Shelter in Place by David Leavitt (The Two Hotel Francforts) delivers a cutting view of elite white angst after the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump. Eva and Bruce Lindquist--"affluent New York liberals, not old money but not new money, either"--are hosting a dinner in their Manhattan apartment. Their guests are shocked at the election results, certainly, but Eva is beyond consolation, and attending the Women's March after inauguration isn't the solution she has in mind. "I've been thinking about it all day," she tells the group. "Where in the world is there a place where I won't even hear an echo of that cheering? And then I hit on it. Venice."

Eva's entitlement is, of course, a shield. Alec, the friend who acts as her foil, scoffs. "Does she honestly believe... that on a day-to-day basis it'll make even an iota of difference to her life?" Her friends, who (unlike her) have jobs and other concerns, are "letting Eva have our hysterics for us." There are subtle ironies, as when it's revealed Eva didn't even vote in the election she now cares so deeply about. Bruce, Eva's long-suffering husband, has been content to stay in her shadow but finds, unexpectedly, another woman with whom his own emotions take center stage.

Leavitt, using sharp social observations softened by humor, underscores the often well-meaning but impotent actions of the moneyed class. Readers looking for a contemporary plot, colorful characters and sly wit will enjoy this topical novel. --Cindy Pauldine, bookseller, the river's end bookstore, Oswego, N.Y.

Within the eight interconnected stories that make up Sari Rosenblatt's perceptive debut collection, Father Guards the Sheep, ordinary people search for a sense of belonging. In the opening "Daughter of Retail," Ellen, a girl filled with self-doubt, becomes a reluctant employee at her father's business. She realizes that surviving necessitates a certain type of invisibility: "leaving the shell behind and taking the head with you." "Miss McCool" demonstrates Rosenblatt's proficiency at weaving a common thread among stories. Ellen, now an adult, can't shake her insecurities. Although she's graduated college and lives on her own, she's still adrift: "If I dozed for a while then woke, my room seemed strange. I couldn't name things.... I didn't seem to belong to me."

The yearning for belonging continues in "The New Frontier." Joel, often ignored, and his distant father are driving home from school. He looks at "houses with lights on in every room" and their inhabitants, "looking like they belonged exactly where they were." In the title story, "Father Guards the Sheep," Esther, a grown woman who lives at home, firmly believes she belongs there. But when her mother suggests other living arrangements, Esther thinks, with a wry comment, "my mother started interfering with the experience of being with my mother," and tells a desperate lie with deep repercussions.

Rosenblatt's unclouded and often gently humorous prose, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, succeeds in showing how profound inner lives can be. Fans of big-hearted stories will savor this collection. --Cindy Pauldine, bookseller, the river's end bookstore, Oswego, N.Y.

This review should be only one sentence: it's best to start reading Aimee Molloy's clever Goodnight Beautiful knowing as little as possible. Readers should go in blind--heck, even skip this review--but if they need more convincing, here are a few more details.

Newlyweds Sam and Annie move from Manhattan to Chestnut Hill, N.Y., to take care of his ailing mother. Sam, a psychologist, starts a private business and almost right away attracts patients, partly due to a local magazine newspaper profile showing how handsome and charming he is. Then he disappears during a storm, and everything readers think they know is turned on its head.

The unreliable narrator is a familiar trope, but Molloy takes it to the next level. It's almost impossible to see the major revelations coming, and when they do, they might cause whiplash and double takes, as one tries to comprehend what just happened and flips back through pages to reread sections. Red herrings and plot manipulations are often obvious, especially to well-versed thriller readers, but Molloy pulls off sleights of hand like an expert magician. It's not all about the twists, however. With short, brisk chapters in alternating points of view, the author takes her time establishing who Sam and Annie are, delving into topics such as trust, loneliness and parental attachment. The characters in Goodnight Beautiful might be conflicted, but Molloy knows exactly what she's doing, with them and her audience. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

Alix E. Harrow (The Ten Thousand Doors of January) enters the ranks of the growing feminist witch genre with The Once and Future Witches, an expansive, angry and ultimately hopeful historical fantasy novel set in an alternate-history 1893 New Salem, 200 years after the (fictional) complete destruction of Salem.

