by Shelly Jay Shore
Shelly Jay Shore's debut novel is a triumph--the literary manifestation of an embrace that makes you feel safe enough to break down. Rules for Ghosting is a story of queer healing, and the kind of unflinching love that can pull a person through seemingly insurmountable turmoil.
Ezra Friedman grew up around death at the Chapel, his family's funeral home. Unlike his family, though, he can see the silent ghosts who hang around. He became a birth doula to get away from death and to avoid the disapproval of his
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by Amy Reading
Amy Reading's The World She Edited: Katharine S. White at the New Yorker is the kind of assiduously researched benchmark book that will get its share of nominations when awards for biography are being considered. It deserves to win at least some of them, and maybe all of them.
Katharine Sergeant White (1892-1977) was raised comfortably in Massachusetts and attended Bryn Mawr College, where she coedited the college's literary monthly. She was hired by the New Yorker in 1925, when the humor magazine, as it was
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by Jen Wang
Jen Wang (Stargazing; The Prince and the Dressmaker) shows just how creative and versatile an artist she is in Ash's Cabin, a graphic novel featuring a teen who seeks self, ancestry, and home in the California wilderness.
Fifteen-year-old Ash had a special relationship with Grandpa Edwin, who lived on a rural ranch near Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Edwin was "resourceful but odd" and spoke of "building a secret cabin where no one could find him." When Edwin started losing his memory, Ash's parents moved
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by Danzy Senna
Each of Danzy Senna's books, including her remarkable 1998 debut, Caucasia, have spotlighted biracial identity. "Biracial," however, isn't the preferred term in the novel Colored Television; "mulatto" is "better" because "biracial could be any old thing. Korean and Panamanian or Chinese and Egyptian. But mulatto is always specifically a mulatto."
Senna presents a peripatetic Los Angeles family quartet: Jane and Lenny and their two kids. Jane is a writer toiling over her sophomore title; nine years
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by Joonas Sildre, trans. by Adam Cullen
Arvo Pärt is arguably the most performed living composer in the world. Estonian cartoonist Joonas Sildre worked closely with his renowned compatriot to create Between Two Sounds, a gorgeous graphic title depicting Pärt's life, from his 1935 birth to his musical transformations. Sildre's meticulous, borderless panels--in black, white, and shades of greenish-grey--are accompanied by Adam Cullen's succinct, lucid translation from the Estonian.
Pärt's mother places him in a children's music
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by Kyo Maclear, illus. by Gracey Zhang
Author Kyo Maclear (The Liszts) and artist Gracey Zhang (Lala's Words) collaborate once again (following The Big Bath House) for the delectably charming picture book Noodles on a Bicycle. "When the deliverymen set off in the morning, we sit outside and watch," the story opens. A mother, four children, and their kitty are all smiles as the cyclist glides by, laden with bowls, boxes, and trays. The destination? The nearby Old Sobaya noodle shop, where, since dawn, the chef has been "cutting noodles from buckwheat
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by Violet Duncan
In Violet Duncan's first work of middle-grade fiction, Buffalo Dreamer, the Plains Cree and Taino from Kehewin Cree Nation author, performer, and educator tells an intimate and absorbing story of an Indigenous girl encountering hard truths.
Twelve-year-old Summer usually spends her summers on the Cree reservation in Alberta, Canada, where her mother's family lives. She hangs out with her favorite cousin, Autumn, picks berries with her kokom (grandmother), and braids sweetgrass with her mother. This season,
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by Beth Lincoln, illus. by Claire Powell
Shenanigan Swift flits across the English Channel for a theatrical adventure with French relatives in The Swifts: A Gallery of Rogues, Beth Lincoln's quick-witted, eccentric, and wholly satisfying sequel to her celebrated debut, The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels, paired once again with the delightfully dramatic illustrations of Claire Powell (Octopants).
Having survived a tumultuous family reunion and nabbed a murderer in their midst, Shenanigan refocuses on finding the fabled lost treasure in their family's
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