*STARRED REVIEW Somewhere close, sometime soon, war is coming. Twelve-year-old Peter and his fox, Pax, are forced apart by a father whose noble intentions have devastating results. When Peter's father enlists in the military, he pressures Peter to return Pax to the wild, while Peter is sent...
*STARRED REVIEW The 1937 school explosion in New London, TX, remains the deadliest school disaster in U.S. history. With that real-life tragedy as a starting point, Ashley Hope Pérez adds greater volatility with race, class, and family dysfunction, by introducing a love story between two teens from...
The third installment of Keigo Higashino's Japan-set Detective Galileo series (after Salvation of a Saint) lands stateside, with plenty of didn't-see-that-coming surprises to keep listeners entranced straight to the end. Brilliant and eccentric physicist Manabu Yukawa – called Detective Galileo because of the sharp, unexpected...
“Girls don’t ride bicycles,” Wadja hears repeatedly. Being an 11-year-old in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, she finds herself constantly at odds with the societal limitations of her gender, from being forced to wear the all-covering abaya to adjusting her feisty behavior in too many restrictive ways. When...
To get her four-eared infant to safety, Nouri Ahmad Mohammad ibn Mahsoud al-Morad's mother gave first her body, then her life. In 13th-century Persia, a child so different would require divine intervention to survive, and Nouri literally falls into the arms of a gentle, crippled...
One Monday in January, 63-year-old Britt-Marie enters an unemployment office, having last worked as a waitress in 1978. After decades of fastidious living – perfect cutlery drawers, coasters under every drink, dinner at six, beds disinfected with baking soda – Britt-Marie needs a job. She's left...
*STARRED REVIEW Originally published in 2003, Jennifer Finney Boylan’s groundbreaking memoir chronicling her transition from James to Jenny was updated in 2013: "Man, what you don't know could fill a book. I'm unique, however, in that the book filled with the things I don't know is...
*STARRED REVIEW Presenting her dozen stories in six interlinked pairs, Shobha Rao uses the savage 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan as her narrative center, with reverberations moving outward beyond borders, cultures, countries, and generations. A 13-year-old's would-be widowhood spent in a refugee camp is the best...
"[A]s a reporter, I was spending my life telling other people's stories and ignoring my own family's incredible one," Dawn Anahid MacKeen realized at 35. Her 78-year-old Armenian mother was aging, and MacKeen could no longer ignore her calls to "come home." In 2006, MacKeen left...
Six days before eighth grade starts, Lily and Dunkin meet for the first time. Lily is still known mostly as Timothy, the boy name he was given at birth – but he's practicing being his true self: a girl named Lily. Dressed in her mother's dress and sandals,...
*STARRED REVIEW Tanya Dubois, as she's initially introduced, is not the woman her husband believed her to be. He's dead – she didn't do it – but Tanya runs anyway, shedding her name and recent past yet again and taking on another identity. In another town, another...
Four siblings gather in their childhood home to determine its future. The oldest is the most distant, unsure she'll even stay the full three weeks they've planned to be there. The middle sister arrives with two children, complaining about her missing husband. The youngest sister...
China's infamous one-child policy lasted just 35 years. Forced sterilizations, gruesome late-term abortions, an overseas adoption boom, and baby trafficking emerged as by-products of the draconian law. What was touted as a "necessary step in [China's] Herculean efforts to lift the population…from abject poverty" resulted in...
*STARRED REVIEW Emma Casey, her brother Topher, and their Granny Blue call the Boneyard Café home. On weekends, Emma conducts tours of the haunted graveyard next door, while Topher warms visitors with his irresistible peach-lavender muffins and famous Boneyard Brew (aka hot chocolate). When their cozy haven...
*STARRED REVIEW Before they became the Three Rancheros, the Little Miss Central Florida Tire competition brought Raymie Clarke, Louisiana Elefante, and Beverly Tapinski together – each for wildly different reasons. Raymie is convinced that when her philandering father, who's run off with the dental hygienist, sees a...
*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, Soledad had two sisters and two loving parents. But tragedy can happen to anyone at any time, and suddenly, Sol and her younger sister, Ming, are transplanted to the other side of the world in a run-down apartment in Louisiana,...
Anna is 7 when her father disappears. In 1939 Krakow, Poland, being Jewish is enough to condemn people to death. When the Swallow Man appears – so named for his ability to conjure and communicate with birds – the unlikely pair reluctantly recognize in each other not...
“No one said this global journey would be smooth,” writes Baz Dreisinger with controlled understatement. Covering two years and nine countries in her pilgrimage to prisons worldwide, Dreisinger – a self-described “white English professor specializing in African-American cultural studies,” as well as prison educator and criminal justice...
Beloved NPR host Diane Rehm’s latest memoir begins with her husband John's end – depleted by Parkinson's disease, unable to "stand walk, eat, bathe, or in any way care for himself on his own, he was now ready to die." After 54 years of marriage –...
*STARRED REVIEW For the rest of his life, Ajie would be known as the last person to have seen Paul, the family’s exemplary, exceptional firstborn. On a Monday afternoon during Nigeria’s 1995 rainy season, 17-year-old Paul announces he’s visiting a friend in the next compound; he...