The initially estranged Eastwood sisters represent three archetypal witches and women: the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone, though Harrow makes clear that every woman is not just one thing. Eldest sister and librarian Bella is the Crone, often found researching spells and acting as the voice of reason. Pregnant middle sister Agnes is the Mother, at times hesitant to enter or continue the fight. Much younger Juniper, half-feral and wildly optimistic, takes on the role of a warrior Maiden, murdering their abusive father and reuniting the sisters at the beginning of the novel; she is the glue that holds them together.

Harrow's world-building is intricate, and the plot is full of smaller battles and acts of rebellion, but her protagonists are complex women with clear motivations. The Once and Future Witches deals heavily with feminist themes, including women's suffrage, sexual harassment and legal oppression, but Harrow also works to broaden the scope beyond white feminism. Harrow's diverse cast of secondary characters are working toward equity in other spheres: the labor movement and unions, Black civil rights, sex work, and immigrant and LGBTQ+ experiences.

And though Harrow never pretends that change is immediate or easy, in the world she's created, witching is inside everyone, meaning that the power to effect change is within the grasp of all. --Suzanne Krohn, editor, Love in Panels

In sinister tales brimming with suspense, this slim yet potent collection of flash fiction probes humanity's dark side and the horrors born of global crises.

In Tiny Nightmares, edited by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto (coeditors of Tiny Crimes), each entry conjures a creepiness that lingers. Classic body horror and mainstays of speculative fiction chill via eerily original scenarios--a dismembered corpse is revealed by melting snow, a decaying body is willfully ignored by a partying coterie, ants carry home a vampire's severed fingers. Explorations of social and technological concerns--a horrifying solution to global warming, a rideshare passenger with unconventional luggage, a woman's (literally) haunting social media history--add a modern twist.

The frightening volume takes what is dreaded most and gives it life. It closes the gap between reality and nightmare, allowing deep-seated fears to manifest--a predatory man, a murderer on a dating app. In one particularly unsettling passage, an officer muses on how someone handcuffed in a police car could shoot themself, while footnotes reference true accounts of people of color whose deaths mirror this experience.

The 40-odd pieces span numerous subgenres, including sci-fi, occult, paranormal and even one choose-your-own-adventure. Authors vary their tones, some sardonic and deadpan, and others as apprehensive as readers will be, even as they succumb to the lure of the next page. With severely unhappy endings and unsavory imagery, Tiny Nightmares is the rare horror collection that will distress the hardest of hearts. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer

In her enormously affecting comics debut, Invisible Differences, French activist Julie Dachez introduces her autobiographical stand-in, 27-year-old Marguerite. Marguerite's daily life is most comfortable when she abides by her familiar rituals: wear soft clothes, depart for work at 7:30 a.m., grab her daily spelt roll at the same bakery en route. Any interruptions--casual conversations, too much noise, social engagements--can cause anxiety, exhaustion, immediate withdrawal. Her colleagues, her cousin, her lover seem incapable of comprehending her boundaries. Her need for "some answers" to her uncontrollable reactions eventually leads to information about Asperger's syndrome; the recognition is instant. Cautious new hope sends her on a long journey toward diagnosis, awareness and lifesaving acceptance.

With Marguerite as guide, Dachez, with a Ph.D. in social psychology, appends almost 20 pages about "What Is Autism," offering history, explanations, recommendations and resources. She finds an ideal visual partner in Mademoiselle Caroline, who initially appears on the pages as a bookseller, in whose shop Marguerite discovers a haven for information and friendship. Dachez deems Caroline the "perfect artist... able to turn [her] script into images with such fidelity and finesse." Caroline's brilliant use of color relies on mostly black-and-white to capture Marguerite's routine-reliant calm, then casting various hues to enhance reactions--agitating reds, familiar blue and discomforting yellows. As Marguerite's self-awareness develops, so, too, does Caroline's palette, aptly adding vibrancy in parallel with Marguerite's growth. Beyond author and illustrator, the opening credits page is notably crowded with additional collaborators, including prodigious translator Edward Gauvin and a sensitivity read by Ashanti Fortson. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

Elijah Cummings's We're Better Than This is part memoir, part behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of American democracy and part call to action. That last piece is, perhaps, the most crucial concept readers can take from the life Cummings dedicated to public service.

