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FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Family Meal

Review by Lauren Bufferd

For Bryan Washington, cooking, eating together or even refusing a home-cooked meal has far-reaching emotional repercussions. In his new novel, Family Meal, the relationships among friends are defined by the food they prepare and strengthened by the meals they share. Food provides the ultimate opportunity for community and witness against a backdrop of personal hardship and urban gentrification.

Cam is back in his hometown of Houston after the traumatic death of his boyfriend, Kai, who worked as a translator and split his time between Los Angeles and Osaka, Japan. Unable to shake the violent circumstances of Kai’s death, Cam is haunted by Kai’s memory and his nights spiral into bouts of indulgent drug use and casual sex. He eventually ends up at the bakery where he once worked, which is owned by Mae. She and her late husband, Jin, took Cam in after the death of his parents, raising him alongside their son TJ. Though the boys were once close, they drifted apart as adults, and TJ struggles to navigate Cam’s limitless despair and self-destructive behavior (Washington provides a content note suggesting that readers for whom self-harm, addiction and disordered eating are sensitive issues should go at their own pace). Feeling stuck in a relationship with a married man, TJ tentatively begins a new relationship with another employee at the bakery and explores his own nascent wish for independence. Meanwhile, Mae is under pressure to sell the business, and her thoughts about expansion are dependent on TJ’s plans. Or are they?

Although facing the people you’ve loved and left behind is often painful, as Washington demonstrates in Family Meal, it can reveal the unconditional love that remains. Shifting between points of view, Washington shows us characters at their most vulnerable, using food culture to explore conflict, desire, pleasure and passion. The meals his characters enjoy together through it all—from congee to collards to croissants—remind us of the many ways that love, like food, sustains us.

Bryan Washington shows us characters at their most vulnerable, using food culture to explore conflict, desire, pleasure and passion.
NonfictionMemoir

Father and Son

Review by Alice Cary

“I was transformed into an old man quite suddenly, on June 11, 2011, three days short of my sixty-ninth birthday,” writes Jonathan Raban, describing the effects of a massive stroke that left him a wheelchair user and without the use of one hand. Raban, who died in January 2023 from complications from that stroke, used voice dictation software to write and edit this posthumously published book, Father and Son, which interweaves his weeks in rehab with the World War II story of his father, who served for three years in the British Army—in Dunkirk, Tunisia, Anzio and Palestine—not meeting his son until his return. It’s a highly personal account of two very different experiences of trauma, loss of agency and adjustment.

Throughout, Raban is brutally honest, not shying away from the ways his personal habits may have contributed to his stroke (“I had left my high blood pressure unmedicated. I was a daily wine drinker and . . . a lifelong smoker.”) or the many indignities he had to suffer during his recovery, such as asking for assistance going to the bathroom. He sings the praises of kind helpers and skewers others, such as a doctor who greeted him by saying, “You’re the one who used to be a writer.” With piercing humor, he notes: “I very much hope that I’m still a writer. I very much hope that I’ll write about this—about you—when I get out of the rehab ward.” He devours other memoirs about strokes and is never short on opinions, calling, for instance, Jill Bolte Taylor’s much-lauded My Stroke of Insight “an unsatisfactory blend of neuroscience, woo-woo, and outdated locationism.” In alternate chapters, Raban meticulously traces his parents’ courtship and his father’s unhappy stint as a teacher and rapid rise as a military officer during the war, using his parents’ letters as well as other histories. Although it’s not exactly a natural pairing with his own medical journey, Raban’s masterful prose makes it work.

The book ends rather abruptly as Raban leaves rehab for a rental home while his own house is being remodeled to meet his new needs. A brief editor’s note provides little additional enlightenment but drops a bombshell: When he died, Raban had been drafting a chapter about a son he had been recently getting to know. (Interestingly, his obituaries mention only one child, Julia.) That chapter, I’m sure, would have been a fascinating addition to Father and Son, and certainly fitting with its title. It’s a sign of Raban’s talent and powerful voice that, even in death, he leaves readers wanting more.

It’s a sign of Jonathan Rabin’s talent and powerful voice that he leaves readers wanting more in his posthumous memoir, Father and Son.
NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

Flee North

Review by Anne Bartlett

As political tension over slavery grew in early 19th-century America, flashpoints were most likely to occur not in the Deep South or North, but in the borderlands, where the enslaved lived within striking distance of freedom. These borderlands were the stomping grounds of a free Black shoemaker named Thomas Smallwood, who ought to be as famous as the remarkable Harriet Tubman. Over just a couple of years in the 1840s, he helped hundreds of enslaved people escape from Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. He wrote vivid, funny abolitionist polemics under a pseudonym derived from a Dickens character. And he was the first to write of the escape network as the “underground railroad”—initially as a joke at the expense of the slave-catchers.

