Last week, the American Booksellers Association made the slide deck from its ICE and Bookstores panel at Winter Institute 2026 available on Bookweb.org, along with some key takeaways. 

As the panel was not recorded and press were asked not to attend, Shelf Awareness has talked with two of the booksellers who appeared on the panel--Emily Russo, co-owner of Print: A Bookstore in Portland, Maine, and Stephanie Kitchen, owner of City Lit Books in Chicago, Ill.--for some additional insights.

It should be noted that neither Russo nor Kitchen are lawyers, and remarks below should not be taken as legal advice.

A major point of emphasis for the panel was the importance of preparation and "making a plan before things escalate," said Kitchen. This includes making safety plans, gathering information, and training staff on what to say and do if ICE agents attempt to enter the store. 

Areas in-store where customers are not allowed should be marked with signs saying "Private Area" rather than simply "Staff Only," Russo noted, as ICE is not supposed to enter an area marked private without a judicial warrant. Russo also encouraged booksellers to familiarize themselves with what a judicial warrant looks like in their state.

Stephanie Kitchen

Booksellers could also put signs on their front door saying, "ICE Is Not Welcome Here Without a Judicial Warrant," though stores may wish to avoid doing so if there is a risk of reprisal for being outspoken. Both Russo and Kitchen have stores in progressive cities; booksellers in purple or conservative areas may reconsider. Booksellers who are members of vulnerable groups may also not feel comfortable doing so due to the fear of being targeted. 

"You don't have to do anything except to do the best that you can," Kitchen remarked. "If you don't feel safe doing it, don't put up the sign."

Bookstore owners should be aware of the possibility of I-9 audits and have Employment Eligibility Verification forms ready and in a safe space. It is important to remember that employers do not have to respond to I-9 audits immediately--legally, they have three days to comply. "You do not have to hand that paperwork over at the time of request," said Russo. "Acknowledge the request, state that you know you have three days to comply, and seek legal counsel."

Emily Russo

When it comes to preparing staff for potential encounters with ICE, Russo suggested training staff to say at most: "I will not be answering any questions. You need to speak with my employer." After that, booksellers should call their state's ACLU chapter for further assistance; that number, and numbers for any relevant hotlines, should be behind the counter in a place that is easy to find. Booksellers can also sign their staff up for de-escalation training. 

Kitchen also mentioned making the staff's emergency contact information accessible to people other than ownership. As an owner herself, Kitchen said, she has all of that information in her files, but in the event of a worst-case scenario, "what if something happens to me or I'm not there?"

Asked about resources that proved helpful, Russo pointed to a guide put together by the National Employment Law Project and National Immigration Center on what to do if immigration comes to your workplace. She also brought up a Know Your Rights guide from the Immigration Defense Project; though it focuses more on homes and residences, Russo said, it was still "very valuable." Kitchen said she made use of a similar guide from the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant & Refugee Rights and advised booksellers to look for resources shared by organizations in their state. 

Networking and sharing information with other local businesses and community members can also be helpful. Signal, the encrypted messaging app, can be used to keep communications secure. Kitchen recalled that during the peak of ICE activity in Chicago, there were community members keeping tabs on ICE's movements, volunteers making and handing out whistle kits, and people "coming together in the hardest times."

On the subject of supporting staff in difficult times, they stressed keeping an open dialogue with staff members and being mindful of their comfort levels. Not everyone will feel comfortable recording ICE agents, for example, and some people may not feel comfortable commuting during periods of increased ICE activity. Some options include paying for rideshares for staff members, and having staff members work from home or do tasks that limit time on the sales floor.

"What I found was that staff wanted to be together in the store during the height of all this," Kitchen said.

It was also important to be understanding and empathetic with staff. Owners and managers should encourage booksellers to use paid time off, take advantage of government programs like the Family and Medical Leave Act, or take longer breaks. They should recognize too that when stress is high, there is a greater chance of people being late and making mistakes. 

"Give as much grace as humanly possible," Russo said. "Be gentle with yourself." --Alex Mutter

The Checkered Shelf Bookshop, which had its soft opening earlier this winter, will host a grand opening celebration on April 10 and 11 at 12419 Cedar Road in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Cleveland Scene reported that the new bookstore is located in the space formerly occupied by Appletree Books, which closed last May.
 
Owner Mary Pat Jolivette said she wants her store to be an epicenter of experience: "I don't want this store to feel like, 'Oh, I'm running an errand and grabbing this book. I want this to feel like I'm coming in, it's comfortable, it's inviting. I want people to come in and spend a half hour in here."