Though Cummings began the work on this book himself, he and James Dale were unable to complete the project prior to the congressman's death in 2019. Dale, along with Cummings's widow, Dr. Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, completed the work posthumously to honor Cummings's wish to share his story with his nation, working diligently, Dale notes, "to make sure that this book was true to his vision and his wishes." The result is remarkable, capturing not only Cummings's stories but his voice (an effect further enhanced in the audio version, narrated by Laurence Fishburne, also from HarperCollins).

We're Better Than This takes its title from an oft-repeated phrase in Cummings's speeches, in which he displayed a righteous outrage at the state of American democracy in the 21st century. Though Cummings himself died before much of his work could be completed--to repair the damage he saw--his own words can be a comfort and a clarion call to act in trying times: "When it seems like you can't do anything, do something. Don't say it's too big or too oppressive to overcome. Start. Try. Now." He started the work--and now it's up to us to take it from here. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

The history of a macabre practice, and the ethical questions it raises, are revealed in Dark Archives, an engaging chronicle of a shadowy aspect of clinical medicine.

As a librarian and a leader of the Death Positive Movement, Megan Rosenbloom is the ideal guide to anthropodermic bibliopegy--binding books in human skin. Such a ghoulish practice can exist only in the cruelest of circumstances, like Nazi Germany, right? Wrong. As medical practitioners became a privileged class, "the medical profession lost sight of the patient as a person in favor of a patient as a collection of symptoms and manifestations, or a soulless cadaver on a dissecting table."

Using a process called peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF), Rosenbloom travels the world to test books that allege to be anthropodermic, providing a fascinating window into the lives of those involved along with context for understanding such a gruesome undertaking. John Stockton Hough, for instance, bound three medical books using the skin of Mary Lynch, the victim of tuberculosis. The troubling story of Crispus Attucks, a Black man whose murder at the Boston Massacre marked the beginning of the American Revolution and whose skin was allegedly used to bind a notebook, reveals the ugly history of racism in medicine that continues to this day. And readers learn about the long history of grave robbers who provided doctors and medical students with cadavers to dissect and partition.

Despite the grisly nature of the proceedings, Dark Archives succeeds precisely because Rosenbloom respects the books for their research value as well as the people whose skin was used to bind them, often without their consent. --Frank Brasile, librarian

Welcome back to a new year at Riverdale Academy Day (RAD) School in Jerry Craft's entertaining follow-up to his 2020 Newbery Medal-winning debut, New Kid. Wannabe artist Jordan reunites with his closest friends: Liam, who arrives from his family's Riverdale mansion via chauffeur, and Drew, who commutes from a Co-Op City apartment where he lives with his grandmother. Craft's focus here is Drew: within moments of arrival, he's accosted by Andy with combative unwanted greetings and by Ashley, who shows her overbearing devotion with home-baked goods.

Although Jordan and Drew are both Black, Drew's darker skin especially stands out in the mostly white RAD community, which subjects him to continued microagressions and myopic racism from both students and administrators. Away from RAD, the trio's sleepover at Liam's mansion almost sunders their friendship as Drew grows increasingly uncomfortable with Liam's wealthy privilege. All three will learn valuable lessons about the danger of assumptions and the power of allyship as eighth grade continues. As in New Kid, young Jordan's black-and-white sketchbook comics insightfully capture the progress.

Just as his characters deal with their RAD new world bolstered by supportive friendships, Craft, too, deftly affirms the authors who have enabled and enhanced his sophomore title. His clever chapter title spreads are visual homages (with permission) to notable creators: He opens, for example, with "Sketch Diary of a Shrimpy Kid." By book's end, his acknowledgements feature a memorable roster of #OwnVoices (Reynolds, Woodson, Thomas) who have inspired him. By maintaining a convincing blend of challenges and triumphs for his own diverse cast, Craft's perceptive Class Act skillfully provides resourceful instruction on encouraging deeper understanding. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon