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NonfictionPhotographyLifestyles

The Heirloomist

Review by Alice Cary

If you are the sort of person who can’t bear to part with sentimental objects—“That belonged to Mamaw!”—this book is for you. Packed inside The Heirloomist: 100 Heirlooms and the Stories They Tell are photographs and stories of 100 items belonging to everyday as well as famous people, including Gloria Steinem, Rosanne Cash and Gabby Giffords. Their treasures might be a Rolex watch or a Rolleiflex camera—or simply scribbled notes, ticket stubs and even a plateful of spaghetti and meatballs.

After becoming curator of her family’s important items, Shana Novak turned to other people’s stuff. Her photography and storytelling business, The Heirloomist, has documented over 1,500 keepsakes since 2015. No matter their financial value, she writes, “all are priceless, precisely because their stories will play your heartstrings like a symphony.” Take, for example, the daughter of a New York City firefighter who died on 9/11. Several years after that tragedy, she and her mother opened a toy chest and found an old Magna Doodle, on which her father had written: “Dear Tiana, I love you. Daddy.”

The Heirloomist is meant to be shared with loved ones, especially those who harangue you to declutter. They may even start rummaging through basement boxes with a freshly appreciative eye.

Shana Novak’s gorgeous, poignant The Heirloomist documents 100 treasures beloved by everyday and famous people.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The Great River

Review by Priscilla Kipp

It should come as no surprise that a book about the legendary Mississippi River covers centuries of history, tons of mud, hundreds of levees and a rogues’ gallery of characters. Boyce Upholt turns it all into an absorbing tale in The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi.

When Upholt took on a writing assignment about a paddler and tourist guide in 2015, he had no experience with the Mississippi. In the following years, he would go on to catch rides in oyster boats, tour the delta with a parish councilman and absorb the worries of the president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association.

Of course, many before Upholt were also drawn to the river. Spanish explorers are credited with “discovering” the river on a mission to plunder the riches of Indigenous people—a historical narrative Upholt calls “that tired idea that a white man can discover something that has already been used as a watery highway for thousands of years.” Enslaved and free Black people and generations of restless migrating white settlers found their way to the territory alongside the river. Mark Twain and his iconic character, Huck Finn, lured cramped, disillusioned city dwellers to the wild river’s endless spaces. Flatboats gave way to steamboats, and railroads hauled people to the river’s banks in droves. Property battles, poverty, greed, murders and graft ensued.

The Army Corps of Engineers built the longest levee in the world along the lower Mississippi—the second largest human-made structure on Earth, only after the Great Wall of China. Local and federal commissions, boards and agencies would attend to the political wants and economic needs of those invested in the river (especially the powerful and wealthy) ever since. Climate change heightens the river’s many challenges. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina “woke the world,” Upholt writes, as it “ripped through the marshland and put much of New Orleans underwater.” But the life of the river goes on. Mud is dredged here and moved there. Industrial pollutants irrevocably change ecosystems. Engineers continue to construct, deconstruct, rearrange, recreate, divert and revert the waterway. Our attempts to control the wild Mississippi are an endless pursuit.

Upholt manages to wrestle a staggering amount of details into a narrative that is at times a challenge to read. But thanks to his concise yet lively writing style, The Great River is worth the effort. It compellingly pays homage to a waterway worthy of its moniker.

Boyce Upholt wrangles the geological, political and cultural history of the wild Mississippi River in a compelling, lively narrative.
Mystery & SuspenseThriller

Tell Me Who You Are

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Anyone who’s ever wondered “What’s my therapist really thinking?” will be fascinated by Louisa Luna’s foray into the mind of the wholly compelling Dr. Caroline Strange. 

In Tell Me Who You Are, her seventh book and first standalone thriller in nearly 20 years, Luna—known for her Alice Vega series, including 2023 Edgar Award-winner Hideout—introduces an unapologetically confident and cynical New York City psychiatrist who favors white Alexander McQueen suits (“It’s not a fucking square dance; it’s work”) and lives in a wealthy Brooklyn neighborhood where “botox meets craft butchery, and even the homeless people can do a mean upward-facing dog.”

