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NonfictionScience

Do I Know You?

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Science journalist Sadie Dingfelder has known since childhood that she isn’t great at remembering people or faces. But for decades, she failed to notice that other people didn’t make the mistakes that she did, like hopping into strangers’ cars, or getting lost in her brother’s small house. After she mistook another man for her husband in a grocery store, Dingfelder began to wonder if her quirks indicated something larger. She decided to undergo a test and learned that she’s faceblind: She truly doesn’t remember faces. 

But that’s only the beginning of what she learned over the next year. “Welcome to my midlife crisis,” she writes in her charming debut, Do I Know You?: A Faceblind Reporter’s Journey into the Science of Sight, Memory, and Imagination. “There will be no fast cars or sexy pool boys, but there will be answers to questions that have dogged me my entire life. Mysteries like: Why didn’t I ever learn how to drive? Why hasn’t anyone ever asked me out on a date? Why was I so lonely as a kid, and how did I manage to make so many friends as an adult? (And why, despite having so many friends, do I still feel lonely?)” Dingfelder soon learned that along with faceblindness, she’s stereoblind—the world she sees is flat, not three-dimensional. She also learned that her brain doesn’t create its own mental imagery; when she reads a novel, her brain doesn’t create pictures or scenes. 

Dingfelder weaves her story into the science of how brains process information like faces and names, and how one type of neurodiversity, like faceblindness, is often linked to another. Throughout Do I Know You?, she’s both cleareyed and vulnerable, and though her mishaps and misunderstandings are often comical, she also conveys the losses that she’s only recently begun to mourn. 

Do I Know You? offers a specific story about one woman’s neurodiverse brain (and the book’s appendix offers practical resources for parents who think their child might be faceblind or stereoblind), but Dingfelder makes the specific universal, showing readers both the remarkable diversity in how our brains encounter the world, and how much more we still have to learn about ourselves.

In Do I Know You?, faceblind journalist Sadie Dingfelder explores her condition and reveals the remarkable neural diversity of humans.
NonfictionCultural CriticismArts & Culture

Cue the Sun!

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

If you believe that reality television began with a naked Richard Hatch strolling on a beach in Borneo in the first season of Survivor in 2000, longtime New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum’s Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV will provide a necessary corrective. While giving Mark Burnett’s “breakthrough for the reality genre” its due, Nussbaum traces that genre back to its roots in shows like Queen for a Day, which made the leap from radio to TV in 1956, and Candid Camera, which did the same in 1948. Her lively survey of the now ubiquitous and endlessly controversial televised product is thoroughly researched and comprehensive, and for aficionados of television and pop culture in general, simply plain fun. 

Though she recognizes it’s ripe for highbrow skewering, Nussbaum approaches her subject with an admirable degree of objectivity. She’s intent on providing a balanced assessment, acknowledging reality television’s often exploitative aspects, while arguing that there is “a lot of glory and beauty” in the way it has tackled formerly taboo topics and brought previously underrepresented groups into the spotlight. Above all, she’s succeeded in her goal of telling this sometimes sordid, sometimes exuberant story “through the voices of the people who built it,” including both its key creators and its participants.

Beginning in 1947, and concluding with her account of The Apprentice, Nussbaum proceeds in chronological fashion, methodically assessing reality-based shows that differed widely in their content, sophistication and quality. She goes behind the scenes of what the television industry euphemistically calls “unscripted programming” in an effort to explain the variety of subject matter within the genre and analyze with an experienced eye what makes these shows succeed or fail. One of her most interesting explorations is an extended retrospective on An American Family, the groundbreaking 1973 cinema verité show that brought audiences into the home of the aptly named Loud family. But she’s equally curious and illuminating about more contemporary fare, like the longest-running reality show ever, Cops.

Readers who have come to rely upon Emily Nussbaum for smart and well-written television criticism will devour Cue the Sun! Reality television is here to stay, and anyone who wants to understand what makes it so appealing, and at times so problematic, will find this book an excellent starting point.

Emily Nussbaum’s illuminating Cue the Sun! tells the sometimes sordid, sometimes exuberant story of reality TV “through the voices of the people who built it.”
NonfictionSocial Science

Code Dependent

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Although the smooth veneer of AI might gleam with a new-car sheen, the rough edges below the surface reveal its inherent inequalities. Madhumita Murgia, the first artificial intelligence editor for the Financial Times, writes in her probing Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI that generative AI “is altering the very experience of being human.”

