maximillia (Max) Plink receives distressing news from her orthodontist.

Dr. Watson says Max’s braces aren’t enough to prevent possible future double jaw surgery—it’s time to start wearing headgear known as “the jawbreaker” for 16 hours a day. It’s yet another thing that makes Max, a witty and kind seventh grader, feel like an outsider in her own life. She observes, “I basically have a shiny metal orb around my head. You could probably stand me on the roof of your house to get a better Wi-Fi signal.”

Despite this unwelcome fashion statement, Max perseveres. She’s used to trying to stay positive, because she’s already relentlessly bullied at school. The most enthusiastic participant in this cruelty is her own younger sister, Alex. Their parents routinely downplay Max’s concerns. Worried about finances, they’re having loud arguments more frequently than usual.

Thankfully, Max finds respite with her best friend Shrynn and as a writer for her school newspaper. When she learns of a journalism competition sponsored by their local Brooklyn news station, it sounds like the path to a happier future. But there’s a catch: A video essay is required for entry. “The thought of my face, my mouth, my teeth living online until the end of time makes me want to cry,” Max thinks.

Tantalizing suspense builds as the contest deadline approaches. As Max contends with all the stressors swirling around her, she wrestles with difficult questions: Should she insist her parents do something about Alex? Would it be a mistake to enter the contest and show her face to the world? Why is Shrynn acting so standoffish lately?

Wyman demonstrates an impressive ability to conjure up both the pain and delight of middle school with immediacy and empathy. An impassioned author’s note reveals that Wyman’s own background inspired this sometimes harrowing, but ultimately hopeful, story. “Sometimes finding joy takes a lot of work,” she notes. Reading Jawbreaker is an excellent and highly gratifying start.

Christina Wyman demonstrates an impressive ability to conjure up both the pain and the delight of middle school with immediacy and empathy.

Kids (and whimsical adults) often wonder what it would be like if inanimate objects came to life. Thanks to Leigh Hodgkinson’s The Princess and the (Greedy) Pea (Candlewick, $17.99, 9781536231328), they can marvel at a tiny vegetable who becomes voraciously self-aware.

One moment, the titular pea is just one among many heaped in a beautiful decorative bowl. The next, he’s standing with arms aloft declaring, “I am SO hungry!” But he doesn’t just have a little snack; no, he gulps down a Brussels sprout and makes his way down an elaborate banquet table, hoovering up all the food he encounters with hilariously messy results. 

Hodgkinson, who is known for her work on the British children’s TV shows “Charlie and Lola” and “Olobob Top,” as well as numerous books such as Troll Swap, has created a visual feast of a picture book replete with vibrant colors, intricate patterns and expressive characters, such as the observant cat, who gapes at the pea’s antics—which include comical repurposing of the lacy tablecloth. 

Inspired by “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly,” The Princess and the (Greedy Pea) is also a cumulative rhyme. The text grows (along with the pea) as the pages turn, adding lines such as “It made him sneeze / when he guzzled the CHEESE” onto the refrain “Without a doubt / he swallowed a sprout. / What’s that about?” 

The fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea” is folded in as well: It turns out a purple-clad princess was anticipating the feast. Alas, the louche legume has consumed nearly every crumb and left behind a graveyard of broken crockery, so the frustrated princess must go to bed hungry. But her bed is so uncomfortable! Kids will crack up when they realize why. The Princess and the (Greedy) Pea is a slyly funny, wonderfully rendered reimagining of children’s classics that will have kids clamoring for a reread—and a giant bowl of green peas, too.

The Princess and the (Greedy) Pea is a slyly funny, wonderfully rendered reimagining of children’s classics that will have kids clamoring for a reread—and a giant bowl of green peas, too.

Spencer Quinn’s Chet & Bernie Mystery books have delightfully punny titles like The Sound and the Furry and Tender is the Bite; the 14th installment in the bestselling series is no exception. In the Christmas-themed Up on the Woof Top, the twosome trade Arizona sand for Colorado snow when they’re hired for a most unusual case.