As Dr. Caroline breezily explains, she’s accustomed to deconstructing all manner of human flaws and foibles, hence the snarky nicknames she (privately) gives her patients: Deluded Delia, Bilious Byron, Pouty Petra and more. So it’s just another day at work when a new patient named Nelson Schack tells her he’s probably going to kill someone they both know. A seemingly unfazed Dr. Caroline is surprised when NYPD detectives arrive soon after, indicating they consider her a suspect in the missing-persons case of Ellen Garcia, a journalist who named her one of the “Top Ten Worst Doctors in Brooklyn.” Dr. Caroline is convinced that Nelson has somehow framed her for Ellen’s disappearance, and she soon embarks on her own covert investigation.

As a chase around the city gets underway, Luna layers in the perspectives of a young Caroline’s neighbor Gordon Strong (hinting at horrors in the good doctor’s past) and Ellen, who’s losing hope for rescue. Progressively shorter chapters will elevate page-flipping readers’ heart rate as the past inches closer to the present and Luna’s characters contend with mounting danger. 

Dr. Caroline herself is no stranger to trauma. It’s what motivated her to become a psychiatrist, and what comes back to haunt her. She may well be unlikable—but is she also unreliable? Luna expertly keeps her cards close to her chest until nearly the nerve-wracking end of this engrossing, twisty character study of a complicated woman.

Louisa Luna crafts a boldly, unapologetically unlikable protagonist in Tell Me Who You Are—but is Dr. Caroline Strange also unreliable?
NonfictionSelf-Help

Take Back Your Brain

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Before creating her popular podcast Unf*ck Your Brain, Kara Loewentheil was already ambitious and accomplished: Her accolades include a degree from Harvard Law School, a clerkship for a federal judge and a job as a litigator for the Center for Reproductive Rights. “I had it all,” she writes, but “the problem was that my brain did not seem to share this understanding. . . . I felt like I was being held hostage by a voice that was a cross between a middle school bully and a disapproving English governess.”

Through working with a life coach, Loewentheil learned cognitive behavioral techniques to challenge her unproductive thoughts and emotions, but even after getting certified as a life coach herself and coaching other women for years, something was still missing. “What we needed to really change our lives—and therefore change the world—was feminist coaching.” Loewentheil’s literary debut, Take Back Your Brain: How a Sexist Society Gets in Your Head—and How to Get It Out, examines how sexist and patriarchal messages impact women’s thoughts and emotions and undermine our self-esteem and self-confidence. What’s more, she offers practical advice for living well despite those long-standing messages.

The book’s first section, “Reclaim Your Brain,” walks readers through the ways pervasive, sexist beliefs play into unconscious emotional and mental cycles. Loewentheil offers a written exercise called the “thought ladder” to help readers move from a negative or debilitating thought to a neutral or even positive thought. The book’s second section, “Reclaim Your Life,” covers body image, self-esteem, romantic relationships, money mindset and time. Each chapter is grounded in cultural and social history or reportage—for instance,the beauty and wellness industries—and offers practical exercises and prompts. Throughout, Loewentheil shares anecdotes and quotes from clients, as well the missteps and successes that make up her own story.

While some of the book’s cognitive-behavioral techniques may be familiar to readers who’ve seen therapists, the feminist framework is a welcome approach for our still-evolving 21st-century society. And Loewentheil is an engaging, straightforward guide.

 

Kara Loewentheil offers a feminist take on self-help in the engaging, straightforward Take Back Your Brain.
FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Swift River

Review by Alice Cary

“This isn’t a mystery or a legend,” Diamond Newberry says. “It’s a story about leaving.” She’s the 16-year-old narrator of Essie Chambers’ debut novel, Swift River, a mesmerizing account of inherited trauma in what was once a sundown town, where residents threatened violence towards nonwhite people after sunset. In 1987 in the fictional New England mill town of Swift River, Diamond—the only nonwhite resident—lives with her unemployed white mom. They have been alone since the mysterious disappearance of Diamond’s Black father seven years ago. He was presumably the victim of racial violence, although the town rumor mill churns out sightings of him from time to time.

