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| | Your eyes don't deceive you. We have a new look! For years, we have been dedicated to bringing dozens of fresh reading recommendations directly to your inbox every week, and this new format puts those book reviews back in the center spotlight. We've made it even easier to find excellent titles across numerous genres, to learn more about authors' creative processes, and to rediscover backlist that continues to inspire writers and thinkers today. Our resolution, as always, is to spark the curiosity of our readers, and what better time to reinvigorate that commitment than the beginning of a new year? Happy reading!
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| | | |  | | The Dream of the Jaguar | | | Miguel Bonnefoy, trans. by Ruth Diver |
| | | This vibrantly imagined and beautifully written novel combines a history of Venezuela with a colorful multigenerational family saga.
» Read the full review | | |
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| | | | How Girls Are Made | | | Mindy McGinnis |
| | | Three teen girls run a secret after-school sex ed class while facing the darkness of social media, emotional abuse, and predatory men in this scathing YA indictment of the way girls are taught to be.
» Read the full review | | |
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| | | | Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore | | | Emily Krempholtz |
| | | A witch fleeing her dark past falls for a grouchy neighbor in this charming romantasy novel about redemption and community.
» Read the full review | | |
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| | | | The Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of King James VI and I | | | Clare Jackson |
| | | The violence-strewn life of King James VI and I--the first monarch of Great Britain--receives a convincing and elegant reassessment in this absorbing reappraisal.
» Read the full review | | |
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| | | | | | The Pelican Child by Pulitzer Prize finalist Joy Williams collects a dozen stories, alternately creepy and magical, that touch upon age-old questions of death and immortality.
» Full review | |
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| | | | Connie Berry's sixth Kate Hamilton mystery plunges the antiques expert into a tricky case involving both a 14th-century grave site and several 21st-century murders.
» Full review | |
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| | | | Comics creators John Allison and Max Sarin develop a boisterous quilting caper for their inimitable sleuth, Shauna Winkle.
» Full review | |
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| | | | Preeminent Old Hollywood biographer Scott Eyman presents an admiring corrective to the high-camp Joan Crawford persona while honoring his subject's objectively outsize personality.
» Full review | |
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| | | | The book's critical role as an "idea machine" is explored in this sweeping history of the bound word as a mobile information device whose impact on human knowledge continues to increase over time.
» Full review | |
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| | | | Journalist Cecilia Sala writes with the urgent poignancy of the young people she covers in the midst of conflicts in Iran, Ukraine, and Afghanistan.
» Full review | |
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| | | | Martha Cooley's lyrical personal essays braid together her own experiences--aging, moving to Italy, her relationships with family and animals--with fateful accounts from history.
» Full review | |
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| | | | This well-researched work of history details the captivating true story of Australia's largest museum heist.
» Full review | |
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| | | | This heartfelt, accessible poetry collection celebrates the special bonds between humans and their dogs, and its soulful watercolor portraits reinforce the affections.
» Full review | |
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| | | | Break Wide the Sea, the first book in a beguiling YA duology, is a dark, oceangoing fantasy marked by sparks of love, betrayal, and the "smell of petrichor and brine."
» Full review | |
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| | | | In this fanciful picture book creation myth of the Mexican folk creatures known as alebrijes, a young mouse solves the city's cat problem by making her own fantastical creature.
» Full review | |
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| | | | Learn how algorithms work, how they can be both helpful and hurtful, and how to break out of the bubbles they create in this handy middle-grade nonfiction guide.
» Full review | |
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| | |  Christina Kovac writes suspense novels set in Washington, D.C. Her career began in television news, where she covered crime and politics, work that informed her novels, including her newest, Watch Us Fall, which follows four best friends who become embroiled in the investigation around a reporter. Discover the detective fiction that influenced Kovac most at an early age and which classic novel's twist still leaves her breathless...(continued)
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| | | |  Poet and novelist DéLana R.A. Dameron, "whose work spoke with aching honesty about the Black experience in the modern South, and who moonlighted as a competitive horsewoman from her farm in South Carolina," died on November 29, the New York Times reported. She was 40.
Dameron's debut poetry collection, How God Ends Us (2009), won the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize. Redwood Court (2024), her first book of prose, is a collection of linked stories. (continued)
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| |  Dark academia gets a 21st-century makeover in Kamilah Cole's brilliant An Arcane Inheritance, complete with a fictitious Ivy college, whispered ghost stories, a powerful Black female lead and incisive reflections on the intersections of class, race, and power in higher education and beyond.
Ellory Morgan was sent by her Jamaican parents to live with an aunt in the U.S. at a young age, cloaked with the expectations of success and financial freedom. "Every second Ellory spent in this country was devoted to building a future that seemed further out of reach the closer she supposedly got," emphasized by her inability to get any kind of scholarship or financial aid to support her parents' dreams of higher education. She is forced to defer enrollment until she can save up enough to begin classes, so when an unsolicited offer of a full ride arrives from Warren University, she leaps on the opportunity to attend as a Godwin Scholar. At the predominantly white, exceptionally wealthy Ivy League school, Ellory feels out of her depth as soon as classes begin...(continued) |
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Comments on a review? Please contact Dave Wheeler for adult books and Siân Gaetano for children's and YA titles.
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