For the uninitiated: Chet the dog and Bernie Little of the Little Detective Agency are business partners and best friends. Chet may adore Slim Jims, but there’s nothing he loves more than the man he sweetly calls “my Bernie” throughout his often hilarious stream-of-consciousness narration. (To Chet, metaphors are baffling, tantalizing aromas are distracting and other animals are suspect: “I’ve had some experience with sheep, none good.”) 

As Up on the Woof Top opens, the duo are attending a book signing with Dame Ariadne Carlise, a globally bestselling mystery author promoting her 99th book. Enchanted by Chet and intrigued by Bernie, Ariadne dispatches her assistant, Chaz, to hire them for the urgent job of helping Ariadne break her writer’s block by finding her muse, Rudy. 

It’s a curious assignment: Rudy’s a reindeer who went missing from Ariadne’s ranch the day after Thanksgiving. Ariadne’s been keeping her struggles a secret, but Christmas and the deadline for book 100 are fast approaching, and her career and reputation hang in the balance.

At Kringle Ranch, faux snow is plentiful and a wreath-shaped blimp hovers in the sky, but underneath the manufactured merriment lurks great danger. Chaz is discovered grievously injured at the bottom of the Devil’s Purse gorge, where Ariadne’s boyfriend, Teddy, was found murdered decades before. Is Chaz’s situation related to Teddy’s demise? Will the (notably ill-tempered) sheriffs present and former help an investigation led by outsiders? And what does Rudy have to do with all of this?

A seemingly straightforward, albeit strange, tracking assignment evolves into a multilayered investigation as Chet and Bernie race against time to find the missing reindeer and unravel the truth about Chaz’s injuries and Teddy’s death. Tense interrogations, gripping action scenes and clever detective work make Up on the Woof Top an engaging, entertaining holiday treat.

Detecting duo Chet & Bernie (Chet’s a dog, Bernie is his owner) must find a crime novelist’s missing reindeer in Spencer Quinn’s clever and entertaining Christmas mystery.

Insider deputy editor Walt Hickey won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting and Commentary. His wide-ranging, captivating You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything makes it easy to see why.

The average American spends three-plus hours a day consuming media. “Across a lifetime,” Hickey writes, “that’s 22 percent of our time on Earth!” No wonder we’re curious about how media affects us. He asserts that, contrary to those who consider our favorite media a “bogeyman, a brain melter, a violence inciter, a waste,” it actually is “complex, fascinating, and often rather good.”

Hickey fascinates as he demystifies pop culture, sharing the outcomes of his experiments and studies. He’s a data journalist, and cheeky and informative visuals—charts, graphs, maps and little photos of famous people’s heads—bolster his pro-pop-culture assertions and illuminate personal stories, such as when he subjected his nervous system to a “Jaws” rewatch to discern which scenes most affected him. Colorful charts like “Movies Make People Exhale the Same Chemicals at the Same Times” bring his research into focus. He notes that when “The Hunger Games” film debuted in 2012, USA Archery’s merchandise sales quintupled. Similarly, the premieres of 1943’s “Lassie Come Home” and 1992’s “Beethoven” were both followed by spikes in the popularity of collies and Saint Bernards.

The author’s keen eye for detail and ability to see connections across genres enliven the narrative beyond theory and talking points. From the WWE to the Tax Reform Act of 1976, Scooby-Doo to geopolitics, Hickey offers a bounty of enthusiasm for our favorite stories.

Pulitzer Prize winner Walt Hickey champions pop culture with a cornucopia of studies, experiments and visuals in You Are What You Watch.

Dear reader, when you go on a road trip, do you stop only for food, gas and bathroom breaks? Or do you embrace detours to local oddities, historical sites and scenic overlooks? 

Your answer will likely inform whether you’ll enjoy MSNBC news producer Dann McDorman’s unusual debut mystery, West Heart Kill. Will you deem it an exercise in delayed gratification with a side of lectures? Or a refreshing—nay, daring—metafictional take on the murder mystery? 

