The guest speaker at the opening press conference of the Frankfurt Book Fair was Mohsin Hamid, author most recently of The Last White Man, who presented a simultaneously dispiriting and hopeful outline of global civilization, which, he said, "is entering what seems like a period of darkness."

He recalled feeling as a child that "the world would keep getting better," and that for many decades he remained positive as he lived variously in the U.S., U.K. and Pakistan. Among the achievements he cited: people landing on the moon, the end of the Pakistani dictatorship, the end of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, growing economic prosperity, the tech revolution, including the introduction of e-mail and the Internet.

Mohsin Hamid speaking at Frankfurt yesterday.

And after the turn of the century, despite "wars and genocides" and "an emerging sense that fossil fuels might be a problem," even through the election of Donald Trump, Brexit, Pakistan's rolling back of civil liberties and press freedom, and "the shockingly rapid retreat of glaciers in the Himalayas," there was nothing that "technology and democracy and the market could not eventually solve."

Not until "sometime around 2020, as the Covid pandemic came, and it was every country for itself, and borders closed, and there were no flights in or out of Pakistan for many weeks, and schools and offices were shut, and driving around was restricted, and the stars came out again at night, because the pollution had receded, and bees and butterflies and birds were everywhere, and my city of twelve million people was quiet, I could no longer force myself to believe, and I found that my faith in inevitable improvement was gone." Instead he said, he had feelings "of confusion and of loss," feelings that were shared by many of his friends. 

He also noted that younger people have told him they never believed things would get better. "For them it seemed instead that it was getting worse. Their parents might have grown up in a less troubled era. But for their own generation the task was just to do the best they could in the face of mounting uncertainty and anxiety."

At first, he thought he had been positive for so long because there was always "a clear formula for progress: the formula of democracy plus science plus economics." But then he came to believe that the basis of his optimism was simply "the irresistibility of cooperation." But currently cooperation is not happening, and "without cooperation we cannot tackle challenges like climate change, inequality, migration, disease, weapons of mass destruction. And yet we seem determined to cooperate less and less. Our world is fracturing into mutually suspicious nations and clans and tribes."

This new lack of cooperation and connection is more dangerous than at any other period in human history because "we are vastly more powerful. The harm we can do to one another, and to our planet, is unprecedented in its scope and complexity."

He then said that "the future of humanity is shaped by the stories we choose to believe in." While TV and film offer passive experiences to their "viewers," books are different. "When we open a book, we encounter letters and punctuation marks against a white field. It is we who then create in our imagination people and places and sights and sounds. The reader of a book is not a viewer. Readers are creators, inspired by the source code of the text they hold in their hands."

Reading literature involves something like the kind of imaginative play most children engage in but that adults avoid. "The very idea [of playing] seems, somehow, to embarrass us. Except when we are alone, that is, and we pick up a book, and we give ourselves permission to play in our imagination with another person, a person we do not know and who is not there, a writer."

Novels are crucial to the future of the planet, Hamid said, "not only because they tell us stories of people who are different from us, and allow us to empathize, and encourage us to blur the boundaries between one group and another. No, novels are also important because of their form, because writing and reading a book is itself a profound and hopeful act of cooperation. Novels emanate from our desire for the fertility that arises when we remember that it is we who imagine ourselves and our world into existence, that we are jointly the authors of what we call reality, and that we can choose to author differently. In a world that seems to be entering into a time of darkness, novels are embers that we cup in our hands, embers of potential."

He added that "reading a book is almost like meditating... if you haven't read a book in a while, you think it's hard because you keep thinking about something else." The technology of the book means "you can't click on anything. You can't go anywhere else." Most other technology is harmful because it attempts to monetize users' attention, and it gets attention most effectively by projecting and portraying threats. As a result, people are "tremendously distracted" and "the continuous onslaught of threats" creates huge amounts of anxiety and leaves people "paralyzed and hateful and polarized."

On the other hand, "Books are quite different because they allow us to re-engage with sustained attention and to be directing our own attention."

