Made-Up Books

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)

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)

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)

When I say that Dayswork feels like it was written for me, that doesn't mean it wasn't written for you too. Written by a married couple, both writers, it is the story of a married couple, both writers... (Tom)

Friendship is the heart of this coming-of-age campus novel. As Savannah embarks on her sophomore year of college, proudly out as bisexual, she's happy to be making new connections and cultivating comm... (Anika)

Labatut's first novel, When We Cease to Understand the World, was a favorite of the New York Times, Barack Obama, and most important, me. This one is even better than its predecessor. Like the earlier... (Tom)

"We were in search of adventure. A place we could own land and start a family. The Millennial dream." This Country is a beautifully illustrated story of two artists—a documentary filmmaker and a teach... (Anika)

You could describe Kairos as a Manhattan story—an ill-fated romance between a 50-something man and a teenage girl—or as an allegory for East Germany before, during, and after unification, but neither... (Tom)

This is a first: the first time we've chosen an author twice for our Phinney by Post subscription service. Babb's memoir of her childhood on an unfertile Colorado farm, An Owl on Every Post, has been... (Tom)

There is no shortage of picture books to help little ones learn their ABCs, but there are few that will also get them (and you!) up and moving like this one. The illustrations (by one of our favorite... (Tom)

Angsty loner Eloise would much rather be spending her time gaming than logging volunteer hours at LifeCare—an elder care service that's at odds with her social anxiety—but that's what her guidance cou... (Anika)

As someone who opts to read few books written by straight white men, I'm the kind of reader Dr. Oliver Harding—a 56-year-old white male English professor who fears becoming obsolete and who would defi... (Anika)

If you loved Nina George’s The Little Paris Bookshop, as I did, you’ll remember Jean Perdu created his floating bookstore, Literary Apothecary, after reading a life-changing novel about love, written... (Doree)

Jessixa Bagley is one of our favorite local children's authors, and her picture books often have a sweetly melancholic tone, which is a perfect match for this story of a Paris musician (a dog, like ev... (Tom)

To title this superb oral history, collected in the early '70s and published in 1980, Gwaltney chose a word that means "ordinary," but that also, unlike many terms in black English, has never quite cr... (Tom)

The postcard arrived, unexplained and unsigned, in 2003, listing just four names: those of Berest's great-grandparents and their two children, who were all murdered in Auschwitz over sixty years befor... (Tom)

First published in 1981, Need a House? Call Ms. Mouse! was recently re-released for a new generation by the New York Review Children's Collection. The animals flock to architect Ms. Mouse because she... (Haley)

Bedford's few novels rarely stray far from the facts of her own history, but with a family like hers, you can understand why. She was raised in the fertile (for a novelist) ground of a family with mor... (Tom)

Perhaps you know Julien Temple's mostly terrible '80s movie-musical adaptation, or perhaps you know the Jam's wonderful 1981 hit single by the same name. If you grew up in the UK at a certain time, yo... (Tom)

Generations of Northwest kids have been raised on Doris Burn's classic picture book, Andrew's Meadow, but until recently I didn't know about this other gem of hers. Burn, who lived most of her long li... (Tom)

Cory Doctorow wears so many hats—tech activist, anti-corporate theorist, pioneering blogger, tireless Tweeter—that you might forget that he's also a pretty great storyteller. His specialty has been in... (Tom)

I meant to read this when it came out last year in hardcover, I swear. It had great reviews and an even better premise—marine biologists of the near future discover that a deep-water octopus species h... (James)

In the two decades since this debut novel came out, Chee has been ever-present as an essayist, a teacher, and a general literary citizen, but he's only published one other novel (2016's The Queen of N... (Tom)

I’m discovering that, even more than historical fiction, I love reading stories written during the particular era in which they are set. The combination of the author’s first-hand knowledge and the re... (Liz)

We here all identify strongly with the young hero of this story, a girl just trying to read a book, or eat a cookie, or do somersaults by herself when a friend shows up. Sometimes it's nice to be alon... (Tom)

Erica Bauermeister was one of my favorite local authors even before I began working with her daughter-in-law at Phinney Books. The author of The Scent Keeper (one of my favorite novels ever) and House... (Doree)

On Frank's home planet of Xob, everybody looks the same: green and boxy. So he sets out to find something different and ends up on a planet full of strange creatures that all look different: ours! Wha... (Tom)

This is one of my very favorite books, but it took me a hundred months to get up the gumption to send it out to our Phinney by Post subscribers. Why? For one thing, it's a book-length poem. For anothe... (Tom)

In her assured debut, Winn accomplishes the mission of historical fiction with wide-ranging research, emotional depth, and a dash of derring-do. WWI buffs will recognize details and themes, all presen... (Liz)

White Cat, Black Dog is Kelly Link's first book since winning a MacArthur "genius" grant in 2018, and it is well worth the wait. The seven short stories in this collection are loosely inspired by fair... (Haley)

One of the minor pleasures of following American literature is the moment when a former outsider, like Shirley Jackson or Octavia Butler or Philip K. Dick, is ushered into our national pantheon via th... (Tom)

After publishing five novels in the '40s and '50s (and spending eight years in prison in the '30s), Himes finally found a wide audience after he moved to Paris and started writing hard-boiled crime ta... (Tom)

It's a very good thing if the main character in a novel blurts. It can set all kinds of mayhem in motion. You would think, in Greta's situation—she is a professional transcriber for a sex therapist in... (Tom)

"The adventure will begin the minute we step through the gate." Three friends make a springtime outing to the modest fort they've built on the other side of a meadow: they get a little lost in the tal... (Tom)

There are some graphic novels that use illustration simply to tell a story and others where every panel is a work of art. The Moth Keeper is definitely in the latter category, full of sumptuous orange... (Haley)

Turtle Diary has been a favorite book of so many people in my life—and I love Hoban's Frances and Captain Najork books so preposterously much—that I half-felt like I had read it already myself, but, u... (Tom)

How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen by Russell Hoban and Quentin Blake I knew how great Russell Hoban was, and I knew, vaguely, that he had written a kids' book with the thrillingly... (Tom)