Anika

To preface, this is the fourth glowing review of an Emily Austin novel I've had the pleasure of writing in the past five years. Yes, I'm a fan. Yes, she's a favorite. In this one, our protagonist Darc... (Anika)

I read this twice in two weeks. As soon as I finished the audiobook version, I knew I had to get my hands on a physical copy. The second reading demanded that I underline sentences, paragraphs, and so... (Anika)

Tuck Everlasting is one of my top ten favorite books of all time, so it's hardly surprising that this beautiful illustrated adaptation will be one of my top ten reads of the year. The original tells t... (Anika)

“Even if a book is about everything else, it is never not about the life the writer lived.” Memoir meets biography meets literary criticism in this heartfelt bibliomemoir (and yes, I was delighted to... (Anika)

D. Esperanza's story is a perfect example of how the personal is political. Thirteen-year-old Esperanza could not have anticipated that his first journal would become this memoir, just as he could not... (Anika)

Have you ever wondered who you might be with a different name? Have you ever grappled with the decision of what to name your own child, knowing it's something they'll have to carry the rest of their l... (Anika)

Told in a modern epistolary form that includes emails, texts, and social media posts, Dear Edna Sloane is a delight. With the ambition and earnestness of an MFA graduate who's landed a dream-adjacent... (Anika)

Suddenly, the Big One—the catastrophic earthquake predicted to ravage the PNW in the next half century—is no longer a matter of What If but of What Now? Annie is nine months pregnant in IKEA stressing... (Anika)

I Am Not Jessica Chen is a haunting portrait of social pressure and academic burnout. When Jenna Chen's wish to become her golden child cousin literally comes true, she's initially elated. She finds h... (Anika)

Jane Eyre meets Shirley Jackson (think: We Have Always Lived in the Castle) in this Victorian horror-comedy. In the movie in my mind, Tim Burton is the director. Upon arriving at Ensor House, the new... (Anika)

As I've come to expect from Emily Austin's previous two novels, the beating heart of We Could Be Rats lies in its deeply flawed but lovable characters. However, where we were given the singular perspe... (Anika)

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)

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)

I love this (kind of) memoir for satisfying the inappropriate curiosity I so often feel when the relationships of people I actually know end. Pittard spills all of the tea about the demise of her marr... (Anika)

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)

I was already predisposed to liking Scottish comedian Fern Brady's memoir on account of enjoying the hell out of her presence on Taskmasker (a British comedy panel game show) and her stand-up comedy s... (Anika)

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)

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)

"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)

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)

An excellent companion to Rachel E. Gross's Vagina Obscura and Liz Stromquist's Fruit of Knowledge. With warm, witty writing, thorough research, and inclusive language, journalist-midwife-mother Leah... (Anika)

Reading Under the Henfluence is a lot like hanging out with your most enthusiastic and knowledgeable chicken-loving friend. You're sure to be entertained and to learn something—even if, like me, you'r... (Anika)

“The history of medicine was filled with 'fathers'—the father of the C-section, the father of endocrinology, the father of ovariotomy—but, ironically, there were no mothers.” Rachel E. Gross is basic... (Anika)

Post-burnout, a 36-year-old woman moves back in with her parents and attempts to find employment that won't demand so much of her. With the help of an agency, she tries on five different menial jobs,... (Anika)

Sometimes, though rarely, I will read a book and feel like I'm watching a movie as I read. Reflecting on this beautiful funny sweet melancholy moving book, I experienced something rarer still: feeling... (Anika)

As a newlywed who showed a screening of the horror comedy Ready or Not at my wedding reception, I couldn't read this one fast enough. Set in a dystopian near future where the wedding industrial comple... (Anika)

Think: Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, but sapphic and romantic. Leah returns home to her wife, Miri, from a deep-sea research mission that was only supposed to last three weeks. But after six agonizi... (Anika)

“One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” Kafkaesque from its opening line, Hamid's novel feels simultaneously fantastical and familiar. In this wo... (Anika)

Told from dual perspectives—from Benny and from "the Book" itself—young Benny's story begins when his father is killed in a senseless accident and he begins hearing the voices of inanimate objects. Mu... (Anika)

VanderMeer has created such an atmospheric and foreboding landscape in Area X, and I found myself drawn deeper and deeper into it by the beauty and mystery there. Instead of seizing up with dread or s... (Anika)

Sometimes I pick up a book and I just know we're going to get along. This sweet YA novel ticked so many of my boxes. Positive mental health rep? Check. A post-graduation road trip with surprising dive... (Anika)

This punchy work of graphic nonfiction reads like the best of stand-up comedy in its presentation of the feminist history of "the female genitalia." It highlights the absurd and infuriating; for insta... (Anika)

Engaging and informative from the first page, The Story of Jane details the experiences of many women involved with Chicago's underground abortion service in the years leading up to Roe v. Wade. These... (Anika)

Comparison is the thief of this artistic, anti-capitalist, homesteading young mother's joy when she starts comparing the mundanity of her own lived life in rural Vermont to the highlight reel of her N... (Anika)

