by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi
A majestic, elusive big cat is as beloved and threatened by humans as its life is entwined with theirs in the nonfiction narrative The Ghost of the Mountains: Unraveling the Secrets of the Snow Leopard by conservationist and snow leopard biologist Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi. Suryawanshi details 20 years of a journey that continually teaches him that even with observation, research, and radio collars, "snow leopards [are] like the mountains they inhabit--there is something forever unknowable about them."
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by Leslie Bazzett
When an aspiring writer falls under the spell of a mysterious older woman, it sets in motion a precipitous chain of events in Leslie Bazzett's dazzling debut novel, Mia, an erotically charged suspense drama fueled by one woman's "fantasy of belonging." The narrator recounts an earlier period in her life, when she and her family temporarily relocated from their Minnesota home to a charming town in Mexico.
Sally, her architect husband, Tom, and their young children, Ida and Henry, settle into a gorgeous hillside
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by Diana Cao
The 38 poems in Diana Cao's arresting debut collection, Slipstream, cast a wry eye over family history, nature, and technology.
The tone is by turns morbid and nostalgic as Cao revisits scenes from the past, such as her father's heart attack while on vacation in Morocco and life's altered rhythms during the Covid-19 pandemic. Solitude and suffering recur. The speaker feels jaded by days' repetitiveness, but travel proves disorienting. Several poems respond to her difficult relationship with a mother disappearing
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by Barbara Perez Marquez, illus. by Lissy Marlin
The Library of Memories is a joyous middle-grade fantasy graphic novel that gracefully explores grief through the determination of a charmingly intrepid girl to regain her lost memories.
Copenhagen, a girl with messy black hair and blue eyes, cannot remember who she is. It is as if she fell asleep in one place and woke up in a fantastical art deco steampunk world inhabited by sentient metal creatures. Those "Gyrotrons" remind her--yet again, apparently--that she is an assistant in the Library of Memories.
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by Andrea Beatriz Arango
A fearful boy from Puerto Rico inexplicably enters another boy's dream world in the mystical middle-grade novel No Place on Earth, which explores anxiety and depression while compassionately challenging gender stereotypes.
When Gustavo's parents decide on a "trial separation," he moves from Puerto Rico to Yellowstone National Park, where his mom has taken a job. Gustavo's dad says he can come back to Puerto Rico if he's able to tough it out in the wild first ("I didn't raise un miedoso"). But the 11-year-old
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by Lily Williams
In the emotionally raw yet hopeful middle-grade graphic novel Exposures: A Story About Life with OCD and the Power of Facing Your Fears, Lily Williams (Go with the Flow) draws on her personal experience with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) to portray its agonizing effects and the results that can come from exposure and response prevention therapy.
Blonde, pale-skinned, 12-year-old Peyton hides her scary, intrusive thoughts from her "perfect twin" sister, Taylor, and their doting parents because she's convinced
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