Although he admitted he didn't know how it could be done, Hamid hopes that technology can be changed to "restore to readers--to human beings--an ability to be the authors of where they direct their attention." People should stop allowing their attention to be directed "for us, from one threat to the next, from one distraction to the next." Technology should be changed from something "authored on us to something we can author with," something to make us "better readers," to "make us more focused." And thus people can remake the world. --John Mutter

Books on the Bosque in progress.

Books on the Bosque hosted its grand opening last Saturday at 6261 Riverside Plaza N in Albuquerque, N.Mex. Owner Deborah Condit told the Journal that running a bookstore had been her lifelong dream. 

When she was a student at West Mesa High School, the Hastings bookstore on the West Side of the city was the place to be. "That was like, the coolest place, and only the cool kids worked there," she said. "I've always loved books and I love bookstores. When I go out of town, I find an independent bookstore to go to--or two, or three--to hang out at, you know, or to find or talk to other bookstore owners."

Although Condit has been working in government consulting since 2001 and never owned a bricks-and-mortar store before, she was looking for a new type of community engagement with Books on the Bosque: "I really wanted to do something that didn't need legislative approval... to be a part of the community and... affect community change."

Books on the Bosque will sell new and used books as well as pastries and drinks. There are games and a vinyl record player that guests can use. Condit noted that all of her employees are avid readers with their own specialties. "I have a lot of booksellers here that are really into sci-fi and horror--I'm scared of my own shadow," said Condit, who favors historical fiction.

One of her goals is to get the "next generation" of readers into the bookstore by offering an inviting space that isn't overwhelming for customers--especially new readers: "(I'm) really hoping to get young people to fall in love with books and to also have this place it's safe for them. This isn't your dad's bookstore."

She told KOB-TV: "I think there's something for everybody here. I am just really hoping that and I'm just really hoping that, if someone's not into reading, we can find the best book and maybe foster a love for reading. That's my goal."

The bookshop shared a video on Instagram yesterday, noting: "Thank you to all who came and visited us this last weekend! We made new friends and saw old ones. Your support and enthusiasm means the world and we can't wait to continue being a part of the community."

Felicia Frazier, senior v-p, children's and education sales, at Penguin Random House, is leaving at the end of the year, Jaci Updike, president, sales, Penguin Random House U.S., announced in a memo to staff. Frazier joined Random House as a national accounts manager in 1994 and has held a variety of management positions there, at Penguin, and then at Penguin Random House.

Updike wrote, "Felicia has had other big ambitions that she has dreamt about for many years, always with an aim to help others and stretch her creative skills, and she has now decided to leave book publishing, to create a project of her own."

She praised Frazier, saying in part, "She is a brilliant visionary who brings enormous passion and energy to her work every day, and as a leader, she has inspired all of us to bring our very best to everything we do. While managing the largest dedicated children's sales team, she has launched countless company initiatives that support literacy, diversity, mentorship, free expression, and voting rights, both at the local and national level. She is the true embodiment of the phrase: we change the world, one book at a time."

Updike added, "On a personal note, Felicia has been a trusted adviser and friend over the years, and it's difficult to imagine doing this without her. I'm sure you can guess how much we tried to talk her into staying, but her next endeavor (which she is not ready to announce yet) is as brilliant and innovative as she is, and if she must leave us, we will just wish her the happiest of successes."

Huluppu: A Magical Bookshop has opened at One Main St. in North Bennington, Vt. Owner Janet Sleigh had "frequently visited Vermont with her parents, who were avid skiers. From age 5, she was put on skis, but what she remembers most is the car rides," the Bennington Banner reported.

"I still, all these years later, remember when we hit Vermont... the difference when we hit the white wooden farm houses... a stream next to the car. I would wish the car would stop so I could jump out and run into the woods," said Sleigh. 

Sleigh, a shamanka (female shaman) and biodynamic craniosacral energy practitioner, hopes Huluppu will be a place of healing: "I hope it becomes more of a haven. There are a lot of people in need of love.... Wouldn't it be fun if people came and started making connections? And after Covid, getting back to understanding that community is far, far more important than a virus." 

