Made-Up Books

This is my favorite book of 2026, and I doubt that anything I read in the next three months will knock it off the tippy top of my yearly top ten list. I feel like this book was written for me—and anyo... (Liz)

For everyone waiting for Bonnie Garmus’s follow-up to her brilliant Lessons in Chemistry in 2022, it’s finally here. Peck & Peck is a New York poetry journal run by twin brothers, who also hate ea... (Doree)

The phrase that kept coming to mind as I read Lady X was “incandescent female rage.” Set in 1977 and 2024, the ingrained sexism inherent in both times sets the stage for women taking matters into thei... (Doree)

The Solo-Millers are complacently wealthy, inevitably good-looking, and eccentrically old-fashioned. Are they paragons of good behavior and high standards? Or are they smug monsters? And is Polly, the... (Tom)

Gabby, decked out in a tutu, cape, crown, and spatula, proclaims it's time for a parade. And whatever Gabby says, people tend to listen. She and her gramma make their way down the city street, adding... (Haley)

More than half a million people walk the Camino de Santiago each year, and each person has their own reason for doing so. Lotte, a middle-aged wife, mother, and chocolatier from the Netherlands, is wa... (Doree)

What would you do to have more time with the people you love most? Would you go to the ends of the earth? Test new scientific theories about time? Laurel and Eli are scientists who face an unimaginabl... (Doree)

This masterclass in historical fiction has a long, slow-burning fuse and a culmination that blew me away. Along with expert world (re)building and insightful character (re)animation is a key feature o... (Liz)

Braiding has taken elementary school class 203 by storm—they're even braiding shoelaces! But Noah doesn't have anything to braid. His teacher tears a classroom rag into strips, which become the start... (Haley)

The Wild Beneath is an epic love story as well as a love letter to the ocean: its danger, mystery, and beauty. In the aftermath of a Pacific Northwest tsunami, Annie—who has lived on a sailboat nearly... (Anika)

This is only my second time reading SGJ, but this novella has made me a fan. This Indigenous coming-of-age story is short but deep, subtle yet horrifying. After Junior's father dies in an accidental d... (Anika)

“One morning/the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,/and didn’t see me—and I thought:/so this is the world./I’m not in it./It is beautiful.” There is a reverent curiosity in Mary Oliver... (Shane)

Once upon a time—1989, to be exact—there was a girl who loved colors and who couldn't seem to stop telling the truth in a town where almost everyone wished she would just stay quiet. Lia is eight year... (Tom)

“Hel drew her revolver. Sam’s eyes hooked on the gleaming barrel. Oh, Hel.” 1903, in shadows cut by gaslight, Tout-Paris clutch at their pearls as a string of beastly murders thins their numbers. The... (Shane)

The initial thing you might learn about this slim novel is that it is the first by a woman from the Faroe Islands—an autonomous Danish territory between Iceland and Scotland—to be translated into Engl... (Tom)

Our Horror section—which we finally created only a year or so ago—is threatening, creature-like, to take over the entire Made-up side of our store. (The True side has its own horrors.) And not just wi... (Tom)

Local favorite Corey R. Tabor's new picture book, Bear for a Day, puts readers in the driver's seat (literally, since this bear rides a motorcycle). Each page's illustration is from the bear's perspec... (Haley)

Can you be nostalgic for a past that's not yours? Stealth is saturated with the sensations and physical details of Cairo in the 1940s, in the lower-middle-class apartments and streets through which th... (Tom)

Why just eat a slice of watermelon on a hot summer day when you could swim in a giant watermelon pool? This quirky and imaginative picture book was a huge Korean hit and is now available for the first... (Haley)

"Secrets and desires are at the heart of our selfhood, and no one can be your best friend if you don’t let them see who you are." Girl's Girl so perfectly and evocatively captures the emotional highs... (Anika)

If you know that Harriet Clark is the daughter of Judy Clark, a former Weather Underground founder given a life sentence for her role in a murderous armored-car robbery, you might expect that her firs... (Tom)

Russell is eight years old: small, stubborn, resourceful, and a flirt with waitresses five times his age. He's also so terrified of his cruel older brother that he wanders the aisles of Fred Meyer at... (Tom)

This book could use a second trigger warning. The first was on the back flap of my copy where I read that a “sexual assault” sets the plot in motion. A more useful one might be, “Assumptions and expec... (Liz)

From The Borrowers to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, it's fun to imagine what it would be like to experience the world as a tiny creature. 102 joins the tradition of shrinking down its protagonist in a cre... (Haley)

“I'd assumed I would step into the role naturally since the role itself was natural, was nature. But nothing felt natural about this." At Yesteryear Ranch, Natalie Heller Mills has constructed the pe... (Shane)