The Checkered Shelf has installed new furniture, including bean bag chairs in the YA loft. Jolivette hopes to host readings and clubs, from crocheting circles to touring poets. The store will also be open until 9 p.m., four hours later than her predecessor in the space. "I feel like it makes this area more of a destination spot," she noted. "You can come in, spend three hours here, get a good meal, get a nice cocktail, then have a space to go after."

The bookshop offers a wide range of curated selections, new paperbacks and hardcovers, literary fiction bestsellers, and deluxe editions of classics and children's favorites, Cleveland Scene wrote, adding that Checkered "will truly be a family passion project. Two of Jolivette's six children, who were raised immersed in books nearby on Scarborough Road, will help run the store in the future."

Jolivette's goal is to keep the tradition Appletree built long into the future: "The long term model here is just connection. You have to create a space where people feel connected, connected to each other and a place people want to support and want to keep alive in the community."

Tabletop Bookshelf, a tabletop gaming store that specializes in solo journaling games and features indie books and zines, held its grand opening celebration last month at 34 W Pittsburgh Ave. in Milwaukee, Wis. OnMilwaukee reported that owner Tom Gibes "had an inkling that his indie bookshop and gaming lounge... was creating buzz, but the turnout for the grand opening on Saturday exceeded his hopes."

"I was definitely surprised. I had some indication that people were interested, but I didn't expect to see 100 people in line," he said, adding Tabletop Bookshelf is "not quite a bookstore and not quite a game store. It’s a little bit of both mushed together."

The shop has community space for group game playing and events, but it focuses on solo games and solo journaling games. The store also sells gift items, plushies, classic card games, tarot cards, snacks, and beverages.

Although he played Dungeons & Dragons in college, Gibes was not a gamer while pursuing a career in retail and technology, OnMilwaukee noted. During the Covid shutdown, however, he returned to tabletop gaming and was inspired by the talents of indie writers, designers, and game creators.

"There are so many interesting writers and designers outside of Dungeons & Dragons," he noted. "Nothing against D&D, of course."

Although he originally launched Tabletop Bookshelf online, he noticed that people really wanted more opportunities to come together as a community: "There's definitely a desire for physical games and getting together to play them in person. This is not just a shop, but a place for people to connect and create together."

Mira Braneck is a bookseller and writer. Currently the receiving manager and Books to Prisoners Program coordinator at A Room of One's Own, Madison, Wis., she previously sold books at Prairie Lights in Iowa City, Iowa, and interned at The Paris Review. A recipient of a Books Across Borders fellowship, Braneck attended the London Book Fair in March. Below is her report from the fair.

Mira Braneck (l.) with Pierce Alquist.

Just one short week after attending my first Winter Institute, I found myself England-bound, en route to the London Book Fair. As the first Books Across Borders' fellows to attend the LBF, my compatriot Pierce Alquist and I considered ourselves to be the unofficial test run. Shelf Awareness gets the scoop: our attendance was an overwhelming success.

The London Book Fair is a major international publishing industry trade fair. Unlike the Frankfurt Book Fair (which is open to the public several days, and is, I learned, five times the size of what I encountered in London), the LBF is exclusively for industry professionals. Booksellers are not the primary audience nor attendees for these types of international book fairs, which tend to cater to publishers and those in rights acquisition. That said, Books Across Borders recognizes the vital role that booksellers play in promoting international literature here in the States and thus sponsors their attendance to further connect booksellers to the international book world. As a bookseller and reader with a passion for literature in translation, I was eager to meet with publishers from all over the world and hear from the presses that are working on the cutting edge of translated fiction. 

I knew the fair would be hectic, but I think I underestimated just how large it would be, drawing 33,000 visitors over three days. At this deeply international fair in a deeply international city, people from all over the world were in attendance. The air was electric with the sense of deals being made: people shaking hands, running to meetings, and taking calls over smoke breaks outside. Imagine Winter Institute on steroids--then multiply that by a hundred and put everyone in a suit.

We were hosted by the Booksellers Association (the U.K. and Ireland's version of the ABA), which held two days of bookseller-specific programming in a small room separate from the rest of the fair. The BA's room was a welcome reprieve from the general frenzy; inside we were met with tea, sales pitches, and general camaraderie. I was pleased to learn that British booksellers are just as friendly as those stateside.