The word Huluppu "is believed to be traced to one of the world's most ancient stories, Gilgamesh, and is thought to refer to the World Tree, which connects earth, heaven and underworld," the Banner wrote, adding: "The store is decorated with wooden antique furniture and handmade tapestries, with a range of books from Christian mysticism to shamanic healing, witchcraft and a tarot deck for everyone in the family. A cozy nook in back is designated to clubs and groups--a spiritual development group, tarot club and jewelry-making workshops."

Tarot cards are Sleigh's primary interest, but she is excited to see what the community will take an interest in as well: "Wicca and witchcraft [are] very popular. But it's actually just the next newest thing. If you look at the books on wicca and witchcraft, you've got chakras for witches. For a very long time, chakras, yoga, the Vedas and Indian philosophy have been extremely popular. But people are moving away from that... so you have 'Yoga for Witches.' " 

She also hopes to offer a book for everyone, noting that a "new generation needs something a little different from their parents.... It's not your normal bookshop. It's a mystical, magical bookshop."

Carmen Callil

Virago founder and author Carmen Callil, described by her agency RCW as "an incomparable and fiercely loyal friend who touched the hearts and lives of so many," died October 17. She was 84. The Bookseller reported that Callil, who was born in Australia but spent most of her professional life in England, "began her publishing career as a book publicist with Panther from 1967 and then worked for firms Antony Blond and Andre Deutsch. Inspired by the feminist magazine Spare Rib and deploring a lack of representation for women writers by publishers, she came up with the idea for Virago in a pub and founded the publisher in 1973. In June this year she celebrated the publisher's five decades at the British Library with a host of former colleagues and Virago authors."

"As well as an outstanding  editorial eye, she had a genius for marketing and publicity and an amazing visual sensibility--the original green spines of Virago are still prevalent today," RCW noted, adding that Callil rediscovered a host of lost women's classics including works by Willa Cather, Henry Handel Richardson, Elizabeth Taylor and Edith Wharton as well as bringing new writers to the list such as Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker and Helen Garner.

Chair of Virago Lennie Goodings said: "I am devastated that she won't be part of the 50th celebrations next year for the imprint she loved and founded to 'change the world.' Champion of women's writing, outspoken critic, wonderful friend and utterly unique human being. A genius, really. She broke the rules and created Virago and changed the view of women in power and women's writing. So, so sad. She stayed in touch long after she left us--and encouraged our publishing until her end. I can't picture a world without her careering around it. But what a life. How few of us come and change the world and she did." 

In 1982, Callil became the publisher of Chatto & Windus, where, among other accomplishments, she was the first publisher of Hilary Mantel. Clara Farmer, publishing director at Chatto & Windus, said: "Carmen's gleeful spirit and her fierce love of her books and authors contributed so much to making Chatto & Windus what it is today. Thank you Carmen--how we will miss you." 

After leaving publishing, Callil had a successful career as a writer and critic, chairing the Booker Prize in 1996 and in 1999 publishing, with co-author Colm Toibin, The Modern Library: The Best 200 Books in English Since 1950. Her other works include Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family & Fatherland (2006) and Oh Happy Day: Those Times and These Times (2020). She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010, won the FRSL Benson Medal in 2017 and in the same year was awarded a damehood.    

Bea Hemming, deputy publishing director of Jonathan Cape, noted: "We are deeply saddened to learn of the death of our author Carmen Callil. All of us in publishing, and all of us who love books, owe a debt to her publishing genius, and we are immensely proud at Cape to count her as one of our authors. She was a trailblazer, an inspiration, a lifeforce, a brilliantly determined researcher and writer, and a loyal friend. We will miss her enormously."

Baroness Gail Rebuck, writing on behalf of Penguin Random House, also paid tribute to Callil, observing, in part: "For all Carmen's many honors and prizes, from the Benson Medal in 2017 to becoming a Dame in the same year, Carmen must be remembered for her campaigning spirit and indefatigable anger and passion. She championed writers and the art of publishing, she railed against Britain's imperial past, she rooted out and exposed inequality, she campaigned against Brexit and she demonstrated against climate change. As her cancer developed and she received immunotherapy at Hammersmith Hospital, she railed against the cuts in the NHS that left her fighting over non-existent wheelchairs and she bemoaned the lack of local care in the community, acknowledging she was lucky enough to have friends who were constantly at her side and organized her care.

