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Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

The Moorings of Mackerel Sky

Review by Noah Fram

Mackerel Sky hasn’t had a good fishing season in centuries. Not since its founder betrayed the mermaid who captured his heart, and she cursed the Maine fishing village in retaliation. That grand tragedy begat many others, but no curse is absolute, even one cast by the most vengeful scion of the relentless ocean. And as young Leo Beale’s alcohol-fueled rebellion against his opiate-dependent mother leads him to the shelter of town elder Myra Kelley; Manon Perle quilts her way out of the miasma of grief over her daughter, born with her legs fused together like a mermaid’s tail and dead far too young; and the local high school’s star pitcher, Derrick Stowe, falls clandestinely in love, the mermaid’s magic may finally be at an ebb.

The Moorings of Mackerel Sky is a book to submerge yourself in. Debut novelist MZ’s storytelling does not flow in straight lines. Rather, it eddies, lingering in tiny moments in the present before transporting readers back to the story’s headwaters, hundreds of years ago. She explores the past in loving detail, filling every page with lushly crafted, often poetic prose. The backstory seems, at times, irrelevant to the modern-day plotline, inserted more for world building than narrative necessity. However, MZ does nothing without purpose. Every half-finished historical anecdote and ancillary encounter contributes to the larger story, like a school of fish following an insistent current.This nonlinear structure is unified by an underlying theme of foreignness. Humans are creatures of the land, whose trespasses on water are tolerated at the mermaids’ whim, while the mermaids themselves are antithetical to land. At its core, The Moorings of Mackerel Sky is both a tragedy and a romance, a tale of humans and merfolk struggling to live and love in each other’s domains, and how they all end up moored to the liminal space of the shore.

A lushly crafted tale of a Maine fishing village cursed by a mermaid, The Moorings of Mackerel Sky is a debut to submerge yourself in.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

One Giant Leap

Review by Lisa Bubert

One little person suits up in their warmest boots, gloves, scarf and hat to make one giant leap into the wintery unknown. They ride the elevator down to the first floor. . . . Or, wait, are they riding a spaceship? In One Giant Leap, a wonderfully inventive ode to imagination, snow is not snow: it’s moon dust. A pigeon is not a pigeon: it’s an extraterrestrial being (or two, or three). Like any good adventure, there is a moment where all may be lost. Will our little astronaut make it back to their spaceship before the duststorm fills the space sky?  

With papercut collage illustrations that play with color and pattern, Thao Lam dives into the unknown of a child’s imagination, reminding readers that intrigue lies around every corner and every day is an opportunity for a new adventure.

Thao Lam dives into the unknown of a child’s imagination, reminding readers that intrigue lies around every corner and every day is an opportunity for a new adventure.
NonfictionMemoir

Grief Is for People

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

After Sloane Crosley’s apartment is burglarized, she’s unmoored. The thief stole handfuls of jewelry that once belonged to Crosley’s grandmother—a cruel woman whom she didn’t like, Crosley’s mom reminds her. But the jewelry was Crosley’s, and she wants it back. She also wants the sense of safety that fled with the burglar as he exited her bedroom window and descended the fire escape onto Manhattan streets. That isn’t so easy to recover, so instead Crosley channels her uncertainty into detective work.

Crosley wrestles with her feelings about the burglary, writing, “Grief is for people, not things.” And on the one-month anniversary of the incident, her grief finds a new object. Her best friend, Russell, dies by suicide. If the burglary unmoored Crosley, Russell’s death sends her out to sea.

In her memoir Grief Is for People, Crosley attempts to write her way through the five stages of grief, which provide the book’s structure. Russell’s death trumps Crosley’s missing jewelry, but the two incidents are intertwined in both her psyche and her experience. She and Russell—a former boss from when she worked in book publishing—would spend hours at flea markets in search of treasures. The spice cabinet the jewelry was taken from was one of Russell’s finds, and a missing ring was one of the identifying factors Russell noted on Crosley’s resume during her job interview (“Long brown hair. Square ring”).

