Made-Up Books

In a perfect world, I would have written about With Animal before Carol and Kelly read at the store last week, but you read when you can, and I only fully dove into this book's strange stories after t... (Tom)

As with so many of the best stories, this one begins with a mistake: specifically, an errant splotch on an otherwise perfect illustration. While this mistake easily evolves into a feature within Luyke... (Kim)

The classic conceit of Harold and the Purple Crayon—a boy's drawings come to life as he creates them—is entirely transformed in Lehrer's new book. Lehrer brings his own wit to the story, but best of a... (Tom)

Énard has become one of France's leading novelists by writing about the Mediterranean as a crossroads of cultures—East and West, North and South—and Compass, which won the Prix Goncourt, France's most... (Tom)

A boy imagines his day, and his father's day, in a small town by the sea. He plays with a friend, eats a baloney sandwich, runs an errand for his mother, looks out at the ocean, while his father works... (Tom)

This classic mystery from 1949 follows few of the rules set down by Tey's peers (Christie, Sayers, Marsh) of the "Golden Age" of British crime writing. To begin with, there's no body, and no detective... (Tom)

Noisy Night by Mac Barnett and Brian Biggs If urban density is the new watchword of our 21st-century boomtown, perhaps we should all take a look at Barnett and Biggs's unlikely ode to apartment living... (Tom)

Audio Book of the Week Exit West by Mohsin Hamid A recent roundtrip drive to Portland proved the perfect way to listen to Mohsin Hamid's short new novel (I was done by the time I passed Tacoma on the... (Tom)

This week, someone absconded (yes, it happens, especially in that corner of the store) with almost our entire Kafka section, but they left this one behind, which is somehow fitting. It's the forgotten... (Tom)

Each year, the rulers of a sorrowful town at the edge of a forest sacrifice a baby to the forest's witch. Little do the rulers know that the witch saves the babes and delivers them to adoptive familie... (Haley)

The Caldecotts, like the Oscars, don't often go to comedy, but this funny book was one of this year's Caldecott Honor winners, and deservedly so. It's written and drawn in the style of a traditional R... (Tom)

George Saunders, the best-known living story writer south of Alice Munro, has, finally, published a novel! And it's a good one, concerning the death of Abraham Lincoln's son Willie and Lincoln's visit... (Tom)

The best picture book illustrations can inspire gasps and "aww"s without a single word of text. The wordless Little Fox in the Forest begins in shades of blue and white as we see a little girl bringin... (Haley)

Li is best known for her prize-winning stories and novels, and perhaps now (see above) for her memoir, but she also recently retold the oldest story in recorded literature, The Story of Gilgamesh, as... (Tom)

Swimming Lessons is the rare kind of book that makes you leave a permanent indentation in your reading chair, that you want to draw out and savor (even while turning page after page because you must k... (Kim)

A few years ago I set myself a project of reading fiction that was written just as Nazism was taking hold in Germany. I wanted to get a sense of how people felt while their world was turning upside do... (Liz)

Remember Antoinette? In Gaston, one of our—and our young customers'—favorite picture books since we opened, she's the poodly pup who falls in love with her friend, the bulldoggy Gaston. Now she has he... (Tom)

There's no pink on the cover of this picture book, and no hearts, but it's a love story for sure. A boy falls in love on the first day of school with a girl who loves birds, so he becomes one (or at l... (Tom)

Almost exactly two years ago, I was writing my review of Cusk's last novel, Outline, which turned out to be one of the best books I read that year. I think Transit, the second in a proposed trilogy ab... (Tom)

Sally Jones is a brilliant ship's engineer. The fact that she is also a gorilla and unable to speak complicates matters when her best friend (a ship captain called "the Chief") is framed for murder. F... (Tom)

Garth Greenwell first came on my radar when he wrote an almost-convincing defense of Hanya Yanigahara's A Little Life. Now his own novel has come out, and I don't need anyone to convince me: it's fant... (Tom)

It feels a little like blasphemy to say so, since Maurice Sendak's tiny, boxed Nutshell Library is one of the world's perfect objects (and the item in the store most likely to make a customer sigh and... (Tom)

In his first stab at psychological suspense, poet and novelist Lasdun proves himself a pro. He takes the most basic narrative tools—a vacation home, a love triangle—and with an ear for inner monologue... (Liz)

Grandad, a well-dressed bulldog, can't find a few things in his cluttered old house. Can you help him? Imagine Where's Waldo, but illustrated by William Morris or Neo Rauch: this is the best kind of s... (Tom)

Is this a new book, or an old one? The stories were written in the 1970s, but not published until now, long after Collins's death at age 46 in 1988 and a year after her groundbreaking feature film, Lo... (Tom)

