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For many years, Icarus Gallagher has slipped into the dangerous Mr. Black’s mansion on opportune nights to steal priceless artworks and replace them with perfect forgeries created by Icarus’ father, Angus. Their strange mission is one of revenge: Mr. Black hurt Angus’ family, and so Angus has spent almost two decades trying to hurt Mr. Black.

As a consequence of his father’s obsession, Icarus lives a half-life devoid of any real connection. At 17, he only has a year before he can leave and never see Angus again. Until then, he’ll keep his head down. 

Except one night, Icarus is caught by Helios, Mr. Black’s teenage son. While he originally appears to be a threat that could expose Icarus, the two soon form a tentative friendship—and then something more intense. For Icarus, a boy made of want, it’s almost more than he can bear. But his connection with the broken, golden Helios might prove to be the key to freedom for both of them. 

K. Ancrum’s extraordinary fifth novel Icarus is an elegant, multifaceted gem about art, power and fear. Ancrum performs a confident high-wire act in balancing the weighty manifestations of these themes alongside those of connection, desire and contradiction. 

Icarus—book and boy—is the embodiment of raw yearning, and all of Ancrum’s characters wear their hearts on the tips of their tongues. Occasionally the book’s dialogue can feel unrealistic or even overwrought, showing an honesty and openness not necessarily common among 17-year-old boys. But there is an intimate truth in the intensity of feeling behind their words, and this is one of Ancrum’s greatest skills as a writer. 

“Some of us lead lives that would require suspension of belief from others,” Ancrum writes in the novel’s dedication. Perhaps she references the unreality of a teenaged art thief who tends ferns and scales buildings, but maybe she’s simply talking about the unreality of everyday injuries and ecstasies: the cold rage of abuse; the emptiness of grief; the rapturous beauty and agony of being touched. 

Ancrum’s prose is also thrillingly decadent in certain moments, channeling the masterpieces of art whose power she telegraphs through every page. Often sudden bluntness, either of sentence length or metaphor, gives an edge to the gilded phrasing. In Ancrum’s novel, Icarus’ wings striving for the heat of the sun becomes both a beautiful representation of queer love and a sharp, artful subversion of the original Greek mythos.

In her creative and contemplative debut How Do I Draw These Memories?: An Illustrated Memoir, Jonell Joshua reflects on the people, places and events that helped her become the person—and artist—she is today. 

An interesting pastiche of illustrative styles give this mixed-media memoir a scrapbook-like feel, and Joshua’s artistic range is on full display in painterly full-page pieces, expertly drawn black-and-white comics and colorful, vibrant illustrations. Through the inclusion of photographs of prominent figures in her life, Joshua also illuminates the ways in which others’ perspectives can become woven into our own. 

The author’s childhood years were peripatetic: After Joshua’s father’s death when she was very young, she moved with her mother and brothers to her grandparents’ home in Savannah, Georgia. She and her brothers also lived with their other grandparents in New Jersey while her mother sought treatment for bipolar disorder. The author notes, “I envied the schoolmates who’d grown up together. . . . I kept tabs on how many [schools] I’d gone to. It was like a game I played in my head. Five elementary schools, four middle schools, one high school.” 

While How Do I Draw These Memories? begins with the author’s earliest memories and ends approximately in the present, the memoir moves back and forth chronologically in between, resulting in a reading experience that’s more akin to an assemblage. As Joshua moves from state to state, school to school, her memoir also switches between narrators and storytelling styles—straightforward prose, Q&A format, illustrated narratives, etc.

Additional insight is offered via sections like the informative and empathetic “Bipolar Disorder—From My Perspective” and a detailed chronicle of her path from post-high school uncertainty to where she is today: an illustrator whose clients include the New York Times, CRWN Magazine, and NPR; and someone whose memories remind her that “The moments of joy I felt growing up . . . felt immeasurable. The love I was raised with is the love I carry with me.”