As Liz, who loved this book too—it was her second-favorite Booker nominee last year—said to me before I read it, it's not doing anything that hasn't been done before, with its plot of adultery and sub... (Tom)

David Nicholls's latest novel is wonderful company if you enjoy a good, long hike and a slow-burn romance. Marnie is a 38-year-old divorcee who is nearly agoraphobic since becoming a self-employed cop... (Anika)

On the face of it, Lerner's fourth novel seems, after his big, and more chewily traditional, third novel, The Topeka School, to be a return to the more elliptical style of his first two, Leaving the A... (Tom)

A bizarre and beautiful take on the zombie story, where our narrator is the zombie. She is grieving her former life, including her own name and the love of her life; while her human memories have larg... (Anika)

“It’s strange to know that whenever I remember myself at fifteen, I’ll think of this.” Reading My Dark Vanessa felt like my skin was shrinking—like I was suddenly not enough to cover my body. There w... (Shane)

In a usual crime story, the consequences of a crime, if there are any, descend in a heap at the end, as justice is (or isn't) served. In this novel, an autobiographical debut from 1972, the consequenc... (Tom)

Bike is nervous for her first day as a rental bicycle. What if no one wants a ride? Her fears are soon put to rest as her busy day begins. She takes a baker to Pike Place Market, a dad and baby to the... (Haley)

“My god, to be nothing but a flicker of light.” I am learning that there is nothing so devastating as a Chloe Michelle Howarth novel. Shrouded in the fog of a family’s shame, the O’Leary siblings des... (Shane)

“I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” I’m not ashamed to say that I was moved to finally read Wuthering Heights in large part because of its (incredibly camp) movie tie-in c... (Shane)

Opossum Topsy plans to prepare a pancake feast to welcome her bear friend LouAnn out of hibernation. But each time she plates a steaming stack of tender and crispy pancakes, they disappear as soon as... (Haley)

To preface, this is the fourth glowing review of an Emily Austin novel I've had the pleasure of writing in the past five years. Yes, I'm a fan. Yes, she's a favorite. In this one, our protagonist Darc... (Anika)

The first book I finished this year—published in Germany in 1951 but recently translated into English by NYRB Classics—does two things at once. It immersed me so deeply in pre-WWII, bourgeois Jewish B... (Liz)

This imaginative picture book is set in a small village where the legend of a "night giant" causes speculation and rumors among the residents. Is it the mischievous giant who stacks the park benches l... (Haley)

Shanbhag's debut here, Ghachar Ghochar, was one of the first novels written in Kannada, a language spoken by tens of millions in southwestern India, to be translated into English. His second, also tra... (Tom)

I was charmed into reading this novel by its first pages, in which a self-sabotaging former ad exec revels in the slushy city beauty of a Minnesota December as he trudges to his weekly group therapy a... (Tom)

The arrival of full shelves of Persephone Books was one of the highlights of our year, so it seemed appropriate to close 2025 by choosing a Persephone book—in one of their slightly less expensive but... (Tom)

"If you make a call on a banana phone, who will answer?" The boy in this picture book finds out when he strikes up a long-distance friendship with a gorilla. Emily Hughes's soft-looking illustrations... (Haley)

Emily Jane’s first novel was about aliens, her second about sea monsters, and her third is about, as the title makes clear, werewolves. In each of her books, Jane uses supernatural beings to fully plu... (Doree)

The concept of Buzz! Boom! Bang! is simple: look at each page and make the noise you think the illustration would sound like. But once you start to "clip clop," "boink," and "hiss," you may find yours... (Haley)

The public drama of Penelope Fitzgerald's life came late, as she burst into literary fame in her sixties after years of poverty and quiet desperation. She mined those private years for much of her fic... (Tom)

I remain intrigued that the same person wrote the plain-spoken farmer's memoir, A Garlic Testament, that was our January Phinney by Post pick this year and this brilliant piece of weirdo fiction, but... (Tom)

Tuck Everlasting is one of my top ten favorite books of all time, so it's hardly surprising that this beautiful illustrated adaptation will be one of my top ten reads of the year. The original tells t... (Anika)

I am slowly catching up with the genius of Joseph Roth. After the multigenerational sweep of his masterpiece, The Radetzky March, this little novel reads like a minor chamber piece, but in some ways i... (Tom)

Over the more than five decades spanned by this lovingly curated collection, Carol Emshwiller held to something distinctly Emshwillerian in the stories she invented: out of the most straightforward la... (Tom)

In Cat Nap, a sleepy kitten follows a mouse into a Metropolitan Museum of Art poster. From there, the chase is on, through ancient Egyptian carvings, Mexican ceramics, a medieval prayer book, and more... (Haley)