West Heart Kill is definitely ambitious and absolutely entertaining. The year is 1976, the place is the private West Heart hunting club in upstate New York, and the detective is private investigator Adam McAnnis, there for a visit with his friend James Blake. The Blakes and the club’s other member families, all beneficiaries of generational wealth, are gathering to celebrate the Fourth of July. There shall be fine dining, hunting, swimming and a smattering of adultery.

But really, McAnnis is there at the behest of a mysterious client who’s hired the detective to ferret out conspiracies against him. West Heart has conflict aplenty: the aforementioned adultery, a proposal to sell the club and painfully unresolved resentments. McAnnis observes it all and, when a woman is found dead, a dark and stormy night serves as dramatic backdrop to multiple interrogations and indignant protestations, additional deaths and scandalous revelations. 

McDorman does an excellent job of peeling the onion-like layers of his detective tale, carefully doling out surprises as the pages turn. It’s his penchant for digression that might prove controversial: He repeatedly pauses his story to contemplate literary conventions, sample different formats and interrogate the work of Sophocles, Agatha Christie, et al. He also playfully points out when he’s employing genre tropes like “the Great Detective Pondering the Case.” 

As the author notes while wearing his second-person-narrator hat (he dons first- and third-person chapeaux, too), “The mystery, virtually since its inception, has invited rule-making and rule-breaking.” McDorman embraces that notion in a way that I, dear reader, found archly amusing. The journey, while meandering and sometimes confounding, had its own pleasing element of suspense: Wherever will he detour to next? West Heart Kill is an off-roading mashup of fact and fiction that will have readers asking “Are we there yet?” with varying degrees of enthusiasm and buy-in—and thus is sure to spawn exceptionally lively book club debates.

Dann McDorman’s extremely meta mystery, West Heart Kill, is sure to spawn exceptionally lively book club debates.

The Hidden Language of Cats

Sarah Brown knows and loves felines: She has a doctorate in the social behavior of neutered domestic cats, and the dedication page of her new book simply reads, “For the cats.”

Those who said “Aww!” at that information will delight in Brown’s The Hidden Language of Cats: How They Have Us at Meow. It’s a fascinating compendium of scientific information about our furry friends’ modes of communication interwoven with interesting anecdotes about Brown’s 30 years of fieldwork (plus her own cats’ hijinks at home).

Brown traces the history of cats’ evolution from solitary wildcats to the creatures who now reside in 45 million households in the U.S. alone. A crucial step in that process: “Cats supplemented their original scent-based language with new signals and sounds, designed for life alongside humans and other cats.” In a more recent development, researchers released data in 2017 about the “Feline Five,” a set of “personality dimensions similar to those of humans” (such as agreeableness and neuroticism) that people can use to better relate to their cats. After all, Brown notes, “Just like people, cats have complex personalities.”

Whimsical line drawings by Brown’s daughter Hettie add to the fun of this informative, accessible guide to what cats are telling us, whether through tail twitches, meows or exceedingly slow blinking.

Fifty Places to Travel With Your Dog Before You Die

For many dog owners, traveling with their pooch in tow is a must, but it’s not always easy to figure out where to go or how to prepare. There are rules of entry to consider, not to mention pet-friendly lodging. If border crossing is involved, vaccines and paperwork come into play too.

Not to worry: Fifty Places to Travel With Your Dog Before You Die: Dog Experts Share the World’s Greatest Destinations was created by Chris Santella and DC Helmuth to demystify the process of traveling with dogs and “provide a road map and inspirational guide for those who would take Fido along wherever they go.”

The duo turned to seasoned “dog travelers” to help them compile a list of superlative spots in the U.S. and abroad. Fittingly, it begins with Anchorage, Alaska, home to the Iditarod and Yukon Quest dog races. Those who seek a slower pace may want to relax in Palm Springs, California, or visit wineries in the Margaret River region of Australia. Hiking in Yosemite National Park could be fun, or perhaps a trip to Venice, Italy, where “dogs are typically welcome on gondola rides.”

Gorgeous color photos of people and their pets accompany each detail-packed entry in this practical and aspirational world tour for dog owners.

