by Jennifer Dasal
Reading The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Époque Paris is like being slipped the password to a speakeasy or directions to an exclusive art show happening in a bohemian corner of Paris. The "Club" referenced in the title was a subsidized living and social space in Paris for young American woman artists of the Belle Époque era, prior to World War I. It offered young women a space of their own where they could pursue their artistic studies, and held luxurious common spaces
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by Chris Baron
Chris Baron (The Gray) will leave readers both teary-eyed and cheering with his novel-in-verse Spark, which evokes the terror of wildfires and the hope of new growth.
Like all Californians, the residents of Redwood Hollows are intimately familiar with red-flag warnings and alerts for wildfires. They are so common that middle-school student Finn keeps track of fires by noting them in his field journal, a meticulous log of local flora and fauna. Then the alarm sounds: "LEAVE NOW-LEAVE NOW-TIME TO GO!" His family's
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by Zoe B. Wallbrook
Clever campus hijinks meet murder mystery in History Lessons, Zoe B. Wallbrook's debut novel. History Lessons follows Daphne Ouverture, the daughter of Ivorian immigrant mother and Louisiana Creole father, and a new junior professor at the prestigious Harrison University. Daphne is one of few Black people on the faculty and she specializes in French colonial history, so she's confused when she receives a strange text from Sam Taylor, a white colleague in the anthropology department with whom she's had very
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by Megan C. Reynolds
"Every woman I spoke to had a story about how someone at some point made her feel badly for saying 'like,' " writes Megan C. Reynolds in the conclusion to Like: A History of the World's Most Hated (and Misunderstood) Word, effectively summing up what she has spent the preceding pages exploring. "Like," a maligned word that's often called ungrammatical, is also an exceptionally useful filler word and multiuse modifier. Full of interesting details, humorous asides, and vindication for all the readers who
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by Megan Abbott
El Dorado Drive is another stealthy-steely triumph from Megan Abbott (You Will Know Me; Give Me Your Hand; Beware the Woman), arguably the foremost living author of feminist noir.
It's 2008, and even before the recession, the auto industry's decline was hobbling Detroit and the suburb of Grosse Pointe, where the three Bishop sisters have fallen on hard times. Pam is suing her ex-husband for raiding their kids' trust funds and doesn't know how she's going to cover her son's college tuition. Debra is putting
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by Christy Mandin
In Christy Mandin's wondrous, magical Millie Fleur Saves the Night, the follow-up to Millie Fleur's Poison Garden, young Ms. La Fae employs compassion, care, and homemade moon pies to encourage every townsperson of Garden Glen to be a "friend of the Dark."
Every evening, residents of Garden Glen deploy houselights, spotlights, and lanterns to ensure their homes and gardens are safe from the "scary" and "dangerous" dark. Not so Millie Fleur, whose moon garden wasn't growing and who "hadn't seen a single night
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by Jessixa Bagley
A young witch must learn to fly in this lovely middle-grade graphic novel featuring bouncy cartoon illustrations, lively magic, and an endearing girl finding her spark.
Jazzy is a young, brown-skinned witch with cute curls and a penchant for wearing purple. Her moms are the town broomstresses, carrying on a long tradition of handcrafting "besoms" (broomsticks). "When a witch starts flying, it's one of the most important days of their lives," Jazzy's moms tell her. But Jazzy doesn't feel like much of a witch:
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