Diamond and her mother inhabit her deceased grandmother’s decaying house, which may be repossessed at any moment. Now that enough time has passed to have her missing husband declared legally dead, Diamond’s mother is counting on his life insurance money to turn their lives around. Meanwhile, Diamond yearns to escape and is secretly taking driving lessons. She and her mother hitchhike to get around, especially after Diamond, who weighs 298 pounds, allows her bike to be stolen because it had become too difficult to ride.

Diamond feels like a misfit in both society and her family, noting of her maternal lineage, “I am a break in their pure Irish stock; the first Black person, the end of the whites.” Chapters set in 1980 explain the events leading up to her father’s disappearance; at that time Diamond told her father, “You ruined my skin!” Her understanding of his family blossoms when the teenager receives a series of letters from Southern relatives. Black people once ran Swift River’s mills, until escalating racist hostility forced all but one to flee to Georgia during an event that became known as “The Leaving.”

While Diamond may sound like a down-and-out, tragic character, she’s anything but. This gutsy girl has a keen intellect, a beautiful singing voice and an irrepressible, hopeful outlook. Her often-humorous narration is the novel’s central, propelling force. She befriends a white girl, Shelly, and their page-turning misadventures offer sharp insights into friendship, class, racial bias and discrimination, and coming of age.

With finely crafted prose, never a saccharine moment and a plot that skillfully weaves together past and present, Chambers masterfully delivers the message of Swift River: “Our instincts, our deepest intuitions, are really our ancestral memory; our people speaking through us.”

Swift River is a mesmerizing account of inherited trauma in a “sundown town,” propelled by the insightful and often-humorous narration of 16-year-old Diamond Newberry, the town’s only Black resident.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

Simone

Review by Norah Piehl

Pulitzer-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer) takes his first foray into children’s books with Simone, a thoughtful and emotionally intense family story set during the California fire season. Simone, a young Vietnamese American girl, is dreaming of floating in the ocean when she is awakened by her mother (whom she calls M&aacute, the only Vietnamese word she knows). A wildfire is approaching their town, and they’ve been ordered to evacuate.

Simone and her mother are prepared with go bags and an evacuation route—but even then Simone has to make tough choices: “I’ll be back for you,” she reluctantly says to the books and toys she can’t take. The pain of leaving things behind and the panic of vacating her home in an emergency remind Simone’s m&aacute of when floods forced her to evacuate her childhood home in Vietnam and abandon everything but her precious crayons. Despite the disorientation and chaos at the evacuation shelter, Simone’s m&aacute helps Simone find a path forward: “You don’t fight fire with fire, / You fight fire with water,” she says.

Minnie Phan’s hand-lettered text reinforces Simone’s first-person perspective, and Phan’s colored pencil and watercolor palette gorgeously interprets the book’s themes. Simone dreams in color, but when she awakens, the world is black and white, with the only remaining colors the red and orange of the flames. Likewise, her mother’s memories of Vietnam are blue, like the floodwaters that engulfed her home. Toward the end, as Simone and her new friends use artwork to remember their homes and to re-imagine their future, color returns to the pages. The illustrations combine with Nguyen’s words—“It’s up to us”—to offer a vision of hope and healing in the wake of generations of displacement.

In Simone, Minnie Phan’s illustrations combine with Viet Thanh Nguyen’s prose to offer a vision of hope and healing in the wake of generations of displacement.
NonfictionTravelPhotographyLifestyles

Project UrbEx

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

Adventure, anyone? While Ikumi Nakamura is best known as a Japanese video game artist and developer with an interest in horror and mystery, she has another fascinating side. As Project UrbEx: Adventures in Ghost Towns, Wastelands and Other Forgotten Worlds reveals, she’s also a fearless, adventurous photographer who has long traveled the world to explore and capture unusual and hidden locations. (For the uninitiated, UrbEx is short for urban exploration, a sometimes-dangerous pastime exploring structures and abandoned ruins in the human-made environment.)

