Made-Up Books

"I had the sense," Celia, the only daughter in the troubled family in Imagine Me Gone, thinks on seeing an unnamed painted portrait in a museum, "that this person had been alive." That is the sense yo... (Tom)

A mother narrates a tale to her young daughter of twin sisters named Arabella and Henrietta Osgood. From birth, Arabella has always been more beautiful and bubbly than her serious and quiet sister. De... (Karlyn)

The escape from slavery is one of the most powerful of American stories, but it usually leads in a single direction: north. Whitehead's railroad, as you might guess from the cover image, doesn't run i... (Tom)

The X-ACTO-bladed papercuts of Nikki McClure are so recognizable a Northwest product that you half expect that grammar-school children, asked to memorize state products in a way they surely no longer... (Tom)

Cold ocean waves. Fried tongue and onions for dinner. Up at 4:30 in the morning to shovel lobster chum into a bucket. "You'll love it!" Eliot's mom promises while bundling him off to spend a summer wi... (Tom)

"Everyone should be favored to know one person of courage and genius, though that person arrives with all the flaws and fiends that vex the rest of us, sometimes in disproportionate abundance." For Wr... (Tom)

"This is the worst book I have read in years," wrote one early Amazon reviewer, and if Joy Williams's idea of God doesn't match yours, you might agree. Fresh on the heels of last year's career-spannin... (Tom)

I may be a bit of a broken record about both the big, beautiful productions of Flying Eye Books (see Wild Animals of the North) and the young British illustrator William Grill (see last year's fantast... (Tom)

Do you want to read a book about good people in a hard but beautiful world? On a small southern farm in 1915, Jane Chisholm is born with an affliction that sets her apart, and is likely to continue to... (Tom)

It took hearing Steph read this at Friday storytime for me to realize what a brilliantly constructed little book it is. "One day I went to school. I came home. The end." "One day I made something. I g... (Tom)

Fed up with the new lives of her divorced parents, 15-year-old Anna steals her stepmom's credit card and hightails it to Los Angeles to stay with her half-sister, Delia, a struggling actress. She soon... (Karlyn)

You can likely read this slim novel in less than eleven hours, but it will feel like it's happening in real time. The clock starts with the morning admission of Lore, 31 years old and alone, to a New... (Tom)

Some novelists unpack a single day in their 300 pages, while others unfurl a quarter of a millennium. Gyasi, ambitiously, does the latter, tracing the parallel lineages begun by two West African half-... (Tom)

How obnoxious (and clichéd, with Bloomsday just past) to suggest Ulysses as your summer reading. (Hey, why don't you climb the Matterhorn while you're at it!) Well, I'll confess that I read it, years... (Tom)

Raymie Clark's father has run away with the dental hygienist, leaving 10-year-old Raymie and her mother behind. The only way to bring him back, Raymie believes, is by winning the 1975 "Little Miss Cen... (Karlyn)

How wonderful to have DeWitt's debut novel (which has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie) back in print! The story of a brilliant (too brilliant?) mother trying to educate her brilliant (too bril... (Tom)

Imagine a group of kids living their ordinary lives in a world where something extraordinary is happening. Something that includes immortals, gods, and zombie deers! Mikey and his friends aren't the "... (Karlyn)

It's the summer of 1976 and nothing seems to be going right for 10-year-old Sunny Lewin. She is sent by her parents to spend the summer with her Gramps at his retirement home in Florida and it's quite... (Karlyn)

Douglas, You Need Glasses! by Ged Adamson (Tom)

Kids' Books of the Week Finding Wild by Megan Wagner Lloyd and Abigail Halpin Douglas, You Need Glasses! by Ged Adamson Well, I tried to choose a favorite between these charming new picture books and... (Tom)

I really think of this as two books: there's the novel itself, a beautiful, thoughtful channeling of the great late-Roman emperor that is graced by an elegant, regal reticence and one of the rare powe... (Tom)

Thunder Boy Smith Jr., known as "Little Thunder," is named for his dad. He wants a new name of his own, though, to commemorate one of his cool achievements, a name like "Touch the Clouds," or "Not Afr... (Karlyn)

We dipped back into an earlier Kids' Book of the Week pick for the first time for our Phinney by Post Kids selection this month, for this one-of-a-kind horizontal picture book, which presents sometime... (Tom)

"Is all this too purple, too florid?" C.E. Morgan suddenly, cheekily asks two-thirds of the way through her proudly purple and florid novel. "Do you prefer your tales lean, muscular, and dry?" If you... (Tom)