New York Times journalist Scott Shane brings Smallwood’s story to much-warranted wider attention in Flee North, an exciting narrative of Smallwood’s partnership with Charles Torrey, a radical white abolitionist. For a short but fruitful time, the two stayed ahead of enemies like the major Baltimore trafficker Hope Slatter.

Shane depicts an unsettled world where no Black person could live without crushing anxiety. The free could be kidnapped and enslaved; the enslaved could be sold south on a whim to hellish cotton-growing labor camps. Police departments were created primarily to suppress Black people. As Shane notes, the usual narrative of the underground railroad tells of tiny groups fleeing on foot, aided by white sympathizers. Smallwood’s and Torrey’s efforts were bolder and more open, involving crowded cities, wagons, boats and actual rail cars, with helpers—and betrayers—as likely to be free Blacks as whites.

It couldn’t last. Smallwood and Torrey had to part ways for safety, but both wrote memoirs. Torrey and his supporters never once mentioned Smallwood; Smallwood never once denigrated Torrey. Torrey was a brave, if reckless, man, but Shane’s hero is Smallwood, whose calculated daring, wit and foresight still inspire.

Scott Shane depicts Thomas Smallwood as an abolitionist hero whose calculated daring, wit and foresight still inspire.
Children's & YAYA FictionYAMiddle GradeChildren's

Gone Wolf

Review by Emily Koch

Gone Wolf begins in 2111 with Inmate Eleven, a 12-year-old girl being kept in a tiny room. Her only company is her dog, Ira, who has been “going wolf” more often—pacing, narrowing his eyes and imagining he is free. Inmate Eleven is a Blue, which refers to her blue skin and hair. As a genetic match for the president’s son, she is designated to serve as his companion in a mysterious and sinister system. And as Inmate Eleven gathers more information about the world outside her room, she begins to feel the calling to go wolf too.

The narrative switches to Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2022, where Imogen—also 12 years old—is often told she feels too much. She used to rely on her brothers to help settle her worries, but now the pandemic has isolated her from everyone other than her mother and therapist. When Imogen connects with a Black college student in the Big Sister program through a mutual love for stories, she begins to open up and heal the sadness—the blueness—in her own heart.

Gone Wolf is divided almost evenly between the future and present timelines. Its first half effectively makes the reader feel as trapped as Inmate Eleven. Each chapter is followed by disturbing “flash cards” that the ruling Clones use to brainwash the society of 2111 into complacency. In parallel, the second half set in the present day uses excerpts from Imogen’s Black History for Kids textbook, which illuminate the resilience of Black Americans without shying away from the atrocities of slavery and racism. Both imagined texts demonstrate the power of choosing which narrative to tell.

Unlike her previous two young adult novels in verse—Me (Moth) and We Are All So Good at Smiling—National Book Award finalist Amber McBride has written her middle grade debut in prose. Her syntax shines with beautiful symbolism, such as, “I know that minds can’t be hurricanes but that is what it feels like.” “But that’s what it feels like” is repeated like a mantra throughout the book—yet another echo of verse. Both of Gone Wolf’s protagonists write poetry, which further allows McBride to slip some of her magic in.

Imogen’s therapist puts it best: “History and the truth are sometimes hard.” Gone Wolf examines the ways in which both the COVID-19 pandemic and slavery’s ongoing legacy impact Black youth while also celebrating storytelling’s ability to heal and bring us together. There is nothing quite like it.

Gone Wolf examines the ways in which both the COVID-19 pandemic and slavery’s ongoing legacy impact Black youth while also celebrating storytelling’s ability to heal and bring us together. There is nothing quite like it.
Mystery & SuspenseMysteryHistorical Mystery

Harlem After Midnight

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Louise Hare’s second Canary Club Mystery, Harlem After Midnight, begins with tragedy: A policeman gazes down at a grievously injured young woman lying on the ground in front of a three-story apartment building. Did she fall from the topmost window, or was she pushed? 