This volume includes images from Nakamura’s explorations in North America, Europe and Asia accompanied by short, evocative essays and captions by Cam Winstanley, written based on interviews with Nakamura. The photos range from an old Italian garment factory, a decaying theme park in Bali nearly overgrown with lush vegetation, and the ruins of military planes baking in the Mojave Desert sun. A few depict Nakamura herself in precarious positions as she attempts to capture a shot.

It is unfortunate that the text is printed in neon orange, which readers may find difficult to read. Otherwise, this beautifully designed book is an intriguing conversation starter that may inspire photographers to undertake their own explorations.

 

In Project UrbEx, photographer Ikumi Nakamura explores and captures unusual and hidden locations throughout the world.
NonfictionMemoirLGBTQ+

Pretty

Review by mónica teresa ortiz

As the Texas legislature attempts to ban books; dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion; and threaten LGBTQ+ people with draconian laws, poet and author KB Brookins’ debut memoir, Pretty, arrives when we need it most. Brookins is a Black, queer and trans writer and cultural worker whose previous work includes two poetry collections, Freedom House and How to Identify Yourself With a Wound. Pretty details their experience navigating gender and Black masculinity while growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, exploring how they have moved through a world of cisgender Black and non-Black people, from their biological parents to their adopted family, from classmates to lovers, and from their gender transition through adulthood.

Brookins spent their youth challenging binary spaces and expectations. From early childhood to the present, they have desired to be seen as pretty, and this book is the search to find out what that means for them: “Though not gendered, we often associate prettiness with womanhood, femininity, and objects we see as dainty,” they write. “I’ve never been interested in womanhood, but I’ve always wanted to be treated softly, like a fat pleasantry to the eyes.” Through often striking prose and imagery, Brookins questions the restrictions involved in those associations: “When I was femme, my prettiness was canceled out by Blackness. When I was butch, my prettiness was seen as invalidating my masculinity. Who taught us that masculinity can’t be pretty? Who taught us that Blackness was devoid of prettiness and delicacy?”

While Brookins searches for answers to these questions, they continuously remind us of how hostile the U.S. is to Black and trans people: “As the perception of me changes before my eyes, I realize that it is a specific sadness—embodying patriarchal masculinity in a country that wants your blood more than it wants you to breathe.” We need words and stories like this. By describing their movement through the world, Brookins simultaneously critiques the conditions that oppress Black and racialized people who seek radical self-acceptance, and refuses the state’s malicious attempts to criminalize gender and sexuality.

Pretty offers far more than just pretty words—Brookins tells their side of the story as an act of resistance against those who would silence them. This book is as much a story of self-discovery and survival as it is a love letter to their younger and current self.

As Texas threatens LGBTQ+ people with draconian laws, KB Brookins’ memoir, Pretty, is an act of resistance against those who would silence trans writers.
RomanceContemporary Romance

Out on a Limb

Review by Katie Garaby

Filled with fun tropes, disability representation modeled after the author’s own experience and beautiful writing, Out on a Limb is a love story so sweet you want to squeal with glee. Originally self-published, Hannah Bonam-Young’s lovable rom-com is a must-read gift to the genre. 

Winnifred “Win” McNulty is used to forging her own path. Not one to tolerate being coddled for her limb difference, Win has spent most of her life trying to prove to everyone around her that she can make it just fine on her own, thank you very much. But that all changes one very steamy night at her best friend’s annual Halloween bash, when Win hops into bed with the very handsome Bo. Caught up in the moment, they rely on Win’s irregular use of birth control and find themselves facing a surprise pregnancy. Bo recently lost the lower part of one of his legs to cancer (he’s now in remission), and wasn’t sure if he’d be able to have children. So he’s elated at the news, shocked but genuinely excited. Meanwhile, Win decides to view her pregnancy as a way to level up into adulthood after spending her 20s flailing. The two plan to navigate pregnancy and parenthood as friends only, because that’s what good, responsible future caretakers would do. But if Win and Bo have learned anything, it’s that things rarely go according to plan. 