At the end of Calle Sol in Puerto Rico, the myth says, there's a cursed house consumed in plants, the home to a scientist and his daughter, a girl filled with poison and with green skin and grass for... (Karlyn)

Markson's reputation—as a "writer's writer," as an experimentalist who favors Zen koan titles—might scare off casual readers, but if you look into one of his novels (or in the case of this newly repri... (Tom)

Maybe it has something to do with Seattle's recent hot weather, but I've already found the book I'll be recommending to anyone who comes in to the bookshop looking for an upbeat summer read. It's a re... (Liz)

Miss Moore was a constant reviser (and remover) of her own work, so this republication of her 1924 collection, the one that made her name as a Modernist great alongside Eliot, Pound, Williams, and Ste... (Tom)

Just out in paperback after being one of our most popular middle-reader novels last year, The Fourteenth Goldfish neatly slides a science-fiction premise (11-year-old Ellie Cruz's cranky, arrogant gra... (Tom)

"Gone five, six days. You got a dog or a snake or something, find someone to feed it." That's about all East, a skinny sixteen-year-old drug-house lookout who's never left LA, is told about his assign... (Tom)

I confess myself somewhat bewildered by the actual tale that transpires in Cursed Pirate Girl, the meticulously drawn comic book whose first three chapters have been collected handsomely in paperback... (Tom)

The name Martin Guerre may make you think of Gerard Depardieu (who played him in a 1982 movie), but his story, based on true events in the 16th century when a stranger appeared in a French village and... (Tom)

"It's okay. I know everything." In talking about a crazy time-travel tale like this one, why not start with the last words spoken, which made me want to turn back to the beginning and start the trip a... (Tom)

Udall takes one of the basic sitcom setups, the good-hearted, incompetent dad, and turns it up—not to 11, but to 28, the number of kids title patriarch Golden Richards has scrambling around the four h... (Tom)

Readers accustomed to the charm of Sara Pennypacker's Clementine series might be surprised by the depth and darkness of her new book for older readers. Twelve-year-old Peter and Pax, the pet fox he wa... (Tom)

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was eccentric even by celebrity-author standards, so it's fitting that her imagined life story defies the conventions of typical historical fiction. Instead o... (Liz)

They sure boiled their books hard back in the '50s. This one, published in 1953, has been almost as difficult to find since as an armored car at the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft (to borrow a memo... (Tom)

There was an odd book about a sleepy bunny that was all the rage for hypnotizing toddlers last year. I don't know if this one's clinical effectiveness has been tested against The Rabbit Who Wants to F... (Tom)

Since we've had such a snowy winter on the nearby slopes, let's celebrate Slush Mountain, Bjørn Lie's oddball new appreciation of ski culture. Slush Mountain is a busy place—almost Richard Scarry-busy... (Tom)

I'm not sure which choice The Vegetarian makes more horrifying: eating meat, or not. When a young Korean woman makes a simple decision—she won't eat meat, and she can't bear to have it in her apartmen... (Tom)

Anders's debut novel has been filed, officially, on the adult side of fiction (and it does have an R-rated scene or two), but I think it might find its most passionate readers among older teen readers... (Tom)

When I opened the store, I was surprised and disappointed to find that only the first three of the original seven Great Brain books are still in print. There may be no kids' books I remember more inte... (Tom)

What a strange and perfect little thriller. Published on the eve of war in 1939 and opening with the near-assassination of an unnamed European dictator, it remains as riveting as ever, with an airtigh... (Tom)

Phinney Mother Bruce Full credit to our storyteller Steph for spotting right away how hilarious Mother Bruce is, which we have since confirmed with extensive field-testing among kids and adults (the a... (Tom)

Among novelists there are, as Thomas Wolfe once said to F. Scott Fitzgerald, "putter-inners" and "taker-outers." Elizabeth Strout is definitely a "taker-outer," and much of the wonder and beauty of he... (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)

Giving a lesser-known historical event—the development of the Citroën C2V, the brilliantly simple French "people's car"—a fictional, kid-friendly spin by putting 13-year-old Angelo Fabrizzi at its cen... (Tom)

One of the books What Belongs to You reminded me of, and this is high praise indeed, was André Aciman's first novel, Call Me by Your Name, also a slim, elegant, explicit novel about a short-lived affa... (Tom)

We only learned of Imai's exquisite 2014 picture book when her fellow author Sanae Ishida made it one of her holiday gift recommendations for us, but it ended up being one of our surprise hits of the... (Tom)

When I returned to the third book of Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels after six months away, what struck me most, aside from how vividly the story's two main characters, Elena and Lila, remained in my min... (Tom)