Some things, like sludgy conference coffee and bookish totes, appear to be universal. During publisher pitches, I heard the usual romantasy pitches, "weird girl lit" classifications, and Moshfegh, Mandel, and Ferrante comps. I did learn, however, that just as the more mundane aspects of bookselling (handsells, the Christmas retail season, etc.) transcend continents, so too do the more pressing preoccupations of our distinct industry: the American political situation, the rise of fascism, saving democracy and the dangers of AI were all at the front of everyone's mind.

As part of the BA's programming, Pierce and I were scheduled to co-lead a talk, "Bookselling in America," moderated by the inimitable Nic Bottomley of Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights, Bath's exceptional indie bookstore. I'd expected our audience to be curious, wary, and concerned--and we were met with that exactly. What is it like to sell books while masked federal agents arrest and disappear our neighbors in the street? How does it feel to operate important cultural spaces that are major flashpoints in the culture wars? What are the logistics of navigating our government's famously increasing censorship efforts?

A Room of One's Own, where I am the receiving manager and Books to Prisoners Program coordinator, occupies a very particular space in this current sociopolitical moment. We are a 51-year-old feminist bookstore. We are queer- and trans-owned and largely operated. We are adamantly and ardently abolitionist, leftist, and anti-genocide. We dream of seeing liberation in our lifetime. If you are at all familiar with our store, you know that we are an inherently and pointedly political space.

When Pierce and I described the work we, and many other booksellers across the United States, are doing--offering space to organizers, handing out whistles, running mutual aid fundraisers--you could see the U.K. booksellers' concern and shock. Someone came up to us after and said, kindly and a bit incredulously, that she couldn't do what we do. She doesn't have the energy. To her, and anyone with this (very understandable!) feeling, I say: you will do what you have to do when you have to do it. And, odds are, you will have to, as most of the Western world swings right and continues to elect far-right governments.

I sometimes forget just how steeped in our own context we are. British booksellers talked about a noticeably sharper sense of tension and polarization on recent trips to the States. The notion of ever-present firearms came up multiple times--something I often forget is not the norm elsewhere, and not a factor people have to take into account when hosting events or operating in a public-facing industry like retail. What begins to feel normal--clashes with aggressive customers, concern about event safety, the ever-present threat of censorship--is not the norm everywhere. Talking to these booksellers was a good reminder that the social tension within which we're simmering is real, increasingly difficult, and abnormal.

Things weren't all doom and gloom. I attended a talk with Sylvia Whitman, owner of the famed Shakespeare & Company in Paris, who ferried her father's bookshop into the 21st century. Her conversation, featuring shop poltergeists, William Burroughs, and the joys and frustrations of hosting a robust events series, was truly a treat. As a devout small press reader, I loved meeting with the indie publishers who put out some of my favorite books in translation. As a nerdy bookseller who loves shop-talk, I enjoyed talking about the ins and outs of American distribution. I even took the Tube out to the new Fitzcarraldo offices, where I was met with a big, sunny room, the familiar white and blue aesthetic, and a bag of books. I am happy to report that amidst all the social upheaval, literary fiction lives on.

The best part of the LBF was talking to other booksellers at a pub after the day's end, as is often the case (while Winter Institute's panels and rep picks are informative and invigorating, I think I'm not alone in saying that the author dinners and parties are perhaps the most memorable aspects of the affair). I met booksellers from other radical shops, and even visited Common Press in Shoreditch, which I would count as Room's unofficial sibling store (if you've been to both, you'll see the similarities). It was fantastic and heartening to get into the nitty-gritty with booksellers from the U.K., and see how resonant our work is. The U.K. is shifting right, too, and experiencing a wave of anti-trans and -immigrant sentiment. I found it heartening to talk to booksellers who are at the forefront of the work in their communities in the fight against this hateful moment.

All in all, my trip to London was incredibly invigorating. To the American booksellers reading this, know that we have international support in the work we're doing. Our friends across the pond see what we're up against, and they salute us.

This past week, Shelf Awareness sent our monthly pre-order e-blast to almost 940,000 of the country's best book readers. The e-blast went to 939,546 customers of 280 participating independent bookstores.

The mailing features 11 upcoming titles selected by Shelf Awareness editors and a sponsored title. Customers can buy these books via "pre-order" buttons that lead directly to the purchase page for the title on each sending store's website. A key feature is that bookstore partners can easily change title selections to best reflect the tastes of their customers and can customize the mailing with links, images, and promotional copy of their own.

