*STARRED REVIEW Casey Plett's second collection, after A Safe Girl to Love and the novel Little Fish – both Lambda Award winners – once again features a spectrum of experiences lived by transgender women, from exhilarating to soul-crushing and all the quotidian moments in between. Among the exceptional dozen...
Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout has the remarkable ability to engage audiences immediately with just a few opening sentences. Her marvelous eighth novel, Oh William!, is no different, made even more inviting by being the third in her Amgash series, which began with My Name...
Ava Simon’s life might seem, well ...
*STARRED REVIEW Kat Somerville will never win any mother-of-the-year awards. She shows up at the principal’s office black-eyed after her 7-year-old daughter, Sybil, bloodied another kid’s nose; rather than any admonishments, Kat brings Sybil a Stephen King novel. The rebellious pair abandon not only the school but...
From the cover alone, it’s clear Theo Ellsworth’s visuals are unique, striking, and surreal. A sense of witnessing something unrecognizable resonates throughout, with bizarrely stylized images of people, beasts, and scenes surrounded by intricate backgrounds that might induce trypophobia in some. And yet, self-taught artist...
Mesha Maren: 'Fear and Unease Can Be a Writer's Best Friend' Mesha Maren's 2019 debut, Sugar Run, took almost a decade to hit shelves. In the meantime, she published short stories in various prestigious journals (the Oxford American, the Southern Review) and won numerous prizes and fellowships (2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize,...
*STARRED REVIEW Titles about lonely survivors with just the right balance of lightening humor and lasting gravitas make for an undeniably popular genre. Think international sensation A Man Called Ove, whose global mega-success probably fueled the popularity of acerbic-but-redeemable-left-behinds-who-get-happy-endings sort of books. Steven Rowley’s latest is a prime example, superbly improved...
An octogenarian shoplifter doesn’t quite seem like a likely hero, but British actor Siobhan Waring will certainly make you believe otherwise. Kleptomaniacal Irish matriarch Millie is caught yet again at the village shop and this time her son Kevin (energetically embodied by Irish-born Gary Furlong)...
Debut novelist Ray Stoeve’s first chapter has three short sentences: “I think I might be trans. I mean, I know I am. I think.” Seattle high-school senior Dean already came out as lesbian, is lovingly partnered with Zoe, and has supportive friends (quality over quantity)....
Peyton Thomas's auspicious YA debut, Both Sides Now, invites readers into the complicated transition year between parental reliance and university independence. Seniors Finch and Jonah are their Olympia, Wash., debate team headliners. Although they lose the state competition to their private school archnemeses, the pair still...
Even before the title page, we've got a country road, an ambling rooster and a barreling semi – this can't end well ...
*STARRED REVIEW Ray Fawkes's One Soul debuted in 2011, earning extensive adulation (including an Eisner nomination) for its never-before-done graphic presentation of 18 lives via 18-panel grids divided across two-page spreads. His 2014 follow-up, The People Inside, used a similar format to follow 24 individuals through various relationships. One...
Lauren Groff has built a significant career crafting novels and stories featuring sharp observations by and about modern women. In a surprising feat of time travel, the two-time National Book Award finalist (for Fates and Furies and Florida) leaps back to 12th-century England in Matrix and fictionalizes the life...
Patricia Lockwood, who shocked and/or delighted with her memoir, Priestdaddy (2017), continues to disquiet with her new sort-of-in-the-end tragic (but uplifting, too) family drama. Kristen Sieh might be her ideal accomplice, as she oh-so-comfortably ciphers zingers and wisecracks most readers probably never expected to hear,...
Duane Murray, an actor, writer, and producer in film, makes his on-the-page graphic debut, nimbly realized by Canadian artist Shawn Daley. In a rallying example of the axiom “It takes a village,” a half-dozen graphic greats – including Jeff Lemire and Nate Powell – contribute...
The intimate struggles of a husband and wife desperate to become parents might not be universal literary fare, but with millions of couples worldwide attempting conception via IVF, Two-Week Wait will surely, deservedly find sympathetic audiences. Luke C. Jackson and Kelly Jackson "began their own IVF...
Next-door neighbors Cora Hamed and Quinn McCauley’s best-friendship began in toddlerhood, but they’ve spent the last 10 months in silence. Cora’s sister Mabel is dead. Quinn’s brother Parker murdered her; he took a gun to school and killed four people, including himself. Mourning defines the Hamed...
A book about a possible murder, award-winning French Canadian Pascal Girard's Rebecca & Lucie in the Case of the Missing Neighbor guarantees delight – if nothing else but to laugh with Girard himself. Here in his vivid graphic world, translated by Aleshia Jensen, Pascal Girard...
*STARRED REVIEW When Kristen Radtke (Imagine Wanting Only This) began writing Seek You in 2016, the world was rather different. "Loneliness is one of the most universal things any person can feel," her author's note posits, but still-looming, pandemic-mandated isolation imbues her spectacular graphic memoir with...
Eleven-year-old Ellie has been bullied most of her life for being fat. The mean girls are bad enough, but her weight-obsessed mother might unintentionally be her worst enemy – what mother pushes bariatric surgery on her tween? Ellie’s best friend is moving away, which means that...
