One theme that stands out among many of today's excellent reading recommendations deals with the indelible bonds people form with each other and the places they love. In the poignant and gorgeous graphic memoir This Beautiful, Ridiculous City, Kay Sohini details her fixation on New York City and the allure it held for her, even during her youth in Calcutta. Lida Maxwell's biography Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love is "an ode to the freedom and joy" that examines the relationship that bolstered the environmentalist's views on nature and political activism. And Coretta Scott King Award winner and Newbery Honoree Renée Watson crafts "an intimate, intense portrayal of grief" in All the Blues in the Sky, blending poetry and lyrical prose to tell an "achingly beautiful" story about a friendship cut short by death.
Meanwhile, in The Writer's Life, Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, author of Glassworks, introduces her second novel, Mutual Interest, a "sure-footed" historical tale about queer characters immersed in the "rough-and-tumble capitalist quagmire" of turn-of-the-century New York City.