It's no easy trick to weave three generations into fifteen stories, tracing lines of heredity, loyalty, and betrayal, holding onto a dozen and more characters as they shape-shift across leaps in time... (Tom)

No one would use the world "realism" to describe Matthew Simmons's stories—God, for one thing, makes a number of appearances, starting a band in one story and making a deal with a guy who calls him "D... (Tom)

I have never seen such a collective swoon behind our counter as when an advance copy of this darling book arrived in the mail a few weeks ago. Why do we love it so? Emily Jenkins's words appear simple... (Tom)

Smith became famous, fast, for the precocious pyrotechnics of her debut novel, White Teeth, but this novel, her fifth, is her quietest and most patient, perhaps because it is all filtered through a si... (Tom)

If Plotto is the over-the-top, maximalist solution to building a story, McGuire's Sequential Drawings is the minimalist alternative. Working in the vestigal, forgotten space of spot illustrations (tho... (Tom)

Sometimes a book comes into the store that I know almost nothing about, and I can't help but divert it into my own bag instead of putting it onto the shelf. That's what happened with this short novel,... (Tom)

Ada Twist, by the same team that brought us Rosie Revere, Engineer and Iggy Peck, Architect, is already one of our picture-book hits of the year, so perhaps I'm not telling you anything you don't alre... (Tom)

"Du is tak?" What does that mean? "Ma nazoot." Huh?! What are these bugs saying about the green, growing thing before them? After a few readings of what looks like nonsense at first, I think you and y... (Tom)

For those still mourning the end of Mo Willems's Elephant and Piggie series, the author is back with a delightful new picture book, illustrated with photos of a cardboard-and-paper diorama-like world.... (Haley)

Nearly ancient by the standards of the time but still in good voice as an itinerant reader of the news through small-town, post-Civil War Texas, Capt. Jefferson Kidd finds himself a temporary guardian... (Tom)

My new and fanatical devotion to How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen led me to this kindred item, also from the '70s and also illustrated with chaotic glee by Quentin Blake. If you thi... (Tom)

The crime is clear: Roderick Macrae, a young crofter in the Scottish Highlands, murdered three people on a summer's day in 1869. But the story is less straightforward, layered by Burnet with great pre... (Tom)

For all the kids and grown-ups who have loved this young Polish couple's Maps (it's been one of our most popular kids' books ever since we opened), their new book, equally oversized and equally quirky... (Tom)

Boy, I hope this isn't all that man is. Szalay's nine stories of men across Europe—often in the act of traveling across Europe's open borders with no real direction in mind—make up a loosely-knit nove... (Tom)

You don't need to know that Have You Seen My Trumpet? completes Escoffier and Di Giacomo's "Word-Play Trilogy" (after Take Away the A and Where's the Baboon?) to understand that it's a total hoot. The... (Tom)

If people walked around with authors' names on their jerseys there would be almost as many "SEMPLE"s here as "SHERMAN"s and "WILSON"s, and the stadiumful of Where'd You Go, Bernadette? fans (me includ... (Tom)

What a beautiful and haunting book. This story of a family that loses its home and father to war and must set out for a safer home might not be a soothing bedtime tale, but for a child curious about t... (Tom)

Some anthologies of new poetry try to take a stand, declare a school, say what poetry is now and what it should be. Burt, a poet himself, couldn't include all of his peers in his book, but it seems li... (Tom)

I just returned from the best summer reading experience I've had in a very long time. I spent almost 2,000 pages soaking up the imagined atmosphere of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) during the decade of 1... (Tom)

How does a dog, or a snake, or a nocturnal skunk see a cat? Brendan Wenzel's picture book shows you the same cat through the specialized eyes of several different creatures. It's incredibly simple on... (Karlyn)

I was reading this book at the same time images of the little boy injured in the bombing of Aleppo were all over the media. In the same way those few seconds of video crystallized the trauma war infli... (Liz)

Really, there's almost no way to choose among A Girl and Her Gator and the linked picture books by Bryan and Murphy that precede and follow it, each with its own similarly inexplicable but ultimately... (Tom)

A polio hospital for children in Western Australia in the 1950s might not seem the most promising territory for a story of heart-catching beauty, but that's exactly what London's third novel is. I hat... (Tom)

If, as researchers have recently estimated, most of us have a little Neanderthal in us, it might be the goofy sitcom gene. Or at least that's what you'd guess from the first book in the new series by... (Tom)

Based on the title, I thought I knew a bit about what I was in for with this novel, but it stunned me nonetheless. Maya's gritty, time-compressed world of heroin addiction is somehow shockingly raw an... (Kim)