Crosley’s work is often praised for its humor, whether in her essay collections (I Was Told There’d Be Cake, How Did You Get This Number) or novels (Cult Classic, The Clasp). But Grief Is for People places at the forefront a remarkable willingness to face the dark questions that follow a suicide. Crosley began writing one month after Russell’s 2019 death in an attempt to convince herself that he was really gone (a conclusion she accepts, inconveniently, during the COVID-19 pandemic). Her search for acceptance is an impulse that readers who have mourned a loved one may recognize—an effort to map a new emotional landscape on what looks, to a non-mourner’s eye, like the same old world.

In Grief Is for People, Sloane Crosley shows a remarkable willingness to face the dark questions that follow a suicide.
NonfictionLiteratureBiography

Carson McCullers

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

The 1940 novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter established 23-year-old Carson McCullers as a talented new voice who conveyed through her characters the pain and loneliness of outsiders, misfits and oddballs seeking to be loved. Over the next 11 years, McCullers published two novels, a novella and collection of stories set in small Southern towns. When she died at 50, she left behind this small but powerful body of work and a record of what she once called her “sad, happy life.”

In her absorbing new biography, Carson McCullers: A Life, Mary V. Dearborn draws deeply on letters, the author’s unfinished autobiography and newly available archival materials, painting a colorful and finely detailed portrait of McCullers’ public and private lives. Born in 1917 in Columbus, Georgia, Lula Carson Smith grew up in a family she described as well-off, though not rich. As a child, McCullers and her mother recognized her many talents. “Marked out as special,” Dearborn writes, she “felt herself somehow outside the sphere of normal childhood,” a state McCullers would express in one of her earliest stories, “Wunderkind.”

McCullers was studying writing at New York University when she met Reeves McCullers in 1935. The two found an immediate attraction and soon married. Carson was bound and determined to become a writer, and Reeves believed she was destined for great things. But the marriage was always troubled, with the couple separating, remarrying and separating again, until Reeves died by suicide in 1953. Unlike Virginia Spencer Carr’s 1975 biography The Lonely Hunter—written without access to McCullers’ now-available letters and archives—Dearborn offers a candid and complex portrait of the author’s lifelong love and pursuit of women, especially older, more worldly women, documenting many of her relationships for the first time.

Dearborn, who has authored the biographies of Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller, among other writers, captures the way that McCullers alienated many artists—Eudora Welty called her “that little wretch Carson”—as well as the ways that others such as W.H. Auden, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams championed her. In the end, Dearborn notes, “We read Carson’s work today because she taps into the universal sense that we are not understood, not loved for ourselves. Carson provides confirmation that our common search means we are less alone.”

Dearborn weaves careful critical readings of McCullers’ writings with detailed descriptions of the author’s life, producing an exemplary critical biography of one of our greatest writers.

The absorbing Carson McCullers is the first to paint a full portrait of the author, showing acclaimed biographer Mary V. Dearborn at the height of her powers.
NonfictionMiddle Eastern HistoryHistory

The Achilles Trap

Review by Stephen Elliott

With its near 500-page count and robust endnotes, The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq might at first glance scare off readers who haven’t sniffed a textbook in years. But thanks to Steve Coll’s crisp and dynamic prose, what’s between the covers feels little like an academic tome.

Despite appearances, The Achilles Trap is not really an Iraq War book (just as Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower is not really a 9/11 book). Yes, you get there eventually, but Coll, like Wright, has more to say about the years leading up to that cataclysm. The narrative details Saddam’s upbringing, rise to power and entrenchment as a key strongman in the Middle East, sometimes allied with the United States and sometimes its biggest pain in the ass—and sometimes both at the same time.

In the two decades since the American invasion of Iraq began, Saddam Hussein has become a sort of caricature. Here, Coll reintroduces the dictator to an audience that has either forgotten his nuances or never knew them. There is unimaginable cruelty, family drama and even comedy—like when Saddam sets out on a career as a historical romance novelist just a few years before his death.

