Made-Up Books

A delicate and lyrical counterpoint to the weighty Challenger, Orbital is called a novel, but it bears about as much relation to your average novel as its characters' sixteen daily zero-gravity orbits... (Tom)

This little book carried such a reputation—as one of those exquisite literary gems whose compact perfection is a miracle of tone and concision—that for a long time I didn't want to actually read it an... (Tom)

Godwin is, as advertised, about the search for a teenage soccer prodigy who may or may not exist in West Africa and who may or may not be the next Messi. But it's also about a minor power struggle at... (Tom)

Reading the latest offering from McNally Editions, you might think it’s a reissue of a slim Victorian classic. It’s actually a historical novel that was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize. Schlee n... (Tom)

Young mouse Rumie and Uncle Hawthorne build a mouse-sized raft from twigs, bark, and ribbons. But when Uncle Hawthorne oversleeps the next morning, it's too hard to be patient and Rumie decides to try... (Haley)

On the first page of Pavane, Queen Elizabeth I is assassinated. On the second, after the resulting chaos, the Catholic Church regains its medieval authority over Britain. And in the next, the story le... (Tom)

After a long phone call one day, author/illustrator Felicita Sala's daughter asked her, “Mum, what if you talk so much that you run out of words, and then there won’t be any left for me?” Her daughter... (Haley)

A young woman unexpectedly becomes a young mother after an affair with her English professor. As a broke college drop-out with a newborn, Margo's running out of rent money and employment options. She... (Anika)

My favorite historical fiction author, Beatriz Williams, is back with her 16th book (not counting her collaborations with fellow authors Karen White and Lauren Willig), all but one of which have inter... (Doree)

I binge-read the first 17 books in Jacqueline Winspear’s historical fiction/mystery Maisie Dobbs series during the pandemic. Somehow, immersing myself in the years between World War I to World War II... (Doree)

For every mother everywhere, this book is a primal scream of new motherhood. The schizophrenic nature of those early days—when you're bursting with love for this little creature, but also dying inside... (Doree)

If you're an adult who doesn't usually read middle-grade books, I highly recommend you give this one a try! Set in 1936, and originally published in Greek in 1963, this beautifully written book has ju... (Tom)

Well, this might be the best book I've read so far this year. For all the flutter of "quirkiness" that surrounds July, she is a stone cold serious artist, in whatever form she chooses, and this is a c... (Tom)

Your first clue that this romantic comedy is a break-up story is the list that kicks it off: Reasons Why It's Good I'm Not with Jen. Here begins Andy's obsessive wallowing. To be fair, he deserves a g... (Anika)

Mavis the Bravest's excellent text and illustrations pair perfectly to tell a classic farmyard tale of heroism (with a good dose of silliness). Mavis is a chicken, both in the figurative and literal s... (Haley)

What happens when an author crushes on a real-life 19th-century polar explorer's photograph? The resulting obsession developed into The Ministry of Time, a book for anyone who has ever wondered what i... (Haley)

What a big, strange, good book the folks at Boiler House Press have recovered. Harris published nearly twenty inventive and eclectic novels between 1961 and 1993, nearly all out of print now. This one... (Tom)

Two orphaned sisters, Jody and Mice—near adults, half-infantile—live in a fairly specific place: Miami, in the springtime of 1961. But in Levine's telling they also live in a landscape of blocky, odd... (Tom)

The Night in Question by Susan Fletcher is a heartwarming—and heartbreaking—exploration of love in later life and the regrets we have about our younger years. Florrie Butterfield recently lost a leg d... (Doree)

Friends are one thing Eddie Coyle doesn't have. He talks to a lot of guys—this book is made of talking—but every conversation is a wary exchange, negotiated sometimes in half-spoken ways and sometimes... (Tom)

What word do you use when you can't remember the name for something? Thingamajig? Doohickey? Whatchamacallit? Whozeewhatsit? Rilla Alexander has a hoot of a time with all those madeup words we all see... (Tom)

By the time he moves from small-town Iowa to the rural Northwest, ex-sheriff Amos Fielding is a widower in his seventies, and he's seen too much of the dark side of the world, some of which you will h... (Tom)

I loved The Lincoln Highway and adored A Gentleman in Moscow, so when the advance copy of Amor Towles’ new Table for Two, consisting of six short stories and one novella, arrived in the bookstore, I s... (Doree)

Sashiko's Stitches is a new picture book from local favorite Sanae Ishida (Little Kunoichi: The Ninja Girl). Sashiko is a little girl with overwhelming fears and worries. One day, her mother teaches h... (Haley)

