Before Jacqueline Bouvier became that Jackie, she was a young socialite with journalistic ambitions, who caught the eye of then-congressional member Jack Kennedy. Louis Bayard's 10th novel, Jackie & Me, is an engaging yet melancholy account of Jackie's friendship with Lem Billings, whom Jack asked to court Jackie on his behalf.

Bayard (Courting Mr. Lincoln) begins his narrative in 1981, as Lem looks back 30 years to the summer when he and Jack met Jackie. In extended flashbacks, Lem describes his friendship with Jack (dating back to their days at prep school) and his role in the swirl of Kennedy family chaos. Jackie, meanwhile, comes off as fresh-faced and kind, uncertain of her direction but longing to find meaningful, exciting work. As she and Lem spend time together on Sunday outings, which range from visits to art museums to the circus, both of them gradually realize that Jack may become Jackie's life's work, though at greater personal cost than she expects.

Bayard deftly portrays the classism of high society in the 1950s; the competing snobberies of Jackie's mother and Jack's father are particularly well-drawn. He hints that Lem was gay but never discusses it too openly (as, indeed, was the case for Lem in real life). His characters often speak in elegant riddles, and the narrative drama rides largely on what goes unexpressed: namely, Lem's deep love for Jackie and the complicated affection they both harbor for Jack. Bayard's novel provides a fresh take on an enigmatic icon and shines the spotlight on a man who built his life around being the loyal friend. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Discover: Louis Bayard's 10th novel provides a poignant, witty account of Jackie Kennedy's unusual connection to John F. Kennedy's best friend.

For her sixth novel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks (March; Caleb's Crossing) crafts the biography of a seminal horse in the guise of a marvelous novel. Brooks moves among key characters in the shaping of the horse's life in the pre-Civil War South, and those who bring the significance of a long-forgotten horse skeleton to light nearly two centuries later.

The book opens with the discovery of a discarded painting of a horse. Theo is a Black doctoral student at Georgetown studying art history in 2019, and he seeks to learn more about this painting he found in a neighbor's trash. A chance encounter with Jess, an Australian managing the Smithsonian's vertebrate Osteology Prep Lab, blossoms into a relationship. It is fraught with misunderstanding on Jess's part, of what Theo's experience is like as a Black man living in Washington, D.C. But they form a connection based on their mutual interest in this horse, his for its history, represented through art, and hers for the scientific puzzle the horse presents.

The most moving and compelling relationship of the novel, however, is that between the horse, named Darley and later knighted Lexington, and Jarret, the enslaved boy--and later man--who trained and cared for the horse from its foaling to stud sire to his retirement to pasture. Through Jarret's story, the author reveals the unusual and indispensable role Black trainers and jockeys played in the pre-Civil War South.

Equestrians or not, readers will appreciate Brooks's invitation to linger awhile among beautiful and graceful horses, to see the devotion they engendered in her characters and in the author (a horsewoman) herself. --Jennifer M. Brown

Discover: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks crafts the biography of a seminal horse in the guise of a marvelous novel.

Meg Mitchell Moore (The Islanders; The Admissions) returns with another juicy, thoughtful, enthralling family drama in her seventh novel, Vacationland. Louisa Fitzgerald McLean has been going to her parents' summer home, Ships View, on the coast of Maine every summer for her entire life. But this summer, things are different: Louisa, now a tenured professor, arrives in Maine with her three kids in tow. Her husband, Steven, has stayed behind in Brooklyn to focus on his podcast start-up. As Louisa struggles to make some progress on a scholarly book she's writing, she is also forced to face an uncomfortable truth: her father, a retired judge, is struggling with Alzheimer's, and her patrician mother is alternating between trying to cope and pretending everything is fine. The family's tenuous peace is further upset by Kristie, a new arrival to town, who's juggling $27,000 in medical debt, her grief at losing her mother and a secret that connects her to the Fitzgeralds. Louisa and Kristie are forced to examine their assumptions about privilege and family--as well as each other--over the course of the summer.

Moore tells her story mostly by alternating Kristie's and Louisa's points of view. She paints midcoastal Maine, the "vacationland" of the title (also a nickname for the state), in its spruced-up summer glory, but pulls back the curtain to show the lives of those who work hard to serve the wealthy residents and summer people.

Full of breathtaking Maine sunsets and family drama writ large and small, Vacationland is both an escapist summer read and a thoughtful examination of motherhood, privilege and what makes a family. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Discover: Meg Mitchell Moore's seventh novel combines a juicy family saga with a thoughtful exploration of motherhood and privilege.

From acclaimed fiction writer, screenwriter and memoirist Chris Offutt (Country Dark) comes Shifty's Boys, a crime thriller with characters as ugly and beautiful as the landscape of the Kentucky hills. The novel is the second Mick Hardin story, following 2021's The Killing Hills.