Here is my romance hot take, the absolute hill I will die on: I love a surprise pregnancy. That’s right, I said it. Out on a Limb perfectly deploys this tricky, often unpopular trope with two of the best main characters a reader could ask for. All the while, Bonam-Young winks at the reader, letting us know not to worry since Win and Bo secretly have big, tenderhearted feelings for each other. Both are softies who’ve had a bit of life thrown at them and, as a result, are scared of the possibility of a good thing. We watch them unlearn past hurts, often from time spent operating in an ableist society, and be seen for the very first time by a partner. It’s an incredible thing to bear witness to, and it makes for a powerful love story.

“Isn’t that all we ever want? To be seen and heard?” Win says at one point. “Validated, even when we’re not able to ask for it?” Out on a Limb allows readers to feel all of those things alongside its characters, and the romance world is better, kinder and more expansive for it.

Hannah Bonam-Young will make you a believer in the oft-loathed surprise pregnancy trope with Out on a Limb.
NonfictionTravelLifestylesLGBTQ+

Out in the World

Review by Anna Christensen

Summer vacation has arrived, and with it the euphoric urge to pack a bag and hit the road (or skies. Or sea). But what is a well-traveled LGBTQIA+ person (or ally!) to do when the same old vacation spots have gotten a bit too-well trodden? Let Out in the World: An LGBTQIA+ (and Friends!) Travel Guide to More Than 120 Destinations Around the World guide the way!

Card-carrying, globe-trotting gays Amy B. Scher and Mark Jason Williams have assembled an impressive guide on where to go when and what to do when you get there, whether you’re a rugged hiker, a small town sightseer or are simply looking to relax at as many vineyards as possible before returning to real life. Even better, they’ve done it with an eye especially for the queer traveler, compiling lists of LGBTQIA+ owned eateries, tour companies, shops and bed and breakfasts. (They even note which hotels are dog-friendly, in the event of a furry plus one). Divided into chapters with headings such as “Where No One Gets Hangry,” “Nature and Nurture” and “Our Favorite Small Towns With Big Pride,” Out in the World is packed with unexpected and delightful new places to explore while unabashedly being exactly who you are.

Out in the World is an LGBTQ+ travel guide packed with unexpected and delightful new places to explore while unabashedly being exactly who you are.
FictionLiterary Fiction

One of Our Kind

Review by Carole V. Bell

Bestselling young adult author Nicola Yoon’s first book for adults is a provocative mashup of body snatcher horror in the vein of The Stepford Wives, with the intraracial introspection of Ellis Cose’s The Rage of a Privileged Class. 

One of Our Kind is built around the complex truth that while white liberal guilt is more remarked on in popular culture, the angst of the Black middle class is just as powerful. Jasmyn Williams is, in many ways, a lucky woman. As a public defender, she has work that matters, as well as a loving husband, an adorable 6-year-old son she cherishes and a second child on the way. And yet, as successful as both Jasmyn and her husband, King, are, they live in the shadow of racist violence. The solution King suggests is relocating to Liberty, a utopian Black enclave just outside Los Angeles. 

Moving to an elite outpost isn’t an easy choice for Jasmyn, but she never could have anticipated the danger that would unfold in this idyllic retreat. Black folks in Liberty seem strangely culturally whitewashed, and are apathetic about Black lives outside their sphere. Even Jasmyn’s one simpatico friend—a schoolteacher with a big Afro who’s married to another Black woman—eventually succumbs to a conservative makeover that seems to rob her of her personality and racial consciousness. And something is decidedly unwholesome about the local Wellness Center. Yet, though Liberty harbors dangerous secrets, Jasmyn’s anxieties stretch beyond it. News of police killings seeps into her consciousness through her phone like poison, and feelings of threat are her constant companion. This puts her at odds with the other Black folks who came to Liberty to forget racial danger. 

The paradoxes and discontents of the upwardly mobile Black bourgeoisie are territory the Jamaican-born, wildly successful Yoon knows intimately and draws with precision. Like Kiley Reid (Such a Fun Age and Come and Get It), Yoon vividly captures the racial and political zeitgeist that haunts the Williams family. The embodiment of striving Black middle-class anxiety, Jasmyn constantly judges herself and others, and is ambivalent even on vacation, feeling guilty “because how is this her life? Why should she have so much when others have so little?” As troubled as she is compelling, Jasmyn is a potent illustration of the effects of racial trauma. 