Coll, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars and a longtime journalist for The New Yorker and The Washington Post, has a special combination of mostly unrelated skill sets that eludes so many narrative nonfiction writers: He’s a groundbreaking reporter and researcher who is able to uncover new information in a tightly wound arena, but also a deft stylist with a natural gift for both narrative structure and fluent yet surprising writing. Like a baseball player who can both pitch and hit with the best, the rare union places Coll at or near the apex of the craft.

Detailing Saddam’s own cruelty does not mean Coll lets the U.S. off the hook, though. Sprinkled among what is at times a tense political thriller are scenes of astounding myopia, hubris, miscommunication, dark hypocrisy, betrayal, stupidity, cruelty and violence of our own. Though the events of The Achilles Trap concluded 20 years ago, there are few better roadmaps to where American foreign policy in the Middle East has ended up today.

With agile prose, groundbreaking reporting and narrative splendor, The Achilles Trap is a gripping history of the Iraq War.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Anita de Monte Laughs Last

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Part campus novel, part ghost story, Xochitl Gonzalez’s second novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, fearlessly takes on racism and misogyny in the rarefied world of fine art and art history. 

Nodding to real-life Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta and her husband, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, the novel opens in the late 1980s with the death of artist Anita de Monte. After a violent argument with her husband, Jack Martin, Anita was found on the sidewalk outside their apartment, leaving speculators to wonder—did she jump or was she pushed? As Andre was in his real trial, Jack is acquitted and continues his successful and lucrative career, while Anita’s art is all but forgotten. Ten years later, Raquel Toro is an art history major at Brown. Her working-class, Puerto Rican background makes her feel out of place at the university and even more so in her department, where she doesn’t fit in with the privileged “Art History Girls.” Fortunes change when Raquel begins dating art major Nick Fitzsimmons, whose wealthy parents have ties to New York’s major museums and galleries, and when her advisor enthusiastically supports Raquel’s senior thesis on Jack Martin’s career. 

The dynamic between Raquel and Nick mirrors the one between Anita and Jack, with both men trying to control their partner’s physical appearance, clothing and schedule through microaggressions and expensive gifts. As Raquel’s summer internship redirects her research to include Anita’s experience, Anita’s story, told in parallel chapters, takes a turn for the uncanny; she subtly haunts Jack from beyond the grave, transforming into a bat and shifting his meticulously displayed art works. Though told with humor and a light touch, Gonzalez doesn’t shy away from serious issues: the erasure of women from the art history canon and the racism often faced by first generation students of color at Ivy League colleges. As Raquel brings Anita’s groundbreaking sculptures to light, Anita de Monte Laughs Last boldly questions the choices behind what we are taught and demands that the complete story be disclosed.

Though told with humor and a light touch, Anita de Monte Laughs Last doesn’t shy away from serious issues: the erasure of women from the art history canon and the racism often faced by first generation students of color at Ivy League colleges.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Woman in the Sable Coat

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Elizabeth Brooks returns to World War II-era England with her fourth novel, following two young women connected by their love of the same man. But The Woman in the Sable Coat isn’t a typical story of plucky, cheerful British heroines making a difference to the war effort: Although World War II is at the center of the novel, and its period details are sharply etched, this is a darker, more Gothic-leaning story.

Nina Woodrow and Kate Nicholson are first brought together on an August afternoon in 1934 when 14-year-old Nina is on the outs with her best friend, Rose, and Kate, married to her childhood friend Guy Nicholson, is pregnant and miserable in their new home in Cottenden village. That night, a spontaneous dinner party has both Nina and Kate acting impulsively and seemingly out of character.