The pre-order e-blasts are sent the last Wednesday of each month; the next will go out on Wednesday, April 29. Stores interested in learning more can visit our program registration page or contact our partner program team via e-mail.

For a sample of the March pre-order e-blast, see this one from The Brown Dog Bookshop, Kennesaw, Ga.

The titles highlighted in the pre-order e-blast were:

On Witness and Respair: Essays by Jesmyn Ward (Scribner)
John of John by Douglas Stuart (Grove)
Enormous Wings by Laurie Frankel (Holt)
The Land and Its People: Essays by David Sedaris (Little, Brown)
The Midnight Train by Matt Haig (Viking)
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)
American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed by Isaac Fitzgerald (Knopf)
Seek the Traitor's Son by Veronica Roth (Tor)
Ironwood by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)

Nineteen new and prospective booksellers from 12 states gathered at Story & Song Bookstore Bistro, Fernandina Beach, Fla., to learn about the business side of retail bookselling from trainers Mark Kaufman and Donna Paz Kaufman (front, center) of the Bookstore Training Group of Paz & Associates. For details on bookseller training, visit OpeningABookstore.com.

Congratulations to Sunshine Book Co. in Clermont, Fla., which is celebrating its fifth anniversary this month. In a Facebook post, the bookseller wrote: "How is it we're at this milestone?? Our 'what if' became a reality when we opened the doors to this beautiful and historical house April 2021. What a life we've created with this little bookstore here in South Lake County! Y'all have been the very BEST, more than we could have imagined. 

"Many thanks to the family and friends who helped us get this off the ground. Thank you to the new friends we've made along the way. Thank you to the support from the South Lake Chamber of Commerce, Clermont Main Street, the ABA and SIBA, for guiding and teaching. Thank you to the schools, businesses, and organizations that have trusted us in so many ways. Thank you to the vendors and authors who have shared your stories and creations. 

"We look forward to many more ways to serve, and many more years of being YOUR independent bookstore! Keep an eye out all month as we share ways to express our gratitude to you, our readers and bookish friends. Cheers to 5 years!"

Bright Side Books in Flagstaff, Ariz., posted an Instagram reel exploring options for "when the shop gets busy you have to find creative ways to sneak past your coworkers."

"New window art outside our front door courtesy of @_bog_art_ !! Come snap a springtime selfie with it and tag us in your posts!" Morgenstern Books, Bloomington, Ind., posted on Instagram.

Tomorrow:
Today: Arthur C. Brooks, author of The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness (Portfolio, $30, 9780593545423). 

Also on Today: Arsenio Hall, author of Arsenio: A Memoir (Atria/Black Privilege Publishing, $28.99, 9781982191368).

Good Morning America: Billy Ray, author of Burn the Water (Scholastic, $19.99, 9798225006747).

Drew Barrymore Show: Andrew McCarthy, author of Who Needs Friends: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America (Grand Central, $29, 9781538768945).

Tamron Hall: Kat Ashmore, author of Big Bites: Time to Eat!: Nourishing Family Recipes That Cook in an Hour or Less (Rodale, $35, 9780593736258).

Laura Dern will star as the award-winning journalist Julie K. Brown in the limited TV series Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story. Variety reported that Sony Pictures Television is shopping the project, which is based on the 2021 book by Brown, "who put a renewed spotlight on Epstein and his crimes."

The series is described as "an explosive account of an investigative reporter exposing the secret plea deal between Epstein and federal prosecutors. Drawing from Brown's experience as a groundbreaking reporter for the Miami Herald, the book and the limited series follow her relentless years-long investigation that identified 80 victims, persuaded key survivors to go on the record, and led to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's arrests."

Sharon Hoffman (Mrs. America, House of Cards) will adapt the book for the screen and serve as executive producer and co-showrunner alongside Eileen Myers (American Hostage, Masters of Sex). Other exec producers include Dern, Brown, Adam McKay, and Kevin Messick via Hyperobject Industries.

"Should the project find a home and go to series, which seems highly likely, it would be the first scripted series about the Epstein case," Variety noted. 