Murgia illustrates the ways that AI affects all areas of our society from health care and policing to business and education. “Our blindness to how AI systems work means we can’t properly comprehend when they go wrong or inflict harm—particularly on vulnerable people,” she writes. Drawing on deep research and interviews with individuals around the world, Murgia humanizes this claim by introducing readers to the people at risk, as well as to those endangering them.

Sama, a U.S. company that outsources digital work to East Africa, promises financial and social mobility to people living in poverty. Daniel, a South African migrant, was told he would be working with marketing content. But when he got to work, he discovered that his job was to spend hours viewing images of “human sacrifice, beheadings, hate speech and child abuse,” all for a salary of $2.20 per hour. Officially, he was flagging graphic and illegal content, but he was also training Facebook’s algorithms to identify this sort of content on their own. Daniel sued Sama and Meta, telling Murgia, “These companies are only interested in profit and not in the lives of the people whom they destroy.” His lawyer, Mercy, is even more pointed about the inequities of the AI industry: “‘All revolutions are built on the backs of slaves. So if AI is the next industrial revolution, then those who are working in AI training and moderation, they are the slaves for this revolution.”

Murgia also shows the promise of AI. In western India, Ashita, a doctor, uses an app called Qure.ai to help screen for diseases like tuberculosis in rural areas that lack access to health care, allowing her to deliver lifesaving care more quickly. Her usage data and communication with developers improved the software so that it could be rolled out more widely, and tuberculosis diagnosis and treatment shot up 35% in the region.

Code Dependent is full of such bracing, complicated stories throughout as it uncovers the perils and promise of AI.”

 

Madhumita Murgia’s bracing Code Dependent puts human faces to debates about AI’s perils and promises, revealing both the potential harm and good that this technology can do.
NonfictionLifestylesBody, Mind & Spirit

Blame the Stars

Review by Natalia Berry

Spurred by illustrator and “accidental astrologer” Heather Buchanan’s popular Instagram account @Horror.Scoops, Blame the Stars: A Very Good, Totally Accurate Collection of Astrological Advice is a hilarious journey through astrology, a subject that is, Buchanan writes, “stuffed to the glittering gills with practical, utilitarian functions.” But that doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun with it. “In such a bizarre universe,” she writes, “the most logical response is to get bizarre right back at it.” 

With colorful, offbeat drawings and handwritten captions, Buchanan gives classic signs silly names and outrageous descriptions: The corresponding animal of Splattitaribus (Sagittarius) is “a skunk haunted by the ghosts of her past;” a Lehbrah (Libra) is “the last push of breath that blows up a pool toy.” Buchanan is a joke factory, but Blame the Stars never feels mean-spirited. She balances out her playfulness with a palpable admiration for each sign, and, despite the absurdist claims, traditional astrology buffs will recognize kernels of wisdom. The book really shines with absurdist journal prompts: “What if everyone who hated cilantro had their teeth turn into cilantro? . . . Discuss.” 

Blame the Stars is beautifully constructed with quality paper and a well-thought-out jacket that manages to include illustrations of all the signs without feeling too busy. That impressive attention to detail continues throughout the book, with art included on almost every page. If you’re a lover of astrology, or if you’re perhaps looking for some silly direction among the stars, you’ll certainly find solace, laughs and maybe even some inspiration in these pages.

Blame the Stars, by the creator of popular Instagram account @Horror.Scoops, provides offbeat takes on astrology that will keep readers giggling and contemplating their next steps in life.
NonfictionSocial Science

Black Pill

Review by Natalia Berry

The last decade of American political terror isn’t some accidental phenomenon. As award-winning journalist Elle Reeve intimately conveys, the “alt-right” movement is the result of several racist and misogynistic hate groups born in the least moderated parts of the internet, who have aligned with powerful Republicans and whose primary focus is white supremacy. Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics is Reeve’s investigation into the network and ideologies of the alt-right’s most key players. Some of them have left the extremist organizations that once consumed them; others are still pulling the strings. 

Her profiles of Matt Parrott and Matt Heimbach, the neo-Nazi co-founders of the Traditionalist Worker Party and one of the driving forces behind the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, are among the most illuminating. The men lament their middle-class upbringings, their feelings of alienation, their crumbling personal and professional lives, their hatred of their dads and even their diagnoses of autism. But these qualities, Reeve contends, are not an excuse for facism and hatred. 