Eight years later, the war is grinding on. Nina, now 22, has joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, where she folds silk parachutes and tries to find her footing. Back in Cottenden, Kate cares for her son, Pip, and takes in refugees. But Guy, now a Royal Air Force Pilot at the same base as Nina, tells Kate he wants a divorce and that he’s in love with Nina. This revelation draws the despairing Kate to Nina’s father Henry, an awkward, cautious widower.

The novel rotates between Nina’s and Kate’s perspectives, as each contrives to live with her decisions and precarious situations: Nina as the second wife of a divorced man and Kate as a divorcee. With a sense of suspense and menace in the vein of Daphne du Maurier (to whom there’s a nod as Kate obsessively reads du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek), The Woman in the Sable Coat lays clues for the reader to suspect a long-hidden deception, a secret that turns out to affect both women in unexpected ways. The novel also shows how the era’s prim morality feels suffocating for middle-class women, and how the trauma of the Great War still reverberates for some of these characters decades later. The Woman in the Sable Coat is a slow burn of a novel, with a lovely, surprising moment of redemption and connection for both Nina and Kate at the story’s end.

The Woman in the Sable Coat isn’t a typical story of plucky, cheerful British heroines making a difference to the war effort: Although World War II is at the center of the novel, and its period details are sharply etched, this is a darker, more Gothic-leaning story.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Parasol Against the Axe

Review by Freya Sachs

To step into one of Helen Oyeyemi’s worlds, you have to give up control—accept that something magical and unpredictable is about to happen. Reading with a “yes, and” mentality will make your experience all the more dynamic, curious and surprising. Following up on 2021’s Peaces, Parasol Against the Axe uses place as character to question what, exactly, is true and can be trusted.

That place is Prague. The city is alive, and six-foot-tall Hero Tojosoa is visiting for the weekend, unsure that she should have said yes to participating in a bachelorette party for Sofie Cibulkova, her estranged friend. Hero has brought a book with her, Paradoxical Undressing, and she soon discovers that the book is a changing thing: Depending upon who is reading it, where, when and even why, the text alters. Its instability comes to reflect the ways that people appear and complicate what should be a celebratory weekend.

Stories within the story unfold, and there’s a particular satisfaction in following how they reflect the main narrative of the novel. At famous sights around the city, unexpected guests arrive, some from Hero’s past. They add to the tension between Hero and Sofie, and in each scene, these new characters raise doubts about the truth of the story, the past and the present.

Oyeyemi’s language, along with her ability to drop clues and invite questions without clear answers, makes the reading experience a world unto its own. Readers will find themselves checking the various versions of Paradoxical Undressing against one another, to make sure they haven’t missed any echoes or revisions. The pleasure of Parasol Against the Axe lies in figuring out what is real and what is imagined—and if, in Oyeyemi’s world, the difference even matters.

In Helen Oyeyemi’s Parasol Against the Axe, the city of Prague is alive, and six-foot-tall Hero Tojosoa is visiting for the weekend, unsure that she should have said yes to participating in a bachelorette party for her estranged friend Sofie.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Great Divide

Review by Laura Sackton

In The Great Divide, her first novel since 2014’s The Book of Unknown Americans, Cristina Henriquez paints an intricate, layered portrait of a monumental moment in the history of the Americas: the construction of the Panama Canal. Set in 1907, this polyvocal novel is a powerful act of witness and remembrance.

Instead of focusing on only one character, Henriquez threads together the stories of over a dozen people whose lives are profoundly affected by the canal project. This inspired choice suits the scope of the event and hints at even more stories beyond these pages: It’s easy to imagine, in the snippets of lives that Henriquez zooms in on, just how many more love stories, deaths, moments of radicalization, migrations, injustices, protests and other life-altering moments occurred during the construction of the canal between 1903 and 1914.

The characters come from many countries and a wide range of backgrounds. There’s Francisco, a Panamanian fisherman who’s disgusted at what the canal project is doing to his country, and his son Omar, whose decision to work in the excavation zone causes a deep rift between them. There’s Ada, a girl from Barbados who arrives in Panama hoping to earn enough money to help her ill sister back home. She finds work in the house of John and Marian Oswald, a white American couple who have come to the isthmus in the hopes that John can eradicate malaria. Joaquin, a fishmonger who’s mostly content to live an ordinary life in the city, gets swept up in his wife’s burgeoning protest movement when she finds out her hometown is being forcibly moved to make space for the canal.