Hare rewinds her story to the days leading up to this disturbing discovery, picking up where her series’ first installment, Miss Aldridge Regrets, left off. Lena Aldridge, a 26-year-old singer from London, is still reeling from her voyage on the RMS Queen Mary. It started with excited anticipation for a role on Broadway and ended in despair after a series of murders, the evaporation of her job opportunity and the revelation that a fellow passenger was in fact her New York City-based birth mother, the wealthy Eliza Abernathy.

Lena is relieved and grateful when Will Goodman, a handsome musician she met on the ship, suggests she stay with his friends in Harlem. Married couple Claudette and Louis Linfield are eager to get to know the first woman Will’s brought around in years. Will’s half sister, Bel Bennett, is curious, too, but her mix of effusive charm and snide duplicity leaves Lena feeling unmoored. 

While wondering whether she and Will will have a future together and the music careers they desire, Lena also resolves to learn more about her beloved late father, Alfie, a pianist who lived in New York some 30 years ago. Harlem After Midnight’s timeline moves between 1936 and 1908 as Hare juggles the compellingly conceived perspectives of Lena, Alfie and his sister, Jessie, whom Lena has never met. Will she find out why Alfie left New York for London, track down her aunt and perhaps even connect with her mother before she’s due to board the Queen Mary once again? And who is the unfortunate young woman from the beginning of the book, and what does her fate have to do with Lena’s quest?

Through Lena’s eyes, Hare conveys the glory of the Harlem Renaissance, shines a light on New York’s painful history of segregation and emphasizes the value of learning about—and from—those who came before us. The resonance of family history and the dangerous potency of long-held secrets collide as Lena reckons with her past and strives to create a new path forward.

Louise Hare gives readers a glorious tour of 1930s New York City in her second Canary Club mystery, Harlem After Midnight.
NonfictionMemoir

How to Say Babylon

Review by Rachel Hoge

With unparalleled lyricism and a command of language only a poet could possess, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir recounts Safiya Sinclair’s life as a Rastafarian child raised under the oppressive and patriarchal rule of her father. While providing a contextual background on Rastafari—a religious movement and cultural community many have heard of, but few outsiders understand—Jamaican-born Sinclair tells the story of her and her siblings’ upbringing of isolation, fear and poverty. Shining a spotlight on the persecution and unwanted attention her unorthodox upbringing garnered in Jamaica, in addition to the acts of racism running rampant in the Western world, Sinclair describes acts of ignorance and cruelty from a perspective so close, you can feel her wounds. How to Say Babylon contemplates matters of race and religion, of class and equality, of identity and womanhood, through an unforgettable voice that’s unflinchingly raw and powerful.

The beacon of light throughout this often tragic narrative is Sinclair’s journey to her vocation as a writer. With rich descriptions that feel languid and decadent, each sentence should be consumed like a meal—filled with literary nutrition and poetic garnishes that’ll leave Sinclair’s fellow writers begging for the recipe. Inhabiting a space between poetry and prose, with the very best elements of both on display, How to Say Babylon is truly a poet’s memoir. A story of Black womanhood that grips the reader through its obvious feat of craft and its captivating storytelling, the style of Sinclair’s work is utterly unique, including phonetic dialogue that brings Jamaica’s Rastafarian world to life. How to Say Babylon also considers the power of literature and education, the strength and perseverance of familial bonds and the complex notion of identity for people of color worldwide.

Above all, the pages of How to Say Babylon should be savored like the final sip of an expensive wine—with deference, realizing that a story of this magnitude comes along all too infrequently.

Safiya Sinclair's memoir should be savored like the final sip of an expensive wine—with deference, realizing that a story of this magnitude comes along all too infrequently.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

I’m From

Review by Norah Piehl

A young unnamed Black boy wakes up on an ordinary school day with a smile on his face, eager to enjoy his favorite breakfast: “pan-fried bologna, homemade pancakes, strawberry jam.” He hugs his dog, endures a raucous school bus ride and settles in at school. But his unremarkable day is disrupted by insensitive, likely routine remarks from his classmates, who make assumptions and try to box him into prescriptive categories: “Can I touch your hair? . . . You don’t sound Black . . . Do you play basketball? . . . Where are you from?”

In I’m From, the protagonist is from all the things he loves: notebooks, caramel candy squares and late-night belly laughs. He feels most at home when he’s drawing pictures of himself and his dog as superheroes, and when he’s in the warm embrace of his family. Their gentle reminder about their shared traditions, hopes and aspirations give the boy a sense of purpose and belonging, which allows him to fall asleep warm and secure under “handcrafted blankets, knitted with memories.”