For the Love of Dog

In the introduction to her edifying and entertaining For the Love of Dog: The Ultimate Relationship Guide, author Pilley Bianchi notes that “The New York Times alone has published almost two hundred thousand articles on dogs and is currently averaging a new one every other day.” Many were about “a member of my family . . . a world-famous dog” named Chaser.

In 2011, Bianchi’s father, Dr. John W. Pilley, and their border collie Chaser went viral for their work together, particularly with regards to Chaser’s 1,022-word vocabulary and the revelation that “dogs are not only smarter than they have been given credit for, but capable of so much more.”

Bianchi, who refers to herself as “Chaser’s coteacher, producer, roommate, and water girl,” partnered with U.K.-based illustrator Calum Heath to honor her late father and their dog while showing readers how to tap into their own dogs’ special capabilities—for learning, for fun and for love.

In service of that goal, she shares a history and philosophy of dogs that name-checks Odysseus and Descartes; deeply ponders the values of play and praise; and cautions against making assumptions about breeds, which “can often lead us to miss the individual nature of a dog.” Heath’s illustrations frolic across the pages, adding humor and beauty to this eclectic, heartfelt tribute to the dogs we love.

These 3 charming nonfiction books about dogs and cats are the perfect pet-centric holiday gifts.

The titular eatery in documentarian and activist Curtis Chin’s charming and contemplative debut memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, is Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, which Chin’s great-grandfather opened in 1940. Until its closure in 2000, the restaurant was a beloved fixture of Detroit’s former Chinatown. Even as the city’s fortunes shifted and changed, Chung’s persevered as a place to get delicious food (especially their famous almond boneless chicken), play a rousing game of mahjong and mingle with people from all walks of life.

With a straightforward writing style and appealingly conversational tone, Chin leads readers through the early years of his life, beginning with “Appetizers and Soups” and ending with “The Fortune Cookie.” After all, he writes, “The important lessons that guided me through my childhood came served like a big Chinese banquet . . . a chorus of sweet and sour, salty and savory, sugary and spicy flavors that counseled me toward a well-led, and well-fed, life.”

Achieving that well-fed life was initially challenging, thanks to Chin’s feeling that he didn’t fit in anywhere: at home as the middle child of six; at the restaurant, where he felt overlooked amid the high-energy hustle-bustle; and at school, where he contended with racism. And for many years, he was hesitant to come out, noting, “No one in my family ever said anything anti-gay . . . but no one said anything positive about being gay either.” 

Readers will root for the author as he moves along his journey of self-acceptance, which was, he notes with dryly humorous empathy for his former self, not without missteps: His eighth grade New Year’s resolution was “not to be gay,” and in high school, he “became the Asian Alex P. Keaton” to show that he was “as apple pie as anyone” in school.

Ultimately, Chin finds a community of kindred spirits at the University of Michigan who help him assert his identity as a liberal gay man, discover his writerly talents and gain new perspective about his parents and the family business. Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant is an engrossing chronicle of a city, a restaurant, a family and a boy’s path from anxious uncertainty to hard-won confidence.

Set in Detroit’s beloved Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, Curtis Chin’s memoir shows his path from anxious uncertainty to hard-won confidence.

The prolific and hilarious Keegan-Michael Key—known for his work in “Key & Peele,” “Mad TV,” “Schmigadoon!” and as President Obama’s “anger translator”—shares his passion and enthusiasm for sketch comedy in the aptly titled The History of Sketch Comedy: A Journey Through the Art and Craft of Humor, co-authored with his wife, film producer Elle Key.

The book, based on their Webby Award-winning podcast, is a wonderful soup-to-nuts compendium of everything sketch. The authors trace its origins from ancient Greece to today’s comedians, and take readers around the U.S. and abroad as they consider influential American comedy schools and highlight the British comedians who are “courageous trailblazers who have influenced comedy around the world.”

