Made-Up Books

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)

I had to read it three times to make sure: on page 21 of the novel that bears her name, Katherine Carlyle leans over the side of Rome's Ponte Mazzini and drops her phone into the Tiber. Her phone?! On... (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)

Perhaps all you need to recommend Victory to you is to be told that Joan Didion rereads it before she starts every novel she writes. That's what got me to open it a few years back, and I wasn't disapp... (Tom)

I knew how great Russell Hoban was (in his Frances books for kids and his grown-up novels Turtle Diary and Riddley Walker), and I knew, vaguely, that he had written another kids' book with the thrilli... (Tom)

"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)

What happens in Pond? Almost nothing; less than nothing, you're tempted to say. The smart young Irish woman who narrates Bennett's debut novel has zero ambition, but she tells herself, "if you don't d... (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)

"Show, don't tell," that's what all the writing guides say, and there's plenty of truth to that truism. But sometimes you want a story to be told—there's a reason they're called "storytellers"—and whe... (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)

Grief? Feathers? Didn't I already read that book when it was called H Is for Hawk? Not in the least. The bird in this case is a crow, and the book, well, it's a beast of another kind entirely, a slim,... (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)

Surely I had come across the absurdities of "Colonel" Baxter before, but never in such a concentrated fashion: in this career-spanning collection, the illustrated incongruities of this British madman... (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)

Betty Bunny Loves Chocolate Cake by Michael B. Kaplan and Stéphane Jorisch A customer tipped us off to this recent gem, which makes me laugh every single time, not just for Betty herself, stuffing a s... (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)