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Poisoned Pen Press: The Mystery Writer by Sulari Gentill
Shelf Awareness for Readers
Week of March 22, 2024
Thunder Song
Feeding Ghosts
The First State of Being
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This week, we review Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls, which considers "the nesting-doll lives of three generations" of Chinese American women and "brings into clear focus the ever-shifting complexities of mother-daughter relationships"; as well as Thunder Song by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe, who "skillfully sifts through the past, present, and the unraveling future, drawing from the different branches of her identity as a punk, queer Indigenous woman." Plus, The First State of Being by Erin Entrada Kelly, who "has written one of the kindest boys in children's literature" for this "buoyant and entertaining" middle-grade novel about time travel. And more!

In The Writer's Life, learn which book felt like a time machine to Christina Hwang Dudley, author of Pride & Preston Lin, and where she went on a "literary dream tour" with her daughters.

--Dave Wheeler, senior editor, Shelf Awareness
Read the full issue

Bitter Lemon Press: The Lover of No Fixed Abode by Franco Lucentini, translated by Gregory Dowling

The Writer's Life

Christina Hwang Dudley is a lifelong Janeite who has reimagined a Chinese American take on Pride & Prejudice. Find out which author she thinks "inherited Austen's talent for telling love stories with memorable and often funny characters," which book brought to life her family's stories of fleeing Communism in China, and which books have made her cry her eyes out--in public no less... (continued)

The Best Books This Week
The Underground Library
Fiction
Finlay Donovan Rolls the Dice
Mystery & Thriller
That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Human
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Hathor and the Prince
Romance
The Translator's Daughter
Biography & Memoir
Doris
Children's & Young Adult
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See This Week's Book Reviews
Book Candy

Vernalagnia & Reverdie, for example. Mental Floss looked up 18 words to welcome spring.

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"Stephen King, Shakespeare, and many writers agree: eclipses are doom," Atlas Obscura noted.

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For Women's History Month, the New York Public Library's staff is highlighting "absorbing fiction based on the fascinating lives of real women from history."

University of California Press: Fighting Mad: Resisting the End of Roe V. Wade Volume 8 (Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the 21st Century) by Krystale E Littlejohn and Rickie Solinger

Women's History Month
Loud and Proud: The Life of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm
Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong
Shakespeare's Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance
In True Face: A Woman's Life in the CIA, Unmasked
See All of This Week's Reviews
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Maximum Shelf
Annie Bot
by Sierra Greer

Sierra Greer's timely and intimate debut, Annie Bot, digs deeply into gendered power relations through the lens of a gradually developing AI who is eager to please her owner. Greer's novel reads as one part slow-burn thriller and one part meditative relationship drama, often forgoing the spectacle of AI for the humanist questions it raises.  All Annie has ever wanted to do is make her owner, Doug, happy. Annie is a Stella, a fully functioning, female-modeled AI, originally programmed to operate in one of three modes: as a housekeeper, cook, or "Cuddle Bunny." But Doug recently switched her to the autodidactic mode. Now, everything is different.... (continued)

Click here to read our interview with Sierra Greer

Mariner Books: Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

Shelf vetted, publisher supported.

Bloom Books: A Touch of Chaos (Hades X Persephone Saga #7) by Scarlett St Clair

Rediscover

Dan Wakefield, "a protean and prolific journalist, novelist, screenwriter, critic and essayist who explored subjects as diverse as life in New York City in the 1950s, the American civil rights movement, the wounds that war inflicts on individuals and society, and, not least, his personal journey from religious faith to atheism and back again," died March 13 at age 91, the New York Times reported. In 1970, his first novel, Going All the Way, was nominated for a National Book Award... (continued)

National Geographic Society: Secrets of the Octopus by Sy Montgomery and Warren K Carlyle

Comments on a review? Please contact Dave Wheeler for adult books and Siân Gaetano for children's and YA titles.

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