by Cindy House
Mother Noise, Cindy House's "graphic narrative piece," is an unexpectedly uplifting memoir that tells the story of House's heroin addiction, 20 years of recovery and the anxiety over sharing her past with her son.
This collection of more than 20 nonlinear essays, interspersed with whimsical drawings, begins when House's son, Atlas, is nine years old. House reflects: "It is only now that I am thinking of how to tell him about my past that I realize how much danger I was in back then." Her honest narration
Read More »
by David Yoon
For those who think every post-apocalyptic novel is the same, City of Orange by David Yoon (Version Zero; Super Fake Love Song) argues otherwise. The opening is familiar: man wakes up in a desolate nowhere and can't remember his name or the traumas preceding this moment. But Yoon refuses to follow the typical script, taking readers on an often funny and always compelling journey through the mystery man's past, an alternative present and the uncertain future.
The novel begins in 2010 in California, all concrete
Read More »
by Lindsay Eagar
In the spectacular middle-grade novel The Patron Thief of Bread, an eight-year-old girl called Duck wages an internal battle over her loyalties. Are the Crowns, a ragtag band of orphans who roam the streets relieving townspeople of their pocket change, her family? Or does she belong with the kind "behemoth baker" to whom she is fake-apprenticed to keep the orphans in bread and coin?
Duck, "a pale and grimy girl with dull hair," and the Crowns move from "alleyway to bridge to lodge," always on the lookout for
Read More »
by Alex Andriesse, editor
Elizabeth Hardwick's popularity never matched the enormous regard critics had for her during her life. However, thanks to a string of publications following her death in 2007, the word is out. The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, edited by Alex Andriesse, makes a fine companion to her Collected Essays, selected by Darryl Pinckney and published in 2017.
Featuring 35 essays, this anthology covers everything from headline news, such as the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal ("Head over Heels") and the O.J. Simpson
Read More »
by Michael Eric Dyson, Marc Favreau
Michael Eric Dyson, author of The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America, explodes onto the YA scene with co-writer Marc Favreau (Crash: The Great Depression and the Fall and Rise of America) in a potent and weighty collection of stories that demonstrate the ubiquity of racial inequality in the United States. With each unsettling case of racial disparity, the authors also introduce their teen audience to freedom-fighting Black Americans determined to bend the arc of the moral universe
Read More »
by Ashlee Latimer, illus. by Shahrzad Maydani
In this warm and appealing picture book by debut author Ashlee Latimer, with art by Poetree illustrator Shahrzad Maydani, word-loving Francis faces classroom unkindnesses in a way that may encourage young readers.
Pig-tailed, rosy-cheeked, brown-skinned Francis loves words. And she loves Tuesdays because that's the day Mr. Prewett asks a student to pick a letter. It's Francis's turn and she is ready to choose the letter "P." But first the class reviews letters already chosen: "A is for antelope... R is for
Read More »
