The Trees Are Speaking: Dispatches from the Salmon Forests

by Lynda V. Mapes

Lynda V. Mapes (Breaking Ground; Witness Tree) takes her readers on an arboreal exploration in The Trees Are Speaking: Dispatches from the Salmon Forest. It is a stunning and evocative search for the last remaining scraps of old-growth and ancient forest scattered across the North American continent. By doing so, she makes an impassioned case alongside researchers, conservationists, and Indigenous environmental stewards and activists for protecting these areas, not just for the sake of the trees but for the

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Mỹ Documents

by Kevin Nguyen

In Kevin Nguyen's brilliantly chilling Mỹ Documents, the U.S. suffers several coordinated attacks. When the perpetrators are identified as having surnames like Nguyen and Tran, the government--as it did with Japanese Americans during World War II--rounds up Vietnamese Americans and puts them in internment camps.

Siblings Jen and Duncan have never been close with their half-siblings Ursula and Alvin, but due to the American Advanced Protections Initiative (AAPI), their communications are now entirely cut off.

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The Reel Wish

by Yamile Saied Méndez

Eleven-year-old Florencia del Lago learns that dreams are mercurial, malleable things in The Reel Wish, an inspiring and sincere middle-grade bildungsroman by Yamile Saied Méndez (Furia).

Florencia knows she and her best friend Selena deserve lead roles in their exclusive ballet academy's production of the Nutcracker. Both are auditioning for Clara, but "only one girl among dozens [will] be selected for the honor." It is Florencia who becomes "the youngest and first Latina Clara ever." Between regular

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I See You've Called in Dead

by John Kenney

One might expect a novel with the title I See You've Called In Dead to be full of zany humor, especially given that the author, New Yorker contributor John Kenney (Truth in Advertising), has received the Thurber Prize for American Humor. One wouldn't be wrong. But like the film Harold and Maude, which this thoughtful work references, Kenney's book begins with an offbeat premise and deepens it into a life-affirming piece about making the most of one's precious few seconds on Earth.

Bud Stanley, a 44-year-old

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There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America

by Brian Goldstone

Journalist and anthropologist Brian Goldstone compassionately brings readers to the city of Atlanta, Ga., and the efforts of several "working poor" families who are trying to keep roofs over their heads in There Is No Place for Us. With Goldstone's true-to-life reporting, readers are not guaranteed happy endings to every story.

Goldstone shows readers the precarity of being working class in the 21st-century United States. Even Maurice and Natalia Taylor, who were married and both full-time workers, found that

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The Corruption of Hollis Brown

by K. Ancrum

The Corruption of Hollis Brown by K. Ancrum (Icarus; The Weight of the Stars) is a singularly intimate supernatural YA romance that follows a self-destructive boy who shares a body and forges an exhilarating connection with the ghost possessing him.

Seventeen-year-old Hollis Brown is an impulsive "asshole." He gets into fights, becomes reckless when angry, and won't talk to his friends about why he stands dangerously close to speeding trains every morning. Thus, he gives little thought to bargaining with a

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Plum

by Andy Anderegg

Andy Anderegg's evocative debut novel, Plum, tells a story of a girl growing into a woman amid abuse. J begins as an unnamed young girl who sees her brother take the brunt of her father's anger while the two of them daydream of escape. The novel follows her through the chaos of a high-voltage adolescence, then into adulthood, where she tries to make a life for herself while wrestling with the lasting effects of trauma. Anderegg has a particular knack for infusing big emotion into small and metaphorical moments,

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