Key also revisits his Detroit upbringing, detailing his comedy education in college and on various stages. Aspiring comedians will benefit from the book’s educational elements: With copious examples of (and scripts from) favorite sketches and shows, their creators analyze what, exactly, makes them so funny and memorable. Guest essays from stars like Ken Jeong, Carol Burnett, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Tracy Morgan add to the fun, as do tangents about beloved colleagues like Jordan Peele and “one of the godfathers of modern sketch,” Bob Odenkirk. The History of Sketch Comedy is a highly informative and entertaining read that’s sure to inspire instant binge-watching and a groundswell of sketch-centric enthusiasm.

Keegan-Michael Key and Elle Key’s History of Sketch Comedy is a wonderful soup-to-nuts compendium of everything sketch.

All good things must come to an end, and much to the chagrin of Aaron Falk fans worldwide, that includes Jane Harper’s mystery series starring the Australian federal investigator. 

2017’s The Dry, set in a small drought-stricken town, launched Harper’s career as an internationally bestselling author. (It also spawned a hit film adaptation starring Eric Bana.) Next, Falk hiked into a wilderness retreat in 2018’s Force of Nature to solve another murder. And now, Harper is bringing back the talented investigator for his final turn. The cerebral, character-driven Exiles is set in South Australia’s verdant wine country, where natural beauty contrasts with psychological darkness. 

Readers will relish joining godfather-to-be Falk in the fictional Marralee Valley for the christening of baby Henry, son of Falk’s good friends Greg (a police sergeant) and Rita Raco. The Raco family is staying at a vineyard run by Greg’s brother, Charlie, but their celebratory mood is overlaid with grief at what happened a year ago, when Kim Gillespie—Charlie’s ex-partner and mother of their teen daughter, Zara—disappeared from the Marralee Valley Annual Food and Wine Festival, abandoning her infant daughter, Zoe, in her stroller. 

Jane Harper wouldn’t dare snack in a bookstore.

From Kim’s new husband to locals who had known her since childhood, no one has any insight about what befell Kim during the festival. Was she murdered? Did she kill herself by jumping into the nearby reservoir? Or did she decide to disappear? Kim’s body was never found, and Zara cannot accept that Kim chose to leave or take her own life. Falk and Greg can’t let it go either; although the official conclusion was suicide, something nudges at Falk’s subconscious, a “translucent shimmer of a thought hovering in the distance, dissolving and reappearing without warning.” 

Another unresolved crime resurfaces as well, a fatal hit-and-run from six years earlier at the very spot Kim allegedly jumped from. The victim was the husband of Gemma, the festival’s director and a woman Falk finds captivating. In Harper’s hands, Gemma and Falk’s dynamic is a compelling mystery unto itself: Might the devoted detective actually be considering a different way of life? 

Falk is nothing if not dogged, and as he ponders the reservoir’s unknowable depths, he closely observes the tightknit community, teasing out revelations about complicated relationships and long-held secrets, the tension ever building as he gets closer to important truths about the crimes—but also about himself. Harper’s lyrically written, immersive and slow-burning mystery serves as a powerful send-off for a beloved character.

Jane Harper’s lyrically written, immersive and slow-burning mystery Exiles is a powerful send-off for beloved character Aaron Falk.

It can be fun to speculate about nature versus nurture, to consider which of our quirks might be innate and which might have been shaped by where or with whom we grew up. While we’re at it, we can also ponder that well-known question of Shakespearean origin: What’s in a name? 

But Shenanigan Swift, the clever and engaging hero of Beth Lincoln’s debut novel, The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels, has recently realized that such musings aren’t so enjoyable anymore. Although Shenanigan’s name earns her a pass when she’s feeling stubborn or has done something an eensy bit destructive (like putting the family cat in the empty coffin before the monthly rehearsal of her aunt’s funeral), it also makes her feel misunderstood when others insist on seeing her solely as an embodiment of her name instead of as an individual.

However, Shenanigan is far from the only Swift with a name that’s both prediction and label. For generations, the Swifts have used their family dictionary to randomly select names that somehow become destinies. Shenanigan’s older sisters are named Phenomena and Felicity, her uncle is Maelstrom, her ancestors include Calamitous and Godwottery (the latter meaning “overly elaborate gardening” or “old-fashioned and affected language”), and the Swift family matriarch is Arch-Aunt Schadenfreude. Hilariously, the aforementioned cat is simply “John the Cat.”