"But I will remember Carmen as a loyal, funny, caring, brilliant friend and mentor--a trailblazer in publishing and in life--an original spirit who will leave such a vast void in the world of books, and in the lives of all who loved her. She embodied courage and individuality and lived her life firmly by her personal ethical compass. I am sorry she did not live long enough to complete her personal memoir but the way she lived her life will light a path for generations of women to come."

National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Marianne Wiggins stopped by {pages} a bookstore in Manhattan Beach, Calif., to sign copies of her latest novel, Properties of Thirst (Simon & Schuster). Pictured: (l.-r.) Wiggins's daughter and collaborator Lara Porzak, Marianne Wiggins and Linda McLoughlin Figel, {pages} co-owner.

Oprah Winfrey has chosen Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper) as her latest Oprah's Book Club selection. 

Winfrey said: "This is the second time I've chosen one of Barbara Kingsolver's novels for my book club--22 years ago we named The Poisonwood Bible as a selection. Her latest book grabbed me from its opening lines. I so admire the way Barbara has taken the plight of a young boy and invited us on his journey through loss, the foster system, addiction, and so much more. The novel speaks to so many of our country's relevant issues, but most importantly, it's absolutely riveting. Can't wait to hear what other readers think!"

Upon hearing the news, Kingsolver noted: "Getting that call from Oprah is the highest literary prize on the planet, if you ask me. Not just because of the powerful way she connects books and readers, but because of the reader she is herself. I could barely hold it together when she described my own book to me on the phone--her appreciation of the craft, the empathy, and how it touched her personally."

On November 17, Oprah will join Kingsolver and Oprah Daily Insiders for an interactive book club gathering.

Little District Books, Washington, D.C., hosted a marriage proposal recently, and posted on Instagram: "About 2 months ago one of our customers DMed us asking if they could propose to their girlfriend in our store. After weeks of back and forth planning--picking out books for them, working with their awesome photographer (tagged), and setting up a beautiful display with flowers and personal mementos--we got to witness and capture their incredibly special moment. Thank you Rachel for giving us permission to share the incredible photos you took. And thank you to the newly engaged couple for letting us be a part of and share this moment. We couldn't be more honored and excited to be a small part of your love story."

At Macmillan Children's Publishing Group:

Morgan Kane has been promoted to director of publicity from associate director of publicity.

Elysse Villalobos has been promoted to associate marketing manager from marketing coordinator.

The Leash and the Ball by Rodaan Al Galidi, translated from the Dutch by Jonathan Reeder (World Editions).

Today:
Fresh Air: Robert Draper, author of Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind (Penguin Press, $29, 9780593300145).

Tomorrow:
Good Morning America: Becky Kennedy, author of Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be (Harper Wave, $28.99, 9780063159488).

Drew Barrymore Show: Ralph Macchio, author of Waxing On: The Karate Kid and Me (Dutton, $28, 9780593185834).

The View: April Ryan, author of Black Women Will Save the World: An Anthem (Amistad, $27.99, 9780063210196).

Late Show with Stephen Colbert repeat: Anderson Cooper, co-author of Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty (Harper Paperbacks, $18.99, 9780062964625).

Anthony Ramos (Hamilton, In the Heights), Vincent D'Onofrio (The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Lift) and Dane DeHaan (Oppenheimer, The Staircase) have been added to the ensemble for Sony and Black Bear Pictures' Dumb Money, a film adaptation of Ben Mezrich's book The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees, Deadline reported. They join a cast that includes Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Sebastian Stan and Pete Davidson.

Directed by Craig Gillespie, the project's script is by Rebecca Angelo & Lauren Schuker Blum. Ryder Picture Company's Aaron Ryder, Black Bear's Teddy Schwarzman and Gillespie will produce. Principal photography is currently underway.

City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism by Abram C. Van Engen has won Yale University Press's $5,000 Pelikan Award, which is given every other year to "a distinguished book on religion published by the Press in the previous two years."

Jennifer Banks, Yale University Press's senior executive editor in religion and the humanities, said judges found the winning book "a remarkable piece of scholarship, a beautifully written historical narrative, and a deeply researched investigation with important contemporary relevance. They admired the book's originality and praised its careful attention to a crucial, overlooked piece of American political and religious history."