The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association has selected 67 finalists for the 2026 Christian Book Awards, honor titles in 12 book and Bible categories. Winners in each category, along with the 2026 Christian Book of the Year, will be announced April 28 at the ECPA Awards Celebration in Chicago. To see the finalists, click here.

photo: Dustin Parsons

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the poetry collection Night Owl (Ecco, March 31, 2026), which explores love, nature, and the transformative powers of the night. She is also the author of two illustrated collections of essays: Bite by Bite and World of Wonders. She is also the author of four award-winning poetry collections and spent a decade as the poetry editor for environmental magazines, first for Orion and then Sierra. Awards for her writing include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, U.S. Artist Fellows, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A professor of English and creative writing for more than 25 years, she gives firefly tours for Mississippi State Parks and lives in Oxford, Miss., with her family.

Handsell readers your book in 30 words or less:

Not your grandpa's nature writing. Here love and wonder meet under the cover of night, reminding us that attention and tenderness still exist--even in the dark.

On your nightstand now:

This lyric manifesto that is hard to slide into a genre form (my fave kinds of books), Let the Poets Govern by Camonghne Felix gives some historical background of her work on political campaigns and weaves Black writers together with her own moving personal history to help me imagine a better world for us all. Also: Words to Love a Planet--an illustrated lexicon by Ella Frances Sanders, the designer of Orion magazine. I love learning a new word each night, like gökotta, a Swedish word that means waking up at dawn to go birdwatching.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Field guides. I loved (and still do!) regional field guides to birds, wildflowers, trees, and shells, and because I was a nerd, I honestly loved reading dictionaries and encyclopedias for days, though my parents never succumbed to the door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen in the '80s. So I would sit on the floors of various childhood libraries and read about Anne Boleyn to rhinoceroses to Iceland till the lights flickered off or until my parents said it's time for dinner.

Your top five authors:

Naomi Shihab Nye, Lucille Clifton, Mary Oliver, Agha Shahid Ali, Ross Gay.

Book you've faked reading:

Nothing. There is no one on the planet I want to impress by what I have or haven't read. I have no qualms about admitting when I didn't read or couldn't get through it. But that also means, with joy for me, that there are SO many books I want to read. I honestly never understand when someone says they are bored. And I've felt like that ever since I could read as a little girl, truly.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Fireflies, Glow-worms, and Lightning Bugs by Lynn Frierson Faust is a book that gives you an inside look at my favorite insect on the planet. Lynn never talks down to you but instead it feels like your world just cracks open knowing more about the fragile magic of these insects.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Anyone who knows me knows I have a special affinity for cephalopods so when the bright orange (collage? watercolor?) octopus on the cover seemed to beckon to me with its arm, I was hooked from the get-go. Now soon it will be a Netflix series but this one you have to read first, I promise: Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt.

Book you hid from your parents:

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. by Judy Blume: I think the questioning of God's existence would have worried my parents more than mentions of menstruation or stuffing bras but now, as a mother of teen boys, that period of girlhood/cusp of teen years feels so sweet and precious, I get so nostalgic, and it reminds me of the time and work my husband and I did to cultivate an open relationship with our teens.

Book that changed your life:

Let's be honest: D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths by Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire is STILL a book that I can spend time with and linger over the soft colored pencil drawings for hours. I didn't always have the vocabulary for my reactions to the messed-up misogynist myths (Zeus and Apollo, anyone?) but I know the drawings helped me imagine alternate endings for the mythical characters. I think I was about 10 when I first encountered this book and must have checked it out of the library dozens of times, in libraries from the suburbs of Phoenix to rural Kansas, from having moved around a lot. I finally have my own copy now, and it's pretty worn out.

Favorite line from a book:

"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love." This is the opening line of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. I first read it in grad school, and it opened my eyes (and my nose) to how important the sense of smell can be in your writing.

Five books you'll never part with:

Birds of Louisiana and Mississippi: A Field Guide by Stan Tekiela: I bought this on a whim when we first moved to Mississippi, and it taught me so much beauty and how to slow down. I mean more than I already did when outdoors. Though I didn't use a single bird from it, I would never have been able to write World of Wonders without the headspace this guide gave me.

The Book of Light, first edition, by Lucille Clifton: poems that just made me feel like the top of my head was on fire. It taught me breath. And pauses in poetry.

Field Book of Ponds and Streams by Ann Haven Morgan: gifted to me by my dear pal from grad school Mark Steinwachs. He collects rare books and this is a first edition with 23 plates in color from 1930. Each color plate is covered by a near-perfect thin vellum and is just a pleasure to hold in your hand.

Signed copy of Broken Symmetry by David Citino, my beloved mentor who passed away in 2005: these poems taught me breath, and the magic of opening any page and hearing his kind voice sets me back to my early days of being a baby poet/ex-chemistry major and how these pages made me see the world and the possibility of a life in words, anew.