This weekend, Shenanigan will meet even more relatives with dictionary-dictated names, because the Swift family reunion is nigh. Far-flung folks will descend upon the stately yet decrepit Swift House, a 17th-century manor packed with secret doors, the occasional turret and a library that holds both books and booby traps. It’s the perfect setting for the keystone activity of every reunion: the hunt for Grand-Uncle Vile’s long-lost fortune, which Shenanigan is determined to find all by herself. Alas, Shenanigan’s plans are interrupted when someone shoves Arch-Aunt Schadenfreude down the stairs, and other murders soon follow. Amid the ensuing shock and chaos, Shenanigan and Phenomena team up to solve the crimes before anyone else is harmed. 

Rife with delicious tension and charmingly dry wit, The Swifts explores and celebrates the wonders of wordplay and the complexity of identity while serving up a compelling murder mystery and a twisty treasure hunt. As Lincoln notes in her introduction, “The thing about language is that it can’t stay still. Restless and impatient, it races forward without waiting for our dictionaries to catch up.” Word nerds will emphatically agree—and they’ll be delighted to know that a sequel is in the works, too.

The Swifts celebrates the wonders of wordplay and the complexity of identity while serving up a compelling murder mystery and a twisty treasure hunt.

Although sheepshearing typically involves a bit of frustrated grunting from shearer and shearee alike, when done right, the act can resemble a ballet: two bodies bending and swooping in sync, the whirring of wickedly sharp clipper blades their only accompaniment. As readers will learn in Peggy Orenstein’s illuminating, informative and often funny Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater, doing that dance with any grace takes a lot of practice.

It all happened during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, when the journalist and bestselling author decided that, rather than baking bread or gardening, she would fill her “indefinitely empty calendar” with a dream project: making a sweater from the ground up. The lifelong knitter was taught the craft by her beloved late mother; it “bridged the generation gap, created reliably neutral ground where we could meet,” Orenstein writes.

Over the course of Orenstein’s quest, a talented group of teachers shared their expertise and passion for ranching, shearing, spinning, dyeing and knitting. Along the way, she explores how textile creation has influenced human history and culture, from language (gathering wool and counting sheep) to politics (yarn-bombing and pussy hats) to pivotal inventions. For example, the spinning wheel “has been credited with everything from establishing trade routes . . . to catalyzing the Renaissance.”

But progress had an eventual cost. Today, “the fashion industry is an ecological disaster, responsible for more greenhouse gases than all international flights and maritime shipping combined,” Orenstein writes. Indeed, concern for the Earth’s uncertain future is woven throughout Unraveling. So, too, is the inexorable passage of time, as the author considers the “amount of sand at the bottom of my personal hourglass” and the ways her personal identity has shifted and changed.

Orenstein is an impressively intrepid figure throughout this charming and candid memoir in essays—even when her goal requires her to wrestle recalcitrant sheep and pick bugs and poop out of fleece. She even fully embraces the fact that her goal requires her to do something many people avoid: allowing “ourselves, as adults, to be in a position of being absolute rank amateurs.” Perfectly imperfect like a handmade sweater, Unraveling is an entertaining chronicle of a challenging year wonderfully well spent. Creativity and craft can soothe anxiety, encourage connection and spark joy; Orenstein’s book will do the same.

Creativity and craft can soothe anxiety, encourage connection and spark joy; Peggy Orenstein’s book about learning to make a sweater from scratch will do the same.

Yoga classes, cleanses, wellness retreats: We’ve all heard these and other remedies marketed as “self-care” for life in an exhausting and distressing world. But debut author Pooja Lakshmin wants readers to know that, while these types of self-care may make us feel temporarily better, they are part of an ineffectual system that keeps people (especially women and minorities) feeling inadequate and overwhelmed. As the psychiatrist and New York Times contributor writes in her introduction to Real Self-Care: A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness (Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included), “This book is my letter to every woman out there who has flirted with hopping in the car and running away from it all.”

