Plastic Shaman: The True Story of a Deadly Self-Help Retreat and America's Misguided Quest for Wellness

by Annette McGivney

Annette McGivney uses a tragedy at a premium desert retreat to explore how influential figures and practices within the wellness industry co-opt, corrupt, and weaponize sacred Native American rituals and beliefs, often promising changed lives in exchange for ever-increasing amounts of money. In October 2009, a phony sweat lodge ceremony run by a grifter who exercised undue influence over attendees resulted in three deaths. Plastic Shaman delves into the rise of the New Age self-help and extravagant wellness

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Plot Twist: Life, Craft, and the Messy First Draft: A Memoir on Writing

by Harlan Coben

Harlan Coben's hybrid memoir and book on craft, Plot Twist, rivals Stephen King's On Writing in that even if readers don't write in his genre, Coben's succinct insights apply to every sort of writing--and even daily life.

Coben's organizing principle is to adopt "the writer's mind frame." Using this lens, "everything in life is material." He doesn't mind the question that makes most writers cringe: "Where do you get your ideas?" He breezily responds with an answer about keeping a curious mind. Coben repeatedly

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Receipts from the Bookshop: A Bookseller's Year in an English Seaside Town

by Katie Clapham

In 2023, children's book author and bookseller Katie Clapham (The Tour at School) launched a feature on her Substack called "Receipt from the Bookshop," wherein she recounted bits from her day in the bookstore she co-owns with her mother in St. Annes-on-Sea, U.K. A few years and thousands of followers later, she has gathered some of the best of those dispatches into a book, aptly named Receipts from the Bookshop.

The wild success of these informal notes, written on the fly, is wholly due to Clapham's wry humor

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Who Knows the Way to Mr. Grimly's Classroom?

by Chris Priestley, illus. by Mariachiara Di Giorgio

Who Knows the Way to Mr. Grimly's Classroom? is a deliciously dark picture book about an overachieving student who roams the halls of a school populated with majestically creepy settings and oddly named personnel on a quest to return a borrowed book.

When Grace's teacher asks the titular question, Grace's hand shoots up and she blurts out, "Me, Miss. I know the way, Miss!" Miss Flytrap hands the eager girl a book and asks her to take it to Mr. Grimly. But this is Grace's first week at "her strange new school,"

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Absent

by Rex Ogle, illus. by LJ-Baptiste

Stonewall Book Award Honor winner Rex Ogle (Road Home) continues his fearless run of emotionally layered storytelling showcasing the complicated lives of teens in the nuanced and gripping Absent, a stirring mixed-format story of three middle school boys who can't seem to make it to school.

Manny Fueyo, Calvin Johnson Jr., and Liam Miller don't know each other. They all, however, keep journals of sorts tracking their days in--but mostly out--of Lincoln Heights Middle School. Manny, who spends his school hours

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Adam, Mine.

by K. Ancrum

Adam, Mine., the sixth young adult novel by National Book Award longlisted author K. Ancrum (The Corruption of Hollis Brown), is a stunning love letter to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein that highlights its central characters' capacities for humanity and monstrosity.

In 1890, 17-year-old Victor Frankenstein toils away as an alchemy student, sneered at by peers who deem his medical interests a grotesque perversion. Victor is insistent that by the time he graduates, he will have found a way to bring the dead

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