Rather, Reeve shows, QAnon followers, Proud Boys and other extremist groups share the opinion that they’re somehow being cheated out of what is “owed” to them—money, women, sex, power, respect—and that failure to obtain their desires is the failure of the nation. It’s not just that they think they’re losing to minorities, women and leftists: They think the soul of the nation is lost, too. This fear is not new, but the digital space has made white supremacist content easier to access, build community around and impact the political landscape in dangerous ways.

Reeve is a phenomenally skilled interviewer, able to motivate her subjects to reveal more than they probably should. She offers what they went online to find in the first place—an open ear to share their unbridled opinions, no matter how bigoted. Some of the people Reeve interviews distance themselves from the hate groups they called home—Parrott, Heimbach and Richard Spencer among them. But Black Pill also makes clear that once you’re in, it’s hard to get out. “The movement,” Reeve writes, “will get you punched, sued, jailed, divorced, bankrupt. But it will never let you go.” 

“You get to a certain point where everything is just like that Springsteen song, ‘Glory Days,’” a rueful Heimbach tells Reeve. “You just sit around like, Man, remember 2015?” Still, Black Pill doesn’t ask for our sympathy—just a willingness to peer into the dark. 

Elle Reeve’s powerful Black Pill brings members of the internet's most vicious, infamous hate groups out of the shadows, exposing the roots of extremism.
NonfictionMemoir

Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones

Review by Alice Cary

As a child in Kashmir, India, Priyanka Mattoo cherished time spent at her maternal grandparents’ family compound, its several buildings full of her “outspoken and uproarious” relatives. “Imagine an empty cup under a gushing faucet,” she writes. “It fills up, it tips over, the faucet keeps gushing, and the cup thinks, I really don’t need any more water, but, okay, this feels nice. That’s the adoration I felt from my family.”

That luxurious, gushing feeling is exactly what readers of Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones will experience while reading this memoir in essays. Stylistically, it’s The Secret Garden meets Nora Ephron: Mattoo serves up memories with both fairy tale-like charm and thoroughly modern, riotously funny observations.

The book’s title comes from a Kashmiri phrase used to describe “things so rare and precious that the listener should question their very existence.” That sentiment has defined Mattoo’s life since political upheaval prevented her family from returning to their beloved homeland. Luckily, Mattoo’s father was an internationally renowned pediatric nephrologist, and his career took them around the world to London, Saudi Arabia and, finally, America. This expat life blessed Mattoo with intriguing experiences, but also left her longing for Kashmir with “a deep well of sadness that follows me around.”

But Mattoo keeps her sense of humor, as when describing the day she taught her 9-year-old son how to microwave a hot dog (“I briefly drifted into a vision of reading magazines while my child makes dinner.”). The essays can be read separately, but are roughly chronological, explaining how she veered away from her “life plan” and married an American Jew instead of “a nice Kashmiri boy,” didn’t become a doctor and instead followed her creative spirit, forging a life as a writer, filmmaker and talent agent.

In “How to Be Alone,” she writes of her middle school years, enduring painful prejudices that turned her into a loner, until she eventually realized, “I could make anyone my friend, and I would make anyone my friend.” She does just that with Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones—a book of enormous heart, humor and insight that will leave readers wanting more of Priyanka Mattoo’s company.

The Secret Garden meets Nora Ephron in Priyanka Mattoo’s riotously funny memoir in essays, Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones.
NonfictionHistoryCultural History

Better Faster Farther

Review by Deborah Mason

Women run everywhere: up mountains, on the beach, along city roads and country paths. They run for their health, to compete, for the joy of feeling lungs, heart and legs work in harmony. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a world where women don’t run. But in Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women, sportswriter and essayist Maggie Mertens reveals that the history of women’s running was never smooth. Instead, it was like a hurdle race, but one where the obstacles became taller and harder over time.

As Mertens reports, nearly everything conspired against women who wanted to run. It took generations of stubborn, passionate athletes simply to get to the starting line. Mertens opens the book describing the erroneous reportage on 1928’s first Olympic women’s 800-meter race, which claimed that the competitors dropped like flies at the finish line. Male-dominated sports associations barred competitions for women. Doctors declared that running would cause irreparable damage to their reproductive organs. 