Lakshmin wants to help readers find ways to more authentically enjoy their everyday lives, and she uses anecdotes about her patients to illustrate what this might look like. For example, there’s Shelby, who shifted from viewing breastfeeding as imperative to something that just didn’t work out (and that’s OK!), and Clara, who started her own business after realizing teaching was no longer sustainable.

How did they get there? Via Lakshmin’s four principles for real self-care: setting boundaries without guilt, practicing self-compassion, exploring your real self and asserting power. Helpful tools, exercises, scripts and a “Real Self-Care Compass” smooth the way to the gratifying final stage, which is “facing, straight-on, the toxicity and trauma that our culture brings to women . . . and it’s only when a critical mass of women do this internal work that we will come to collective change in our world.”

Daunting? Sure. Doable? The author believes so, and she contends that the hard, ongoing work is worth it. After all, she is writing as a fellow traveler alongside her readers. “I ended up falling for Big Wellness in the worst way,” she writes. “I joined a cult!” While her time with the cult, which practiced “orgasmic meditation,” did offer some benefits (she worked with neuroscientists at the Rutgers fMRI orgasm lab, and the meditation practice “was healing for me in profound ways”), when she left the group, she was deeply depressed for quite some time. 

Over time, Lakshmin realized that “real self-care is not a noun, it’s a verb—an ongoing internal process that guides us toward profound emotional wellness and reimagines how we interact with others.” In her heartfelt and empathetic Real Self-Care, she shares how she moved beyond shame and regret to a happier, more true-to-herself life, something she believes readers can do, too. Lakshmin’s first step: reclaiming the term self-care by imbuing it with self-knowledge, sustainability and joy.

Psychiatrist Pooja Lakshmin wants to reclaim the term self-care by helping readers find ways to more authentically enjoy their everyday lives.

Flames flicker around the edges of Margot Douaihy’s Scorched Grace, casting light and revealing darkness, hinting at the sort of destruction that offers the possibility of a new beginning.

That’s what Sister Holiday Walsh was looking for a year ago when she joined the Sisters of the Sublime Blood after fleeing the wreckage of her life in Brooklyn, New York. Sister Holiday is not a typical nun: While she and her brother, Moose, were raised Catholic by her former-nun mom and police captain dad, being wholly reverent has never been her thing. Rather, she’s the self-described “first punk nun,” a heavily tattooed loner who hides her ink under scarf and gloves and conceals her trauma under a jauntily sarcastic demeanor.

Although she’s somewhat found her footing as a music teacher at Saint Sebastian’s, the New Orleans school the nuns oversee, Sister Holiday’s emotional armor cracks open when an arsonist strikes and Jack, a well-liked janitor and her confidante, is killed. Stunned at his loss and baffled as to why someone would commit such violent acts against the school, Sister Holiday turns to chain-smoking and recalling memories of her former lover Nina to soothe herself. 


How Margot Douaihy turned to noir’s hard-boiled past—and looked to its future—to create Sister Holiday.


But it’s not enough: She mistrusts the police, she doesn’t feel safe, and the Raymond Chandler novels she escaped into as a kid are looming large in her mind. “Sleuthing and stubbornness were my gifts from God,” she thinks, and she’s sure as hell going to use those gifts to solve the mystery on her own. 

Scorched Grace revels in its unreliable narrator and bounty of plausible suspects, from shifty authority figures to mercurial students to enigmatic women of God. Douaihy, a poet and professor who shares Sister Holiday’s punk sensibility, immerses the reader in her hyperlocal New Orleans setting and the murky depths of Sister Holiday’s tormented soul. Her prose is frequently lyrical and often lacerating, her characters layered and intriguing. 

It’s not surprising in the slightest that this series starter is the first book published by Gillian Flynn’s eponymous new imprint. Scorched Grace is both entertaining and devastating, dominated by a queer sleuth with a clever, curious mind and a fatalistic yet somehow still hopeful heart.

Scorched Grace is an entertaining and devastating mystery that introduces Sister Holiday, a queer nun with a clever, curious mind and a fatalistic yet somehow still hopeful heart.

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