Corey Ann Haydu is one of my favorite YA authors, and I eagerly snagged an advance copy of this novel-in-verse as soon as I laid eyes on it. In Lawless Spaces, Mimi, fifteen-turning-sixteen, grapples... (Anika)

I'm often skeptical when new books I haven't read yet are compared to books and media I've already consumed and loved; I've too often been disappointed before by promises unfulfilled. That said, I've... (Anika)

It’s rare that I find a book of short stories that really works for me, but when an advance copy of this collection showed up with local author Kim Fu’s name on it, I had a good feeling. I was lucky e... (Anika)

I am often in the process of reading multiple books at once. The trick to this, I think, is to pick books that are different enough from each other: light vs. heavy, fiction vs. nonfiction, long vs. s... (Anika)

This book had me at "Gilda, a twenty-something, atheist, animal-loving lesbian, cannot stop ruminating about death." I was fully prepared from that one-sentence summary to love this novel, but I hadn'... (Anika)

This sweet, sunny YA novel is just in time for graduation and summer. Josie Hazeldine is supposed to be going to college in the fall—it's her mother's dream for her—but Josie has other plans. She's tu... (Anika)

"Life is the ongoing effort to live. Some people make it look easy. Chickens do not." As a person who aspires to one day keep my own backyard chickens, I was delighted by this little novel about an un... (Anika)

If you’ve ever struggled to lead a creatively satisfying professional life, there’s a good chance Cass’s story will resonate. Cass’s chosen career path? Theater. After an entire decade of working on “... (Anika)

If not for World War II, and their roles in it, Queenie of Scotland and Maddie of Manchester would likely have never met, which would be a shame, because their fierce love and dynamic talents make the... (Anika)

From the outside, 35-year-old Jenny McLaine appears to be a successful adult. She owns her house, has a cool writing job in London, a few good friends, and up until recently she lived with her famous... (Anika)

Again Again both was and wasn’t the young adult love story I expected. Adelaide’s summer can and does go a myriad of different ways, in a number of possible worlds, perhaps thanks to her introduction... (Anika)

Living in the “castle” are the surviving Blackwood family members: 18-year-old Mary Katherine “Merricat” and her cat, Jonas, 28-year-old Constance, and their old Uncle Julian, who spends his days sitt... (Anika)

I delighted in this book of twenty-three author interviews conducted by world-famous librarian Nancy Pearl and her co-author Jeff Schwager, the perfect duo for this literary project. I found listening... (Anika)

Too often in our discussions about diversity, we leave disability out of the conversation. In this memoir-in-essays, Rebekah Taussig brings her fresh and incisive voice to the table, sharing her story... (Anika)

During the trial of Brock Turner, Chanel Miller was known as Emily Doe, “the unconscious intoxicated woman” Turner attacked on Stanford’s campus. Now, in this stunning and unapologetic memoir, Miller... (Anika)

This delightfully illustrated graphic memoir is an emotional and straightforward account of self-discovery and acceptance. Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, explores coming to terms with eir genderq... (Anika)

This short, unconventional memoir is an account of Sarah Manguso’s meticulously kept diary: eight hundred thousand words written over twenty-five years. I am fascinated by people who keep daily record... (Anika)

Within the first few pages of The Vanishing Half, I knew I was reading something special. In this slow-burn novel, twins Desiree and Stella grow up in Mallard, a small black community in segregated Lo... (Anika)

Jessica Vye is a 13-year-old girl living in the North of England during World War II. Yet she maintains that the “violent” experience that shaped her was being told, at the age of 9, by visiting autho... (Anika)

Great is a retelling of The Great Gatsby as a contemporary YA novel. In this version, Nick Carraway is reimagined as a teenage girl named Naomi Rye, who is spending the summer at her mother’s East Ham... (Anika)

Normal People, while a coming-of-age novel about first love, is not a romance. The story is written with insight into two protagonists, Marianne and Connell, which lends a sort of he-said, she-said qu... (Anika)

House Lessons: Renovating a Life Erica Bauermeister's memoir-in-essays is a treasure for anyone who, like me, can't resist the intrigue of an open-house sign. House Lessons beckons you inside a trash-... (Anika)

I love to learn things from the books I read, and this book taught me so much—not only about the South Korean island Jeju, its matrifocal society of haenyeo (women divers), and its culture and traditi... (Anika)

As the title promises, this story is a dark one. It is a modern-day Lolita, in which 32-year-old Vanessa is still reckoning with the affair she had at the brave and vulnerable age of 15 with her 42-ye... (Anika)

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)

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)

One of the things I love best about young adult fiction is that it doesn’t shy away from the hard stuff. In Emily X.R. Pan’s impressive debut, just out in paperback, she illustrates an expert handling... (Anika)

I’ve thought for a while now that short stories just aren’t for me, but Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut has made me reconsider. At just under 200 pages, Friday Black is an intense and provocative rea... (Anika)

As someone who thinks about death more than is probably average or healthy, I couldn’t resist diving into Maggie O’Farrell’s unconventional memoir. Told in non-chronological order, each chapter is the... (Anika)