At times, Jasmyn’s constantly watchful point of view feels painfully earnest. Still, while One of Our Kind lacks the humor of racial satires like Jordan Peele’s Get Out or Percival Everett’s Erasure, Yoon’s observations are bold and razor sharp even when she’s immersed in her characters’ failings.

Wildly successful young adult author Nicola Yoon’s first book for adults vividly captures the paradoxes and discontents of the striving Black middle class.
NonfictionNatureAnimals

My Life With Sea Turtles

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Almost 60 years ago, herpetologist and conservationist Archie Carr introduced the beauty and splendor of sea turtles to the world in his now classic So Excellent a Fishe. It was 1967, and Carr was already warning readers of the dangers these magnificent creatures faced due to fishing nets, ocean pollution and human encroachment on breeding grounds. The plight of sea turtles hasn’t improved much since Carr’s time, but thanks to marine biologist and ecologist Christine Figgener’s captivating My Life With Sea Turtles: A Marine Biologist’s Quest to Protect One of the Most Ancient Animals on Earth, readers can understand the life cycle of sea turtles, the forces that endanger them and the steps we must take to save them from extinction.

Figgener was in an undergraduate research program in Egypt when she encountered her first sea turtle and, mesmerized, watched it swim through the waters of the Red Sea. She moved to Costa Rica to work as a research assistant in an organization devoted to saving endangered leatherback turtles from extinction. Figgener recounts this early research with urgency that brings you right into the moment with her, peering at a sea turtle as she lays her eggs in the sand. 

With zeal and passion, Figgener shares a wealth of information about these creatures. For example, sea turtles migrate back and forth between their nesting beaches and their feeding grounds, some species covering as many as 7,450 miles from site to site. Nesting female sea turtles lay hundreds of eggs each year, but only 50-60% hatch, and once the hatchlings leave the nest, only a small percentage survive the arduous journey back to the ocean, sneaking or scuttling by predatory birds and crabs. Once in the ocean, the newborns face marine predators and must navigate polluted waters filled with plastics and fishing nets that can ensnare, maim or kill them. 

Part memoir, part science reporting and part conservationist tract, Figgener’s illuminating My Life With Sea Turtles sheds light not only on the beauty and mystery of sea turtles, but also on the urgent need to save them.

The illuminating My Life With Sea Turtles sheds light not only on the beauty and mystery of sea turtles, but also on the urgent need to save them.
FictionSpeculative FictionShort Stories

Ninetails

Review by Maya Fleischmann

Myth and folklore intertwine seamlessly with the tumultuous lives of Asian women in this mesmerizing collection of stories.

Each story in Ninetails: Nine Tales reveals the poignant struggles of young Asian women marginalized and scorned, struggling to eke out their identity, follow their heart and break free from political oppression and social expectations. At the heart of these tales of strength and transformation is Ninetails, a fox spirit known by many names—hulijing, huxian, fox demon or fox fairy—who helps women of diverse backgrounds and ages transcend the violence and turbulence of their lives.

The central story, divided into several parts, is called “The Haunting of Angel Island.” Set in the 1900s, against the backdrop of the Angel Island immigration station located in San Francisco Bay, it features Tye, a Chinese interpreter who witnesses the harrowing experiences of women detainees. Other stories include the tale of a silicone love doll who yearns to be human, the plight of a Korean girl bullied in a land foreign to her, and the story of two friends connected by being cheated on by the same man. Unfolding with gripping intensity through author Sally Wen Mao’s vivid depictions of the gritty settings and sobering situations that confront her characters, each premise is made even more powerful by the magical element introduced when a fox spirit manifests to liberate the women from their misery, or inflict retribution for wrongdoings.

Some of the stories in Ninetails end abruptly and can feel a little disjointed; nevertheless, Mao’s compelling depiction of Asian women’s experiences is powerfully unsettling in its authenticity. Through themes of revenge and redemption, these stories illuminate our enduring capacity for resilience.

In Sally Wen Mao’s Ninetails, a fox spirit helps Asian women of diverse backgrounds and ages transcend the violence and turbulence of their lives.

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