Illustrator Oge Mora depicts these blankets and the other illustrations with bold, warm colors and patterns. Her artwork—created with a mix of paint, collage, markers, airbrush and other media—echoes author Gary R. Gray Jr.’s heartfelt words. Harsh colors and shapes mirror the emotional impact of the classmates’ sharp words, but the words of affirmation from the boy’s family are set amid a culminating, joyful spiral of swirling purples and magentas that carry him as high as his imagination can reach. This buoyant story of everyday love and frustrations will comfort readers who just want to be valued for who they are.

I’m From is a buoyant story of everyday love and frustrations that will comfort readers who just want to be valued for who they are.
NonfictionTrue Crime

In Light of All Darkness

Review by Amy Scribner

The Polly Klaas case captured America’s attention in the fall of 1993. It was uniquely horrifying: A lovely 12-year-old girl kidnapped at knifepoint from her own bedroom while her two friends watched helplessly. Polly was missing for two months before her body was recovered near an abandoned sawmill outside of Petaluma, California. The media couldn’t get enough: A child disappeared without a trace from the safety of her home. The story was on the cover of People and featured on “America’s Most Wanted.” Petaluma native Winona Ryder offered a reward for Polly’s return. Polly’s father, Marc Klaas, a bereft man desperate to find his only daughter, made supporting families of missing children his life’s work and appeared in scores of interviews.

In this deeply compelling and carefully reported book, journalist Kim Cross examines why the Polly Klaas case struck such a chord and the lasting impact it has had on investigative techniques. Through dozens of interviews, Cross dives into the nascent use of DNA as a means of identifying and ruling out suspects, and how the Klaas case informed behavioral science used to profile unknown subjects. The case also changed how child witnesses were treated. . The two friends—who were at Polly’s house that night for a sleepover—were subjected to repeated harsh interrogations and lie detector tests in the weeks after the kidnapping. This sparked a national conversation among law enforcement officials, leading to trained child interviewers and a new set of protocols to protect children who witness crimes.

In Light of All Darkness is a fascinating and heartbreaking read as Cross captures the terror and sadness the Polly Klaas case evoked 30 years ago. In the aftermath, parents feared letting their children play outside or even leaving their windows ajar. Polly’s mother, Eve Nichol, was a follower of spiritual leader Ram Dass, and held out hope until her daughter was found, lighting a candle in the window each evening. “You can’t grow a new heart,” she said. “But when you have a big piece torn away, you can either fill it with anger and rage, or you can fill it with love. I just have to try and choose love.”

Journalist Kim Cross examines why the 1993 kidnapping of Polly Klaas struck such a chord and the lasting impact it has had on investigative techniques
Science Fiction & FantasyHorror

Knock Knock, Open Wide

Review by Chris Pickens

Neil Sharpson’s Knock Knock, Open Wide is a dizzying blend of Celtic folklore, gruesome terror and family drama. Gripping, funny and touching, it’s sure to please anyone looking for a horror-mystery with heart.

The story begins when a young Irish woman Etain Larkin discovers the corpse of a man in the middle of the road. Desperate for help, she takes the body to the nearest farmhouse. If she hadn’t stopped, hadn’t taken the body to this one specific home, she would have escaped a night of true horror. Twenty years later, Etain’s daughter, Ashling, is traumatized by her mother’s alcoholism and paranoia. Ashling has started a relationship with her schoolmate Betty, but she can’t let her fully in until she finds answers to explain her family’s terrible past. Ashling has nightmares about “Puckeen,” a well-loved children’s television show in which an unseen entity in a black box serves as a warning for misbehaving kids. But are the dreams just dreams, or something more?

Knock Knock, Open Wide is inspired by Celtic myths and legends, but Sharpson heightens the dread by refusing to explain every strange or terrible thing. Knock Knock, Open Wide shifts from funny and touching to outright terrifying in the blink of an eye, keeping the reader in a suspended state of unease. At any moment, Ashling and Betty might encounter something like “hungry grass,” a patch of cursed earth where someone starved to death. Sharpson bounces from past to present and shifts character perspectives with each chapter as he slowly unspools the mystery of what’s haunting Etain and Ashling, a structural choice that emphasizes the generational trauma the mother-daughter duo can’t seem to escape.

Ashling and Betty’s tender relationship grounds the book when it needs it most, offering a gentle counterpoint to the eerie goings-on. There are a few moments of plot contrivance where they abstain from exchanging key pieces of information, but the couple is so believable and lovable together that one is happy to overlook such a detail.