If a woman wanted to run, she was deemed either dangerously masculine, seriously misguided or mentally ill. Better Faster Father profiles dozens of athletes who faced these charges. Before Bobbi Gibb snuck into the 1966 Boston Marathon and became the first woman runner to complete it, her parents had sent her to a psychiatrist to “cure” her of her passion for running. When runners like Mary Decker and Mary Cain developed osteoporosis, sports scientists blamed feminine frailty, rather than ill-informed coaches who made their protégés starve themselves.

Women ran marathons and broke track records, but, as Mertens details, new barriers kept being erected, supposedly to protect women’s opportunities, including denying participation of trans and intersex athletes. Transgender women were and are targeted, even though their performance on the track is comparable to cisgender women competitors, and the “advantage” of testosterone remains unproven. Genetic testing, invasive physical exams and testosterone tests were and are performed on women deemed too fast, too muscular, too competitive to be female. 

And yet, women run. Like Jasmin Paris, who holds the world record for the Spine Race, a grueling 268-mile ultramarathon up and down the Pennine mountains. And Paula Radcliffe, who controversially kept training up until the day she gave birth—and won the 2007 New York City Marathon nine months later. Every woman you see jogging in the park or sprinting at a track meet. All prove that women can, indeed, run. 

For centuries, women were discouraged from running. Better Faster Farther chronicles how and why they ran anyway.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Bear

Review by Freya Sachs

As Bear by Julia Phillips opens, there’s a wildness that takes over, an immediate sense that control is elusive, that the landscape, not humans, is in charge. On an island in the Pacific Northwest, two sisters—Sam and Elena—spend their days working, caring for their dying mother and imagining future possibilities for their lives. Their routines are measured and predictable.

With limited employment available post-pandemic, Sam works in food service on the ferry to and from the island. She’s startled one day to see a bear swimming off the side—unusual for the area—and she shares the sighting with her sister, Elena. When the bear unexpectedly arrives outside their home, Sam is shocked, terrified; Elena is enchanted, curious. The bear disrupts their equilibrium, introducing questions they’re unsure how to answer. As the novel unfolds, the twin tensions of caring for their mother and of tracking and understanding the bear’s presence push against each other, forcing the sisters’ relationship to change. 

Bear takes light inspiration from the Grimm’s fairy tale “Snow White and Rose Red,” but it would feel like a modern fairy tale regardless thanks to its sense of looking for wonder and magic in surroundings, of giving in to surprise and forces beyond one’s imagination in a world that feels hard. There’s a taut energy, a quickness to the language that contrasts the richness of landscape with the intensity of humans struggling in myriad ways to survive, let alone thrive. It’s a novel that asks to be read in a single sitting: it’s short, carefully paced, language-driven. Just as Elena and Sam can’t look away from the bear, it’s hard to look away from this story that unfolds in deft, surprising, unexpected ways. 

In Julia Phillips’ latest, sisters Sam and Elena spend their days working and caring for their dying mother on an island in the Pacific Northwest—until the arrival of a bear upends their equilibrium.
NonfictionLifestylesFood & DrinkCookbooks

Appetite for Change

Review by Alison Hood

With whole-hearted essays and tempting, approachable recipes, Appetite for Change: Soulful Recipes From a North Minneapolis Kitchen shines with pluck, heart and social consciousness. Influenced by the predominantly Black residents of Minneapolis’s Northside community, the recipes have diverse roots—African, Caribbean, Southern—and were assembled by Northside-based nonprofit, Appetite for Change (AFC).

AFC was co-founded by authors Michelle Horovitz, Tasha Powell and Princess Titus in response to Northside’s troubling history of redlining, poverty and violence as well as the impact of a devastating 2011 tornado, all of which created a food desert with “no place to sit down and be served a meal of fresh ingredients.” The women “gathered friends and neighbors and literally began cooking up change” with cooking classes, gardening projects and AFC’s Breaking Bread Café. Six chapters, each with an essay by AFC co-founders and other AFC staff and volunteers, cover everything from bold vegetables to sweet treats. 

Along with these recipes, Appetite for Change shows the positive social power of growing, preparing and enjoying fresh, wholesome food to nourish body, mind and spirit.