The literary highlight of my year so far came from a writer I thought I knew well already. I had read (and loved) many of Morrison's novels, but when I learned that she narrates the audio versions of... (Tom)

Whenever I am championing Jarman's "funny, cluttered, driven" novel, Salvage King, Ya!—I sometimes feel that I am its only champion, though it deserves many more—I say something to the effect of, "But... (Tom)

Mark Twain famously began Huckleberry Finn by declaring, "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons a... (Tom)

David Sedaris is not for everybody, and his picture-book debut, a collaboration with the late Olivia author, Ian Falconer, won't be either. Sedaris takes a familiar story—readers might be reminded of... (Tom)

Louise White Elk is, like Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady and Antonia Shimerda in My Antonia, the sort of literary heroine whose magnetic allure draws the entire plot of a book around her like... (Tom)

It opens with the typical hook: a missing child. Tom Hargreaves, newbie tabloid hack, takes the bait and is formulating lurid headlines before he even gets to the scene. He plies the suspect’s family... (Liz)

Attention all Anglophile WWII buffs: you do not want to miss McNally Editions’ reissue of this fantastic 1950 novel! It’s the life story of a type of Englishman who—although born on January 1, 1900—re... (Liz)

It's time to make art! But the young girl in this picture book has a few questions first. "What should I use to make art?" "Paint" says painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. "Wood" says carver Ellen Neel.... (Haley)

Emily Austin's debut, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead, was easily my favorite book of 2021, so I approached her sophomore novel with excitement as well as trepidation. There's a lot going o... (Anika)

Seventeen-year-old Marley drives into the tiny town of Mercury with her mother, who never lets them settle into a new place for long. But Marley immediately falls in with the Joseph family, as the gir... (Doree)

One thing picture books don't seem to have much of these days is patience. Things have to move, explode, somersault, etc., all in 32 pages, as if the young listeners will be checking their phones if t... (Tom)

Sometimes books you read make themselves into pairs, but rarely as neatly as these two did for me: two very slim books, the latest by Nobel laureates who each turned 83 last year, and each told by a w... (Tom)

When I finished this year’s Booker Prize winner, Prophet Song, I felt that I hadn’t simply read it—I had lived it. The story follows Eilish Stack, a middle-aged working mother who’s trying to maintain... (Liz)

Fans of Nita Prose’s delightful debut novel The Maid have had to wait almost two years for a sequel, but I’m happy to report it was worth the wait. Molly Gray is now Head Maid at the high-end Regency... (Doree)

Local kids-book stars Clanton and Musser have teamed up—on both the words and the pictures—for this sturdy and sweet book that takes some of the interactive style of Hervé Tullet's Press Here to fashi... (Tom)

This short and spiky novel spans decades of time, from 1980 to 2014, in both Korea and the west coast of America. Is it a poet's novel? (E.J. Koh is a poet.) Yes, but its beauties can be hard to swall... (Tom)

Worth the wait. By that I mean both the time since I first read a preview copy of this novel (nine months or so ago) and the time since Ed Park last published one (fifteen years). A prolific magazine... (James)

This little reissue, originally published in 1986, lured me in with its gorgeous Edward Gorey cover art, and then I couldn't help but stick around. Set in the mid-1970s in the Midlands, it begins with... (Anika)

Our talented friend Karin Snelson gave a witty talk last week at Madison Books about her current passion in her long career in kids' books: translating them. Among her books under discussion (along wi... (Tom)

The first historical novel in Smith's spectacular career is built from the bones of two true stories from Victorian England: the forgotten literary life of William Harrison Ainsworth, a friend and riv... (Tom)

What a beautiful book. First published in 1997 and reimagined and republished this year with the cooperation of its two authors, it brings together story and photos to much the same hauntingly evocati... (Tom)

I’ve heard it said that other peoples’ dreams aren’t interesting, but I’ve never agreed with that! I love hearing about dreams, particularly if they’re Roz Chast’s. In I Must Be Dreaming, the combinat... (Haley)

How to describe the work of Dan Clowes for those who haven't been reading him for thirty-odd years? Cranky, biting, hilarious, and tender: he often puts his jaw-dropping drafting skills in the service... (Tom)

Who doesn't love a big book packed with tiny, hand-drawn details? You can play visual detective with your young readers through dozens of tours of the Grand Old Oak, and best of all (with those dozens... (Tom)

Muyu and his fellow young bachelors may have moved from the provinces to the massive Chinese capital, but from the rooftop of their single-story building of crowded apartments on Beijing's western out... (Tom)

Composed of short autobiographical-but-fictional vignettes tracing a life from a Vietnamese childhood during the war to a Malaysian refugee camp to Quebec, there's a crystalline quality to each piece... (Tom)