Knock Knock, Open Wide compellingly juggles various tones, structures and plot threads to produce a skillful examination of familial pain.

Knock Knock, Open Wide, Neil Sharpson’s horror novel inspired by Celtic folklore, shifts from charming to moving to outright terrifying in the blink of an eye.
FictionLiterary FictionDystopian Fiction

Land of Milk and Honey

Review by Laura Sackton

C Pam Zhang’s sophomore novel has the same striking prose that made her debut, How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020), so remarkable, but the similarities end there. Land of Milk and Honey is much stranger and perhaps even more beautiful. It’s a dystopian novel about food, pleasure, power, monstrosity and womanhood. It’s about the threads that keep us rooted to ourselves and each other, and about what happens when those threads fray and dissolve. The sheer range of Zhang’s imagination is striking.

A gray smog has spread across the world, causing catastrophic food shortages and global famine. A struggling chef, adrift, alone and stranded in Europe when the U.S. borders close, takes a job for a billionaire, preparing meals for his elite research community on a mountaintop in Italy. There, she cooks extravagant meals with ingredients that have disappeared from the rest of the world—aged cheeses, fresh meat, delicate greens, strawberries. Slowly, she cooks her way back to herself, finding pleasures she thought she’d lost forever. But she’s also forced to confront the reality of what her mysterious employer and his genius daughter are doing in this strange paradise—and the narrator’s own complicity in it.

Zhang’s sentences are visceral and heated. She writes about food and bodies with frenzied truthfulness. There is nothing pretty in this novel, but there is outrageous beauty. There is nothing nice in the way she describes the act of cooking, elaborate meals, butter or honey dissolving on the tongue, sex, bodily pleasure. Instead, Zhang’s prose is sensual, lavish, violent, incredibly close, without restraint. The narrator describes events from a distance of many years, but this only makes the heady details she recalls even more remarkable. For the narrator, and thus, for the readers, that old cliche “it feels like it happened yesterday” is undeniably true.

Land of Milk and Honey casts the kind of spell that readers can spend a lifetime hungering for. To read this book is to know yourself as a being made of skin and touch, a being made of other bodies. The impact is powerful and immediate. This is an astonishingly accomplished work, a deceptively simple dystopian vision that lays bare the heartbreaking complexities of seeking and giving pleasure, of wanting and loving in a world that is fundamentally shattered and forever shattering anew. It is the kind of uncomfortably honest art that disturbs and unsettles. It is also a generous and wildly celebratory ode to what keeps humans striving for something beyond mere survival: art, connection, taste, the sublime and fleeting pleasures of the body.

Read C Pam Zhang’s essay on Land of Milk and Honey.

C Pam Zhang’s sentences are visceral and heated. She writes about food and bodies with frenzied truthfulness. There is nothing pretty in Zhang’s second novel, but there is outrageous beauty.
FictionFamily Drama

Loved and Missed

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed is a disarmingly droll tragicomedy about imperfect motherhood and fractured families, generational trauma and the scars of addiction. Unexpected humor, subtle but honest, percolates through the matter-of-fact voice of its engaging narrator and main character. 

After the perceived failures that led to her daughter Eleanor’s downward spiral into lifelong drug dependence, 50-something schoolteacher Ruth seeks redemption through raising her granddaughter, Lily. The compact narrative—which nevertheless traverses 15 years—takes flight when the nomadic Eleanor agrees to meet Ruth on a gray Christmas day for a picnic, where Eleanor reveals she is going to have a child. Smash cut to Lily’s frenetic christening (the funniest scene in the book), with Ruth trying to rein in the chaos. She gives Eleanor and Lily’s father, Ben, who is also an addict, 4000 pounds as a ploy to convince them to let her take the baby home with her for a week.

Unsurprisingly, the new parents’ promises of baby purchases and educational savings accounts prove empty. After Ruth discovers a junkie’s corpse in Eleanor and Ben’s bedroom, she swiftly takes unofficial custody of Lily. A de facto mother again, Ruth throws herself into the task and bonds with Lily in ways she never managed with Eleanor. The quotidian story that unspools proves engrossing thanks to Ruth’s stream-of-consciousness musing and the occasional surprising revelation. We come to know Ruth and the other women in her life intimately, and it is their very ordinariness that makes the novel resonate. Eleanor enters the story only sparingly, typifying the pain and disconnect of having an addict in one’s family orbit.

Boyt is a well-established literary voice in Britain—she is the daughter of the painter Lucian Freud and the great-granddaughter of Sigmund—yet Loved and Missed, her seventh novel, is the first book of hers other than her memoir, My Judy Garland Life, to be published in the U.S. With Loved and Missed, she proves herself a perceptive writer who invites readers in with a singular voice that both upends convention and cuts to the heart of the matter.

Unexpected humor percolates through the matter-of-fact voice of Loved and Missed’s engaging narrator and main character, Ruth, a 50-something schoolteacher raising her granddaughter, Lily.
NonfictionScience

Mapping the Darkness

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Nowadays, it’s common to see advertisements for all manner of sleep-related products, from sleep trackers to CPAP machines to sunrise alarm clocks. Similarly, it’s not unusual for people to enthusiastically discuss sleep hygiene, circadian rhythms or owl vs. lark tendencies. Self-awareness is a beautiful thing, but how did we get here? After all, as Discover magazine contributor Kenneth Miller reveals in his engrossing Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep, “Just a century ago, only a handful of scientists studied sleep. . . . Most saw slumber as a nonevent,” something that “could be safely minimized or eliminated altogether.”

But there were outliers, Miller explains, academics who knew sleep was not merely a pause but rather the precious foundation of our waking hours. In Mapping the Darkness, the author has crafted linked biographies of four groundbreaking scientists—Nathan Kleitman, who in the 1920s incited a cascade of scholarly interest in sleep; Eugene Aserinksy, a student of Kleitman’s; William Dement, Kleitman’s mentee; and Mary Carskadon, who started as Dement’s lab assistant—and the ways in which their discoveries resulted in our present-day understanding of sleep.

In 1938, Kleitman and colleagues lived in a Kentucky cave for a month to examine sleep cycles. Over 20 years later, in the 1960s, Dement set up a cat-filled lab in a Quonset hut near Stanford University to focus on REM sleep. The fruits of these experiments and the research they subsequently inspired were helpful in analyzing root causes of the 1986 Challenger space shuttle tragedy (sleep deprivation was a contributing factor) and understanding teenagers’ need for more sleep than their younger counterparts.

Among many other topics, Miller also chronicles research into the impact of shift work on sleep, treatments for sleep apnea and important sleep-related studies Carskadon is conducting today. But while knowledge is certainly power, he cautions that we’re still experiencing “society’s ongoing, and ever-escalating, assault on sleep” due to digital devices, poor work habits and more. The impressive work of reportage that is Mapping the Darkness is an impassioned reminder to appreciate the researchers whose work has transformed our slumber—and do our best to give sleep the respect and attention it deserves.

Kenneth Miller’s Mapping the Darkness is a portrait of four groundbreaking scientists and how their discoveries impacted our understanding of sleep.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

Mole is Not Alone

Review by Nicole Brinkley

Mole is not the sort of animal who likes big crowds. Mole’s idea of a fun time involves digging tunnels and working on construction projects. So when Mole gets invited to Rabbit’s birthday party, his anxiety spikes. For a critter used to spending time alone, a crowded party is going to be too much.

But supporting friends is more important than nerves, so Mole prepares Rabbit’s favorite dessert and heads to the party. However, Mole’s twisting journey through the tunnels is spent fretting, and when he finally arrives at Rabbit’s door, he is too nervous to knock. Then Skunk arrives, who isn’t a big fan of crowds either. Together, they build up the courage to knock on Rabbit’s door.

It’s not unusual for small children to fret about crowds, especially ones containing strangers. Maya Tatsukawa’s Mole Is Not Alone will help shy kids realize that they’re not alone. Mole’s anxieties around sharing space with so many other animals—even those considered friends—are clearly conveyed through text written entirely as speech bubbles from Mole.

Created through a combination of stencils, stamps, paint and digital illustration, Tatsukawa’s charming art includes many small details that will allow children to pore over each page in search of something new about their favorite animal characters. There’s even a two-page spread of a maze that readers can complete to help Mole move from one tunnel to the next.

Sweet and cozy—much like the cream puffs Mole makes—Mole Is Not Alone lends itself well to both storytime read-alouds and quiet snuggles before bed. Fans of Yeorim Yoon and Jian Kim’s It’s OK, Slow Lizard and Cori Doerrfeld’s The Rabbit Listened will want to add this to their shelves.

Sweet and cozy—much like the cream puffs Mole makes—Mole Is Not Alone lends itself well to both storytime read-alouds and quiet snuggles before bed.

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