--

What Would Nature Do? A Guide for Our Uncertain Times by Ruth DeFries has won the $10,000 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award, given to "the Columbia University faculty member whose book published by the Press in the two years prior brings the highest distinction to Columbia University and Columbia University Press for its outstanding contribution to academic and public discourse."

Reinhold Martin's Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University was runner-up.

 Professor Adam Reich, chair of the jury, said, "DeFries weaves together a highly readable book that approaches our contemporary complex, and potentially failing, society with a spirit of curiosity and pragmatism. Rather than using natural sciences to tell us why our social world can't be changed, she uses the natural world as a source of inspiration for how we might get out of the various muddles we've gotten ourselves into."

photo: Alex Servello

Joe Vallese coedited What's Your Exit? A Literary Detour Through New Jersey. A Pushcart Prize finalist and notable in Best American Essays, his creative and pop culture writing has appeared in Bomb, Vice, Backstage, North American Review, Southeast Review and Popmatters. He is clinical associate professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. Vallese is editor of the anthology It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (Feminist Press), which includes essays from 25 queer writers probing such films as The Ring and Jaws.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

Through the lens of horror, queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified and illuminated their own experiences.

On your nightstand now:

I'm reading Joseph Osmundson's Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between, a beautiful and haunting hybrid text that dramatizes the structures, cycles and evolutions of viruses in ways that laypeople can really grasp, visualize and meditate on. Osmundson wrote it in the darkest days of the Covid-19 pandemic and draws striking parallels to the early days of HIV and how decimated queer communities and cultures have been rebuilt and reimagined as a result. It's taking me a while to get through it because I find myself holding my breath as I read and needing to take breaks from it. 

Favorite book when you were a child:

I had such eclectic taste as a young reader and that remains true today. I was in love with Judy Blume as a kid, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing in particular. I also found the humor of Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar to be satisfyingly dark. And then I'd go and pick up something completely inappropriate like William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist or Stephen King's Misery because--perhaps also inappropriately; sorry for outing you, Mom and Dad--I was completely addicted to horror from a young age and always wanted to read the books those movies were based on. I also had a real penchant for those novelizations of horror movies they used to release, sometimes before the movie itself was even in theaters. I remember 1992 being a particularly fruitful year for me in that respect: Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Candyman, Alien 3. I didn't realize that Single White Female, however, was actually a tie-in with the original John Lutz novel SWF Seeks Same, which is absolutely bonkers and very, very different from the Barbet Schroeder film.

Your top five authors:

Oh, this is tough, but I'll give it a try. Even though my heart was broken a little bit when I did a master's thesis on the heavy hand of Gordon Lish in his work, I'm still very much a disciple of Raymond Carver.

Discovering David Leavitt's stories as a newly out of the closet gay man in my early 20s left a considerable imprint on me.

I've yet to find a single sentence by Alexander Chee that I'm not completely in love with.

I stumbled upon the late Laurie Colwin's novels in college and, even though--or perhaps, because--the characters and the plots feel so far from my own life and experience, I'm still so taken with the brightness, wit and optimism in her work.

Torrey Peters's debut, Detransition, Baby, is definitely my favorite novel in recent memory. I so love its unapologetically queer and trans spin on the '90s Jennifer Aniston pregnancy-induced love-triangle romcom that I can pretty safely predict Peters will be a favorite of mine for years to come.

Book you've faked reading:

Anna Karenina. For some reason it seemed like something I needed to check off my list but every time I attempted it, I just checked out. 

Book you're an evangelist for:

Wonder When You'll Miss Me by the late Amanda Davis. I'm not a big re-reader aside from texts I teach, but the first time I read this novel, I had to stop and re-read paragraphs, and then pages, and then full chapters before I could move forward. It's a disservice to the reader to say too much about it, but it's part rape revenge fantasy, part bildungsroman. It's one of those books that makes you wonder, as a writer, if you'll ever be able to craft something as inventive and pitch-perfect and if you should even try. That said, if a film producer happens to be reading this, I volunteer to write the film adaptation for scale.

Book you've bought for the cover:

I'm obsessed with those '80s Vintage Contemporaries paperback covers and have to resist the urge to buy them blindly on eBay because, more often than not, the stories inside don't really match the tone of the cover art. More recently, I decided to give Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life a try because I loved the cheeky, provocative way it uses Peter Hujar's "Orgasmic Man" and it seemed to complement the book's heft. My feelings about the novel that lives in between the front and back covers, well, that's more complicated.

Book you hid from your parents:

Like a lot of closeted gay boys, I mostly hid anything that had been declared "for girls," like the Baby-Sitters Club or Nancy Drew. Our town library had a very detached, all-business, older German woman as its librarian, and she thankfully never batted an eye.

Book that changed your life:

Speaking of amazing covers! It was, collectively, hands down R.L. Stine's early Fear Street novels. As an aspiring writer who was obsessed with horror movies in part because of my deep, complicated sense of queer kinship with the "final girl," I felt particularly seen by the Fear Street series. The template the books provided also felt, respectfully, like something I could realistically achieve myself--early lessons in "craft," if you will. In fact, when I had the flu one summer when I was 10 or 11, I used my dad's old grad school typewriter and wrote my own full-length Fear Street entry. It wasn't half bad.

Favorite line from a book:

My favorite line of prose is actually from a personal essay by Judy Ruiz called "Oranges and Sweet Sister Boy":

"My self is wet and small. But it is not dark. Sometimes, if no one touches me, I will die."

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

André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name. I didn't have any expectations or any interest, really--it was a few years before the film gave it new life--but it grabbed me in a way few novels had before or have since. I'd love to Men in Black myself, forget everything about it, and then open it again for the very first time.

Writer you'd like to switch places with:

Stephen King and I share a birthday, which was very exciting to learn when I was a kid, as I'd been devouring his novels since around the fourth grade. I thought it was fated, of course, that I'd be the second coming of King, but unfortunately, I just can't write as quickly or prolifically as he can. In the original, twisted ideas department, though, I think I could hold my own.

For many adult readers, Will We Always Hold Hands? will awaken a comparison with Margaret Wise Brown's The Runaway Bunny. Both picture books are powered by a dialogue between two animals, one with a barrage of questions designed to establish the extent of the other's devotion. But with Will We Always Hold Hands?, author Christopher Cheng (One Tree) and illustrator Stephen Michael King (You: A Story of Love and Friendship) introduce a daring degree of complexity by acknowledging that there are limits to the power of unconditional love.

Pocket-size gray Rat and potbellied panda Bear are enjoying a nature walk when the former asks the latter, "Will we always hold hands like this, even when we are old and wrinkly.../ ...and tottering up this hill?" Bear's reply is swift: "Of course we will... As long as you hold mine when my fur turns gray and starts to fall out. I'll even hold your tail so you don't trip over it." Rat has a follow-up: "Will you hold my hand as you read spooky, scary stories?" Bear's reply: "Of course I will... As long as you turn the pages." On it goes, with Bear promising Rat unceasing hand-holding (read: loyalty), even in the unlikely event that, as Rat puts it, "I do something really, really bad."

Bear's answers flow easily until Rat asks a doozy: "What if I have to leave and go somewhere you can't come?"--a question that can be interpreted logistically or existentially. When Bear's answer arrives, it's well considered and truthful, and it may prove comforting to readers who have experience with loss.

For almost every one of Rat's what-ifs, the strolling friends are in fresh surroundings: on a tree branch, in a little boat and so on. King worked in pencil, watercolor and ink to create the art, whose airiness ensures the foregrounding of the story's tender nucleus. Nevertheless, the layouts are spiked with enough particularizing flourishes--Rat's teeny-tiny glasses, each animal's trusty umbrella--to please keen-eyed readers, who may notice that seasons change as the friends' conversation proceeds. By the end of Will We Always Hold Hands?, their journey has apparently taken a year, but as with any outing with a good buddy, it seems to have happened in no time at all. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author

Shelf Talker: This tender and daring picture book, centered on a rat's effort to gauge the extent of a bear friend's devotion, acknowledges that there are limits to the power of unconditional love.