Appetite for Change collects recipes from the predominantly Black residents of Minneapolis’s Northside community, and shows the positive social power of growing, preparing and enjoying fresh, wholesome food.
Children's & YAYA FictionYA

Age 16

Review by Alice Cary

Rosena Fung’s much-lauded debut, Living with Viola, explored the mental health and cultural challenges faced by a middle school girl. Her second graphic novel, Age 16, is an excellent examination of a familiar theme—a teenage girl trying to find herself—which Fung explores more fully through depicting the inheritance of trauma and misunderstandings over generations.

In Toronto in 2000, Rosalind (Roz) begins her morning by stepping on the scale before heading off to high school. It’s a dizzying time, with friends applying to college and talking about prom, the latter of which causes Roz to fantasize about a slimmer version of herself attending. But at home, her mother, Lydia, chastises her for her eating habits and claims Roz “inherited my slow metabolism and bad genes.” Then Roz’s grandmother, Mei Laan, appears unannounced from Hong Kong after an absence of 10 years. This thin but clearly unhappy woman offers nothing but criticism to her daughter and granddaughter.

Two additional timelines, following Roz’s mother and grandmother in their own youths, are naturally woven into this present narrative. Readers travel to Hong Kong in 1972, where 16-year-old Lydia loves to dance but faces nonstop barbs about her weight: “Get your head out of the clouds,” Mei Laan advises. “A girl like you can’t be a star.” Thankfully, a family friend, Auntie Ping, provides encouragement and guidance. In scenes from Guangdong, China, 1954, miserable Mei Laan works in the fields and is always hungry. When she complains, her anguished mother cries, “We didn’t survive the Japanese only to have our family ruined by a big mouth!”

“I wanted to make sure each place was a character in its own right.” Read our Q&A with Rosena Fung here. 

The graphic novel format is the perfect medium to succinctly convey Age 16’s heavy themes of inherited trauma, and how Roz, her mother and grandmother share dreams, doubts and difficulties as they make their own way regardless of absent fathers and husbands. Fung’s lively art makes each generation’s needs feel urgent and relevant. She expertly glides between time periods, making Roz the focus, while examining how all three women’s behaviors are tied together by their shared history. Roz is a likable, realistic character who dreams of going to art school, perhaps becoming a photographer. Alongside her, a cast of high school girls, including Roz’s best friend Victoria, worry about their futures—especially their prom dreams.

With its unique multigenerational approach, Age 16 expertly tackles perceptions of weight, self-worth and parental conflict. In the face of seemingly impossible relationship repair and resolution, Fung offers an engaging, naturally evolving conclusion. As Roz’s mother explains, “When things get tough and you feel like you don’t belong, you can make the world fit you.”

With its unique multigenerational approach, Age 16 expertly tackles perceptions of weight, self-worth and parental conflict.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

A Thousand Times Before

Review by Stephenie Harrison

Asha Thanki’s magical debut, A Thousand Times Before, is a mesmerizing multigenerational chronicle about a remarkable family of Indian women bound to one another by more than blood.

In present-day Brooklyn, Ayukta is ready to reveal to her wife, Nadya, why she has been so ambivalent about starting a family, a decision made difficult for Ayukta due to an extraordinary family heirloom: a tapestry embroidered with images of the women in her family spanning back generations. When a mother sews her daughter onto the tapestry, it unlocks the ability for the daughter to relive the memories of all the women depicted there. What’s more, each custodian of the tapestry is also granted the power to make their heart’s desires reality. 

To convince Nadya of the truth behind her wild claims, Ayukta relates the stories of the women in her family as she herself has experienced them through the tapestry. She starts with her grandmother Amla in Karachi, before the Partition of India in 1947, continuing on to her mother Arni’s girlhood in Gujarat where she was involved in the 1974 student protests against the government. With each woman, Ayukta shares both the triumphs and the tragedies that the tapestry’s double-edged powers afforded them, all while grappling with her own dilemma of whether this inheritance is a burden or a blessing.

A Thousand Times Before is a riveting family saga as well as a tender examination of the indelible yet complicated bonds between mothers and daughters. Thanki transports readers through major moments in 20th-century Indian history, making them accessible and personal via her cast of charismatic characters, elegant prose and spellbinding storytelling. Despite the otherworldly elements woven into the narrative, the themes of love, grief and family that Thanki so thoughtfully develops easily ground the novel in reality, making for an emotionally charged and memorable reading experience.

