Made-Up Books

You might, on first glance, find Evaristo's prize winner daunting: the stories of twelve characters, told over 450 pages in a style that, with its idiosyncratic layout and mid-sentence line breaks, lo... (Tom)

If you've read Lerner's cultishly celebrated first two novels, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, you'll find both familiar and unfamiliar things in his third one. Familiar is the character Adam Go... (Tom)

This must surely be a first: a Phinney by Post selection has been adapted into a children's picture book. In this case, it was one of the New Yorker Talk of the Town vignettes in Jamaica Kincaid's Tal... (Tom)

Stay and Fight follows a rotating cast of narrators making do on a plot of land in Appalachia. Although set in the present, the homesteading project they tackle, which includes a lot of acorns and sna... (Erica)

I took the opportunity of this little volume in the Faber Stories series to introduce myself to a new writer, Robert Aickman, the British horror specialist in whose stories, to quote my favorite podca... (Tom)

Is "pre-apocalyptic" a word? There are books all over our shelves that imagine futures after various disasters, but Davis's graphic novel taps into a feeling that's more intensely present: how to move... (Tom)

The work of a scarecrow is lonely: your job is to keep things away from your fields. But when a baby crow, lost and lonely itself, lands nearby, this scarecrow ignores his job description and leans do... (Tom)

When I'm asked for a favorite Seattle book, I usually choose one of two titles: Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (and its sequel, How I Grew), set in her teen years in the 1920s, and th... (Tom)

I should perhaps be focusing on Coats's newest book, the middle-grade fantasy The Green Children of Woolpit, but it's just come out and well, I haven't read it yet. But I really want to, based on how... (James)

Wenzel returns to the same premise as in his Caldecott Honor winner, They All Saw a Cat—everyone brings their own perspective to the same thing—but for me there's something even more evocative about m... (Tom)

In this wonderfully funny and charming YA debut, we accompany a young queer Puerto Rican woman—Juliet—as she travels to Portland to intern for the hippy-dippy white woman who wrote her favorite book.... (Juliet)

No getting around it, this sounds like a tough sell: 1000 pages of unbroken thought, not a stream of consciousness but a torrential river scouring a mental landscape. But that's how you produce someth... (James)

Who knew that NunLit was a genre with a passionately devoted following? Not me, until I read this unique story about a medieval convent, considered one of its classics. Townsend writes brilliantly abo... (Liz)

Pie in the Sky is a wonderful hybrid of a regular middle-grade novel and a graphic novel, with illustrations vividly fleshing out all the silly, heartbreaking, and imaginative moments in this story. E... (Haley)

This is a novel about gambling, heavy metal music, late-night debauchery, and washing dishes in a restaurant. Guess which is the most interesting, by far? The dishwashing! If you've read other behind-... (Tom)

This is the kind of book I used to read more of: a debut novel by a young writer about, well, young writers. They drink too much, sleep with the wrong (or the right?) people, get poorly paid for iffy... (Tom)

Why is laughing-out-loud at the written word so rare that it feels like an unexpected gift when it happens? Well, whatever the reason, this seriously funny coming-of-age story had me LOL-ing so often... (Liz)

Calling Drive Your Plow a murder mystery is a bit like calling Beloved a ghost story. There is a series of unsolved murders (which—spoiler!—are solved), but the real story is in the storyteller: Janin... (Tom)

Nearly every discussion of Chesnutt's 1901 novel, only recently acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of its time, focuses, understandably, on the real event it was inspired by: the white riot in Wi... (Tom)

One more time hearing Steph's masterful storytime rendition of this tale of a small Western town beset by bandits and saved by a young paleontologist (who arrives, slowly, on a tortoise) convinced me... (Tom)

Having missed out on Marlantes's fiercely admired Vietnam epic, Matterhorn, and in the mood for a big Northwest tale, I decided Deep River, only his second novel in four decades of writing, would be m... (Tom)

Reading last week about the late Michael Seidenberg, I got to thinking about this book by his great friend Jonathan Lethem, who started selling books for him as a young Brooklyn teenager. Perkus Tooth... (Tom)

While perusing a list of women mystery writers’ favorite mysteries by women, one plot synopsis caught my eye: two girls swap identities while evacuating Edinburgh in 1940. When I looked on Goodreads i... (Liz)

Do friends have to stay exactly the same to stay friends? Smouha and Marton take the old lost-sock gag for a new spin (sorry) and wring (sorry!) a surprisingly subtle tale out of a sock who gets separ... (Tom)

I'm not sure if Ocean Vuong's first novel is more intense on the page or in your ear. I took it in the latter way, read in Vuong's own soft, quavering, and forceful voice, which he keeps at such a pit... (Tom)