Additional points of view include those of canal workers from across the Caribbean, a foreman, a mail carrier, a young woman with dreams of becoming a photojournalist and an egotistical French doctor. The canal disrupts their lives in different ways: It kills some of them and makes others rich.

The Great Divide is a collection of small narratives that together create a moving and powerful epic about the human cost of building the Panama Canal. The novel’s greatest strength is this unrelenting smallness. It insists on the importance of every human life, and illuminates the endless, ordinary, forgotten stories that underlie every pivotal moment in human history.

Cristina Henríquez’s polyvocal novel is a moving and powerful epic about the human cost of building the Panama Canal. It’s easy to imagine, in these snippets of lives, just how many more love stories, deaths, migrations, protests and other life-altering moments occurred during the canal’s construction.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

All That Grows

Review by Mariel Fechik

A boy and his sister wander their quiet neighborhood and admire the life bursting into color around them. The boy’s sister tells him about the burgeoning flowers and trees they pass, dropping small seeds of curiosity that take root in the boy’s mind. 

As the season blooms into summer, the siblings tend to a garden. Though the boy loves to help his sister nurture and weed the vegetable patch, he also ponders the weeds themselves: Why are some plants cultivated, while others are yanked from the ground before they’re given a chance to thrive? 

Award-winning author (When You Can Swim) Jack Wong’s All That Grows is a delicate but powerful ode to curiosity and the delights to be found in the natural world. There is an eloquent simplicity to the story and its contained focus. Wong’s narrator, the unnamed boy, is quiet and thoughtful as he describes his surroundings and experiences in vivid, sensory ways: “Overnight, the trees go from bare to bursting with leaves, turning the streets into enormous green caverns.” In a way, the writing feels like a photographer’s macro lens, homing in on the tiny universes unfurling inside something bigger.

Wong’s illustrations parallel this idea as they zoom in and out of the book’s verdant, sun-dappled setting. The beautifully textured pastel drawings are realistic, but they also possess a subtle whimsy in their decidedly childlike perspective. Whether it’s the way everything seems to glow at the edges or the exclusion of adults (save one lone glimpse), the effect is potent. In some near-intangible way, Wong has evoked the soft haze of childhood summers where a small stand of trees might be seen as a huge forest, and a field of dandelions offers magical, unfettered possibility.

In All That Grows, Jack Wong evokes the soft haze of childhood summers where a small stand of trees might be seen as a huge forest to explore, and a field of dandelions offers magical, unfettered possibility.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

The First Day of May

Review by Lisa Bubert

A child cooped up in a small house all winter receives wonderful news. The weather forecaster announces a sunny day from the television; the window is aglow with the bright sunlight; a new page is turned on the calendar: Today is The First Day of May. First, the child is stopped by a pair of adult legs and a disembodied hand that reminds them to put on their shoes. Shoes on, the child is released into the spring day, in a moment of wonder captured by their starry eyes taking in a vast overhead sky. No time to waste, the child is off—flitting around to explore the surrounding fields and forests, watching the birds, chasing butterflies, dancing to the cricket’s song. This most perfect day concludes with the return of the disembodied adult hand bringing the child a cup of tea and tucking them in for a nap in the forest among the flowers, as birds and animal friends look on lovingly. 

This Portuguese import is pure joy: all smiles and cartwheels and bright primary colors. Henrique Coser Moreira’s art is simple but incredibly expressive with its high contrast colors, making this picture book easy for a young child to follow, while compelling adult readers to also remember the joys of all our firsts.

