Made-Up Books

On page 114, about two-thirds of the way through this little novel, the narrator remarks, "The whole evening had taken a dark turn, and I feared for the worst." It's a sentence that could appear in al... (Tom)

In Benway's novel, the surprise winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature this fall, three adopted teenagers, strangers to each other, reckon with the discovery that they have si... (Tom)

When a writer's first collection of stories was Jesus' Son, quite possibly the best American book of the last few decades, it's natural to ask how his second collection, published 26 years later, comp... (Tom)

It seems to be a golden age for oversized, gorgeously illustrated compendiums of facts, and (as you can likely tell, if you follow our kids' recommendations) we are here for it. Add to our favorites t... (Tom)

Kids' Books of the Week Smart About Sharks and Crazy About Cats by Owen Davey It seems to be a golden age for oversized, gorgeously illustrated compendiums of facts, and (as you can likely tell, if yo... (Tom)

Until his death last month, few knew that Shepard had been living with ALS, and few also knew that he had been working during that time—dictating when it became necessary—on this last book. It's a mem... (Tom)

Oliver Jeffers has written and drawn many picture books and illustrated others, including the colossally popular The Day the Crayons Quit, but his new one feels special: a welcome message written to i... (Tom)

Audiobook of the Week Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz, read by Samantha Bond and Allan Corduner I'm late in coming to Magpie Murders, but it entirely lived up to the reports I'd heard all year of i... (Tom)

Georges Simenon wrote over 400 novels, and The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By was the eleventh (!) he published in 1938 alone, but don't dismiss it as a throwaway. It has a simple premise—Kees Popin... (Tom)

Elmet by Fiona Mozley (Liz)

Alain-Fournier's The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes in the original French), the only book he wrote before dying in World War I and one of the most beloved of modern French novels, is often described... (Tom)

A dark and sensual fantasy set in a post-apocalyptic world, Runebinder incorporates just about everything I look for in a young-adult novel. It is Avatar: The Last Airbender meets the zombie apocalyps... (Molly)

Speaking of Rosemary's Baby! You've likely seen the Mia Farrow/John Cassavetes 1968 horror classic, but have you read Ira Levin's novel from the year before? It's fantastic: a tale of the occult that,... (Tom)

My first introduction to Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas was through Jim Henson's underrated 1977 TV special (a Christmas tradition in our house when I was growing up). This charming movie was based... (Haley)

Oh what a joy that this book is back in print! I didn't know about it when I was little (though I was the right age for it when it came out in 1973), but it was a favorite to read with our own kids, b... (Tom)

Why is this novel so absurdly entertaining? Shum, who was a casino dealer in Lake Stevens before getting his English PhD, loosely bases his story on an old gambling tale by Pushkin, but it has a seemi... (Tom)

No one ever accused Theodore Dreiser of being an elegant writer, but nearly every sentence in this book howls with things that elegance alone can't provide: desire, drive, hunger, power, exhaustion, a... (Tom)

A mysterious new doorway in their grandmother's room and some equally mysterious paw prints lead Joon and Noona into a land of mischievous and snack-loving animals, and into the world of the tradition... (Tom)

A while ago I was calling Turgenev the Russian Jane Austen—now I've discovered that the country has its own Brontë sisters! Like the British writers, the Khvoshchinskaya sisters were poor but educated... (Liz)

"You'd be surprised what you find inside a wolf," says the duck. Indeed! The mouse, swallowed, is surprised, and you will be too, and also amused. Barnett and Klassen are prolific kid's-book geniuses,... (Tom)

Everyone says that Pessoa's unfinished (unfinishable?) Portuguese classic is best taken not whole, but in morsels, chewed and reflected on, and so, having always wanted to read it, that's how I'll beg... (Tom)

Laura, who read this book long before I did, has always described it as a burst of confetti, and I still can't think of a better way to sum it up. Fans (like me) of Carter's biting and spectacularly i... (Tom)

This is the month for monsters, and you'll find few more appealing ones than the father and child in this rhyming tale. The rhythms and the rhymes are note-perfect for reading aloud, and the monstrous... (Tom)

A copy of this 2015 collection came into the store a little dinged up, so I took it home. I'd always wanted to read Ryan, and it turns out I like her a lot: she makes tiny aphoristic paradoxes mostly,... (Tom)

This is not the sort of epic that jumps through space and history. Instead, it turns on itself, over and over again, circling back to one event—a lynching in 1930—and another related one—the birth of... (Tom)