I first read Nina LaCour’s We Are Okay shortly after it was published, and now that it’s been released in paperback, I feel compelled to write about it. It’s a quiet, character-driven book about famil... (Anika)

What begins as a story about attempted assassination—Queen Victoria is shot at during an 1860 coach ride through London—quickly becomes a knotty but witty mystery involving Charles Darwin’s recently p... (Jeff)

Published in 1993—decades before YA dystopias became so popular and ubiquitous—Parable of the Sower tells the story of 18-year-old Lauren Olamina, who is surviving in the year 2024. Octavia Butler’s i... (Anika)

Everyone always says that the lanterns they set off during the annual Autumn Equinox Festival eventually turn into stars. This year Ben and a group of friends, accompanied by unwanted tag-along Nathan... (Gabi)

I almost gave up on Outside the Gates. Having liked Gloss's Wild Life quite a bit, I decided to read her first novel (also recently republished by Saga Press) but at first thought its allegorical styl... (Tom)

Sometimes I suspect the gradual reprinting of Mark Alan Stamaty's books from the '70s and '80s has been undertaken with me in mind. Certainly Phinney Books must be among the nation's top sellers of hi... (Tom)

A family of three (mom, dad, and small son) resides in an English hamlet, a site with historic roots that's now a commuter suburb of London. All the mod cons, but with room for a creative kid to roam... (James)

Those of you familiar with the quirks of Cretaceous-era evolution might be aware of the problem our hero, Tiny, faces: "It is very difficult to hug with tiny arms." So what do you do when your friend... (Tom)

A dull romance between a nose-picking princess (sorry, "prinsess") named Barbarotte and a hot-dog-loving prince (sorry, "prinse") named Putrick that includes soft-drink product placement and an "it wa... (Tom)

Republished by Penguin this week alongside three other mostly neglected classics of Asian American literature (John Okada's No-No Boy, Younghill Kang's East Goes West, and H.T. Tsiang's The Hanging on... (Tom)

There are plenty of cookbooks for kids, and lots of oversized illustrated books of facts too, but I've never seen the two combined, and in such an appealing way. Langholtz has adapted her giant book f... (Tom)

Robinson's first solo picture book, after his collaborations with Matt de la Pena (the Newbery-winning Last Stop on Market Street) and Kelly DiPucchio (our beloved Gaston), is a quietly mind-blowing l... (Tom)

Amy Hempel is one of the modern masters of the short story—really, as many of her admirers would say, of the sentence. Her stories are spare, and mostly short, as are her books, which are a once-a-dec... (Tom)

Malu finds herself caught between a Mexican mother who wants her to be the perfect señorita and a music-loving father who helped foster her love of all things punk. After their divorce, Malu and her m... (Gabi)

How does a child recover from abuse? If you’re 11-year-old December, you become convinced you’re really a bird, with wings ready to sprout from that ugly scar on your back. Those wings will take you a... (Doree)

You could subtitle this book “Diary of a Madman,” except Dr. Glas is too logical and high-functioning for that. Maybe “Diary of a Sociopath,” but I’ve never come across one so genuinely charming and s... (Liz)

A picture book about the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea? Despite its unusual setting, When Spring Comes to the DMZ has the makings of a classic. Originally published in 2010 as part... (Tom)

Marianne is a loner in high school. Connell is a smart, popular jock. But Connell's mom cleans Marianne's house, and when they are drawn together, they tell no one. Rooney's second novel arrives here... (Tom)

Oh boy. I remembered loving this book when I first read it a decade ago, but it was even more delicious than I recalled. The action, such as it is, takes place in the miserable confines of the Rosamun... (Tom)

In the admirable title-that-sums-up-the-story tradition of The Elephant Who Liked to Smash Small Cars, the story of this goofy, Day-Glo counting book is just that: if you can only draw worms, well, yo... (Tom)

These days, when public discourse seems like so much shouting past each other, the last thing you want to read is a fictionalized he-said/she-said about a #metoo moment. BUT! Not many write as lucidly... (Liz)

The ferocious energy of Marlon James's prose, the first sign of the literary genius that the Booker judges later recognized in A Brief History of Seven Killings, is immediately evident in this debut n... (James)

When I heard an interview with Jonathan Auxier talking about how many years of historical research he did when writing Sweep, I couldn't wait to dive into his authentic world of Victorian chimney swee... (Haley)

First, for me, was Washingtoon, Mark Alan Stamaty's '80s comic strip, starring Congressman Bob Forehead, that was just nutty enough to help me make sense of the Reagan Era as a teenager. Then, to my u... (Tom)

"Family is what you make it": Thao Lam's third picture book (and her first with words) takes an unexpected route to that final line, making a convincing and hilarious case for the dad/cat resemblance... (Tom)