The weather forecaster announces a sunny day from the television; the window is aglow with the bright sunlight; a new page is turned on the calendar: Today is The First Day of May.
Children's & YAMiddle GradeChildren's

The First State of Being

Review by Emily Koch

To say Michael Rosario is anxious about Y2K would be an understatement. It’s August, 1999, and the 12-year-old boy is convinced that incalculable issues will arise when all internal program systems reset to the year 00. He’s stockpiling stolen canned goods under his bed so that he can provide for his single mom when society crumbles at the start of the new millennium. 

The only thing that can distract Michael from his anxieties is his crush on his 15-year-old babysitter, Gibby—that is, until Michael and Gibby find a mysterious boy named Ridge outside their apartment complex. Ridge claims to be the world’s first time-traveler and proves it with a futuristic book detailing the next 20 years. While Ridge marvels at 1999 culture and tries to convince Gibby to take him to the mall, Michael starts concocting a plan to steal Ridge’s book so he can find out what will happen with Y2K.

The First State of Being by Newbery Medalist and bestselling author Erin Entrada Kelly is an exciting tale about friendship that blends historical and science fiction. Short chapters build tension as Michael’s morality is tested and Ridge wonders if he will be able to get back to the future at all.

The third person prose is imbued with personality, for example when describing Gibby’s brother, Beejee: “Michael still couldn’t figure out how the world’s most perfect creature could be related to a rotten potato like Beejee, but these were the mysteries of the universe.” Kelly shines in the details, such as how given coordinates accurately lead to the exact, real-life neighborhood in Delaware found in a map at the beginning. Occasional glimpses of the year 2199 are given in the form of textbook entries, interviews between scientists, and transcripts of conversations from the lab housing the Spacial Teleportation Module that Ridge uses. Foreshadowing for the plot twists is expertly woven in and leads to well-laid surprises.

This short but suspenseful novel is Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me meets Tae Keller’s Jennifer Chan is Not Alone. Though it takes place at the turn of the millennium, modern readers will be able to identify with Michael’s anxieties over the future of the world, and find his journey compelling. 

Though The First State of Being takes place at the turn of the millennium, readers will be able to identify with Michael’s anxieties over the future of the world.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

Luigi, the Spider Who Wanted to Be a Kitten

Review by Nicole Brinkley

When a big, hairy spider moves into a new house, his plan is to hide and catch flies—but then a kind old woman named Betty reaches beneath the couch and feels his fuzz. She thinks he’s a kitten! Newly named Luigi doesn’t want to scare her, so he pretends to be a cat.

It turns out that cats have cushy lives—snacking on cereal, napping in beds, and playing with toys—and the longer Luigi pretends, the more he truly wants to be a kitten. He misses catching flies and his sticky web, but this is better! If he pretends hard enough, maybe Betty will never notice that he isn’t a cat.

However, when Betty’s friends come to visit and comment on how she adopted a spider, he knows the gig is up. But when Betty turns to him, it’s with open arms and a kind question: “Can you be yourself and still be my friend?”

Author Michelle Knudsen and illustrator Kevin Hawkes, the duo behind Library Lion, reunite for the first time in over a decade with Luigi, the Spider Who Wanted to Be a Kitten. Anybody who thinks spiders can’t be cute will be proven wrong with this charmingly illustrated story about identity and honesty.

With acrylics and pencil, Hawkes uses both shadows and Luigi’s long spider legs to expertly convey his kitten-ness, and read-alouds can be paired with easy challenges to kids to match Luigi’s actions: Can you make your hands look like kitten ears? Can you hold your leg back like a tail?

Luigi, the Spider Who Wanted to Be a Kitten warms the heart, highlighting how freeing the truth can be, as well as the fact that you can be more than one thing—so long as you’re happy.

Correction: The print version of this review featured the wrong illustrator’s name. The correct illustrator is Kevin Hawkes.

Anybody who thinks spiders can’t be cute will be proven wrong with Luigi, the Spider Who Wanted to Be a Kitten, a charmingly illustrated story about identity and honesty.

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