A Thousand Times Before is a riveting magical family saga examining the indelible yet complicated bonds between mothers and daughters while transporting readers through major moments in 20th-century Indian history.
Mystery & SuspenseMysteryHistorical Mystery

A Ruse of Shadows

Review by Carole V. Bell

Have you ever wondered about the aftermath of a great detective’s big case or how the damage reverberates among the grieving families of murder mysteries? In Sherry Thomas’s irresistible eighth Lady Sherlock mystery, A Ruse of Shadows, Charlotte Holmes solves several interlocking puzzles, bringing justice to characters who were collateral damage in previous installments in the series.

In the beginning, things look bleak for the inimitable Miss Holmes, the real genius behind the celebrated consulting detective Sherlock Holmes. Charlotte is a person of interest in the murder of Lord Bancroft Ashburton and, as one of the last people to see the victim alive, she faces questioning by two of Scotland Yard’s finest: upright Inspector Treadles and retired Chief Inspector Talbot. It’s a sticky wicket for both Treadles and Charlotte: She is the adored partner of the victim’s brother, Lord Ingram Ashburton (“Ash”), who happens to be Treadles’ friend as well. Charlotte also recently cleared Treadles from a false murder indictment.

As a result of Charlotte’s investigative efforts, the formerly powerful Bancroft had been exiled to Ravensmere, “a cushioned facility for sensitive prisoners,” for selling the Crown’s secrets. And yet, just weeks prior to his death, Bancroft summoned Charlotte and coerced her into tracking down his missing henchman, Mr. Underwood. Multiple murders and twists ensue as friends, foes and loved ones of earlier victims return and plot strands get brilliantly tied together in a case that serves as a culmination of everything that’s occurred in the series so far. 

The twists are creative and compelling; it’s always rewarding to watch Charlotte’s mind work and see how she wrests control from men who would use her. But her emotional journey alongside Ash is the real centerpiece of the novel. Now divorced, Ash is finding his way in his newly unconventional life. While cushioned by his gender, wealth and privilege, he has still become a social anomaly: “the Upper Ten Thousand was not accustomed to recently divorced men at their social functions and his presence had caused some tongues to wag.” He’s taking cues from his unorthodox better half, who is unlikely to ever want to marry, but Ash still worries about his children’s reputations. Yet, this is the happiest readers have ever seen the couple. Their relationship blooms in intimate moments, culminating in the series’ most satisfying scenes ever. With Ash and Charlotte’s flame burning higher and hotter, A Ruse of Shadows is an unmissable high point in a joyfully original historical mystery series with a romantic twist.

A Ruse of Shadows is an unmissable high point of Sherry Thomas’ Lady Sherlock, a joyfully original historical mystery series with a romantic twist.
Science Fiction & FantasyHistorical FantasyFantasy

A Rose by Any Other Name

Review by Laura Hubbard

Rose Rushe wants to be a court musician more than anything else in the world. With Queen Elizabeth I newly ascendant on the throne, her goal feels within reach if she can only get an audition. But the universe (and Rose’s mother) have different plans for her. After the death of her father, Rose, her mother and her friend Cecely are all accused of witchcraft and forced to flee to London. Rose finds refuge in the home of Richard Underhill, the son of one of her late father’s friends. Security for her family is within reach as long as Rose plays the meek woman and secures a place within Underhill’s household as his wife. But the prospect of such a life is anathema to Rose. As she struggles to avoid the web of her mother’s well-intentioned meddling, an escape path lined with brothels, astrology and a young writer named William Shakespeare presents itself—if only Rose is brave and foolhardy enough to take the first step. 

In A Rose by Any Other Name, author Mary McMyne explores a question that scholars and English teachers have debated for centuries: Who was the “Dark Lady” depicted in some of Shakespeare’s most iconic sonnets? McMyne gives this mystery woman shape, autonomy and desire in the figure of Rose, whom she guides through a dark Elizabethan England full of traps for women—especially queer women like Rose—who crave independence from the men who hold their leashes. While Rose’s struggle for freedom may include some familiar tropes and character types, the original world that McMyne has created shines. Her descriptions of magic are rich with heavy, cloying scents and skin-tingling sensations. Her streets feel full of possibility and danger. And Rose and her imperfect, wild compatriots seem to spring from the page. A captivating blend of forensic literary analysis and dark magic, A Rose by Any Other Name is a fascinating exploration into the world of “what if.”

In A Rose by Any Other Name, Mary McMyne uses the mystery of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady as the foundation for a dark and captivating Elizabethan fantasy.

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