To call Days Without End "Blood Meridian lite" might sound dismissive, but it's not. (In fact, for many readers, it might be just right.) You can't get any darker than Cormac McCarthy's Western hellsc... (Tom)

This fat new book of verse is unrelated to almost anything else on our shelves, except that it might be a nephew to old Uncle Shelby, Shel Silverstein. With tiny punch-line couplets, silly multi-stanz... (Tom)

I'm Just No Good at Rhyming: And Other Nonsense for Mischievous Kids and Immature Grown (Ups)

Hear ye, hear ye! If you loved Victoria Jamieson's Rollergirl, her second middle-grade graphic novel, All's Faire in Middle School, will not disappoint. Like Rollergirl, All's Faire features a relatab... (Haley)

My Absolute Darling is very easy, and very hard, to read. It is the story of Turtle, who lives with her father, isolated on a wild stretch of the northern California coast. He trains her to navigate a... (Laura)

Those of us who loved the quirkily indomitable spirit of Ishida's first picture book, Little Kunoichi the Ninja Girl, will be glad to see Little Kunoichi return in a supporting role in the story of he... (Tom)

I don't know if it's because the film noir idiom is so familiar or if lit noir (?) is just naturally cinematic, but I didn't so much read In a Lonely Place as I saw and heard it. Hughes's writing is f... (Liz)

I'll be honest: as a book, Chicken Butt might not hold its own on the picture-book shelf next to the emotional depths of Sendak or the sophisticated wit of Ada Twist, Scientist. It is, after all, just... (Tom)

For 20 years now, Bell has been making comics that create marvelous depths out of everyday moments, sometimes with low-key fantastical turns, like a woman who turns herself into a chair so she won't b... (Tom)

As a customer recently pointed out to me, in his lovely new book on Maurice Sendak, There's a Mystery There, Jonathan Cott makes the case that Sendak's 1981 picture book, Outside Over There, is one of... (Tom)

Sometimes all I want from a novel is people saying funny things to each other, and for those times, Drury's first novel is a tonic. He is a master of the deadpan, of the dry, offhand remark that build... (Tom)

This Is How We Do It is not the first book to show kids how other kids around the world live, but it's a particularly thoughtful and appealing approach. Using photographs and descriptions sent to him... (Tom)

Our neighbor Laura McGee Kvasnosky, with many children's books to her name, has collaborated on this charming picture book with her sister Kate: a father-son tale, set in familiar Western landscapes,... (Tom)

What a delicious feast! Golden Hill is Spufford's first novel, after five idiosyncratic books of nonfiction, and it's clear he had a ball with it, delighting in the language and the details of his sub... (Tom)

What's an "ACB"? It's a mixed-up alphabet book nine-year-old Perry is making for her Gran, Honora Lee, who has lost her husband and most of her memory and who lives at the Santa Lucia rest home, where... (Tom)

There's a reason Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 novel keeps being remade into movies (not only 1988's deservedly celebrated Dangerous Liaisons, but 1989's Valmont and 1999's Cruel Intentions): it's a bril... (Tom)

Dear Cyborgs is a tiny book; in your hand it's almost lighter than air. And the writing has an airy lightness to it to: not funny-light, but nimble and light on its feet, even as it deals with such we... (Tom)

The thing a novel does better than any other kind of art is put you inside the thoughts of someone else, as they fork and forget and turn back on themselves. In this book, Marías's sentences do just t... (Tom)

When Henry Montague's father sends him on a Grand Tour of the Continent, eighteen-year-old "Monty" is only looking forward to unsupervised partying, drinking himself into oblivion, and waking up in st... (Haley)

A familiar tale of friendship is wonderfully refreshed in this photographic tale of two blobs of clay, one gray and one brown, who are given new lives by an artist's hands and then take matters into t... (Tom)

Phinney Bullfight An executive at a fledgling newspaper in Japan, just after the end of World War II, decides, perversely, to gamble the future of his enterprise on a bullfighting tournament (a Japane... (Tom)

Ever since I heard about the big splash The Essex Serpent made last year in Great Britain, I have been anticipating its appearance on our shores. And this wondrous book ended up arriving exactly when... (Liz)

I've been antsy to write about this breathtaking book, but we sold out of our small first batch and waited months for a reprint. Now we have it back in the store (for the time being), so let me declar... (Tom)