Exploded View by Dustin Parsons: okay full disclosure, this is by my husband, but it is signed to me and I know how hard he worked on this collection of lyric essays about making sense of fatherhood and the kind of man I hope our boys grow into.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Circe and Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. For a gal who grew up hungry for other POVs in Greek mythology (namely, the women or characters who had mentions of strong opinions or a quiet simmering force in their own right), these books are a delicious marvel. I created a new literature course on my campus just so I can teach these two books, and I love seeing the students all swoon and get heavily invested in each novel to the point where I have former students still e-mailing me their thoughts about the upcoming movie adaptation of Odyssey. Can we just cast Connor Storrie as Achilles already in whatever screen adaptation, pretty please?

Why you wanted to write about the night in this fifth collection of poems:

Night has always given me a way to reflect and contemplate the bustle of the day. Emotions "glow" differently at night, I think, and I wanted to showcase all the movement and wonder that can come from nighttime since night is all too often shown as a place for fear or worry. I wanted to showcase how night gives us a container to be our most tender, our most vulnerable.

Robert Isaacs's first novel, It's Hard to Be an Animal, is a feat of humor, yearning, adventure, angst, and romance. In following a lonely, self-doubting protagonist, this remarkable debut manages to be about all of life, in its most unlikely twists.

Readers meet Henry on a first date at a sidewalk café in Manhattan. Nervous Henry is an inveterate doormat, but he is funny and kind. His coworker Jackie has set him up with Molly, who is playful and ebullient; Henry is quite sure she's out of his league, but she likes him nevertheless. "Within the hour" of their meeting, "a migrating songbird weighing less than an ounce would upend his life." Coffee goes well, so they take a walk in Central Park, where Henry spots a magnolia warbler. The sweet, decorative little bird considers the pair, and then speaks. "Fuck off," it says clearly to Henry and then continues in a similarly foul-mouthed territorial vein. When Henry gets home to the apartment he shares with an exuberant Belarussian named Yaryk, he discovers that his housemate's two betta fish are involved in an exchange of creatively nasty insults. The situation continues with dogs, a police horse, pigeons: Henry can now hear animals talking. If that fact were not shocking enough, they all seem to be terribly angry. He questions his sanity and finds the animals' rage depressing.

Henry thinks himself a failure in all parts of his life, but readers can see that he has true friends in Yaryk and Jackie; he handles workplace dramas with aplomb, if also self-denigration; Molly's attraction to him is genuine, even as they weather miscommunications verging on the Shakespearean. Painfully conflict-averse, Henry is challenged enough by human drama; fat-shaming sparrows and judgmental pythons threaten his threadbare mental health but also offer perspective. When he overhears subway rats discussing a body-disposal site, he inadvertently lets it slip to the unusually adventurous Molly. The budding couple soon find themselves enmired in the New York City subway system and an intrigue of increasingly high stakes. And a neighbor's yappy Pomeranian turns out to be just the font of wisdom that the pushover Henry needed. In a newly cacophonous world, he may finally find his own voice.

It's Hard to Be an Animal is one laugh, dire escapade, or poignant moment away from either disaster or nirvana. Hilarious, heartfelt, ever-surprising, Henry's story is one of hope, redemption, and self-discovery. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia

Shelf Talker: The sudden ability to hear animals speak offers perspective, romance, and adventure to an awkward young man in this whimsical, tender first novel.

The following were the most popular book club books during March based on votes from book club readers in more than 94,000 book clubs registered at Bookmovement.com:

1. The Correspondent: A Novel by Virginia Evans (Crown)
2. Theo of Golden by Allen Levi (Atria)
3. The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (Doubleday)
4. Atmosphere: A Love Story by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Ballantine)
5. Wild Dark Shore: A Novel by Charlotte McConaghy (Flatiron)
6. The Book Club for Troublesome Women by Marie Bostwick (Harper Muse)
7. Project Hail Mary: A Novel by Andy Weir (Ballantine)
8. How to Read a Book by Monica Wood (Mariner)
9. Culpability by Bruce Holsinger (Spiegel & Grau)
10. Buckeye: A Novel by Patrick Ryan (Random House)

Rising Stars:
She Didn't See It Coming by Shari Lapena (Pamela Dorman Books)
A Good Animal: A Novel by Sara Mauer (St. Martin's Press)