Mick Hardin, an army criminal investigator, is on medical leave back home in eastern Kentucky after suffering a serious leg injury from an IED. Lying low, he is living with his sister, the local sheriff who's running for reelection. He's also trying to avoid Percocet and whiskey and pondering whether to give in to his wife's desire for divorce. When the two adult male children of a neighboring woman are murdered, he takes up her plea to investigate and discovers a big-time web of corruption and violence against humanity and the land. As the case comes together, Hardin confronts the nature of his home and comes to terms with how he was formed and who he has become.

Offutt writes in the classic detective genre with clarity and ease, providing the structural satisfactions of a mystery unfolding into a taut climax, and possesses the kind of sophisticated language and human insight only a fine writer can deliver. Enriching the story are arresting turns of phrase and intricate details, such as gorgeous descriptions of birds and trees, mushrooms and plants and the way the sun looks as it falls across the forests, meadows and hills. It is a world of startling beauty and cruel violence, its harsh truths unsparing, unemotional and unredeemed. --Walker Minot, teacher, freelance writer and book reviewer

Discover: The second Mick Hardin novel from Chris Offutt is a wonder of human beauty and hideousness, shot through with fine writing and burning at a quickening pace.

British author Phaedra Patrick (The Secrets of Love Story Bridge) consistently treats readers to stories with heartfelt plots and memorable, quirky characters. In her fifth novel, The Messy Lives of Book People, Patrick sticks with that winning formula, telling the story of an ordinary woman who is stretched beyond her comfort zone and is challenged to build a better, more fulfilling life.

Liv Green, middle-aged wife and mother of two adult sons, is a British cleaning lady whose postponed dreams of writing are suddenly reinvigorated when she lands a gig working for one of her literary heroes, bestselling author--and notorious recluse--Essie Starling. When Liv is caught secretly reading a work in progress--the 20th entry in Starling's popular Georgia Rory series--the standoffish, enigmatic author puts Liv on the spot, asking for her honest, writerly opinion. Nervous, Liv gives a tactful yet unabashed opinion. Later, she second-guesses being so forthright. Essie's lawyer contacts Liv soon after this: Essie has died after a surgical procedure. She left specific instructions that she wanted Liv to finish the novel in progress with the stipulation that Essie's death and Liv's ghostwriting be kept secret. This sets Liv on a confidential quest to conjure what Essie might have had in mind for her latest novel, the projected last in the series. However, it's Essie's real-life story that Liv ultimately unravels, one filled with unpredictable twists and turns that are as adventurous as the Georgia Rory novels themselves.

Patrick adds more entertaining, feel-good fiction to her growing body of work. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Discover: A feel-good story about a cleaning lady with writerly aspirations, who is secretly tasked with completing a novel by one of her literary heroes.

In The Hotel Nantucket, Elin Hilderbrand (Golden Girl; 28 Summers) brings readers an exciting, multi-plotted, genre-bending drama set in a storied old hotel on Massachusetts's Nantucket island that's been spruced up and is ready to make a glorious comeback. The large-scale renovation of the once-derelict hotel, which had its heyday in the 1920s, is financially backed by a billionaire developer in London. He spares no expense and aims to put the hotel on the map as a top vacation destination.

The developer lures Lizbet Keaton, who just ended a long-term romantic relationship, away from her job at a competitor. Her job is to hire local staff to transform the old hotel into a first-class operation offering the finest in hospitality--a sterling spa and a celebrity-crewed kitchen and bar. What sets the hotel apart is its history, namely its resident ghost, a former chambermaid. Funny and often judgmental, she served at the hotel during the Roaring '20s and met a tragic death that's kept her spirit active on the premises.

While the hotel strives to regain its former glory, a large cast of characters--hotel staff and patrons--juggle romantic entanglements while unraveling mysteries and secrets in their own lives. Plotlines about scandalous affairs, extortion, assault and sordid pasts enliven Hilderbrand's obvious appreciation for the ins and outs of the hotel industry and for Nantucket culture. Readers in search of page-turning escapist fiction will be immensely intrigued by checking into The Hotel Nantucket and seeing all it has to offer. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Discover: The Hotel Nantucket is an enthralling and juicy romantic drama about the patrons and staff embroiled in the relaunch of a storied old hotel.

Readers hungry for a novel that's equal parts sweet and sour will find plenty of sugar and vinegar in Hurricane Girl by Marcy Dermansky (Very Nice; The Red Car; Bad Marie). "Sick of everybody and everything," 32-year-old Allison Brody flees Hollywood and the movie producer boyfriend who often hit her, and buys a North Carolina beach house in foreclosure. Before she left, she had sold a horror script, so she can afford to relax and swims daily, her favorite pastime. But then her life becomes its own horror film. A Category 3 hurricane wipes out her home, and the TV cameraman who covers the story and invites her to stay with him responds dramatically when she resists his advances and tries to leave: he smashes a vase over her head.

The rest of the novel charts Allison's often grisly adventure as she drives home to New Jersey with a head injury; receives care from her mother, who still grieves her husband's recent death; and begins a relationship with Dr. Danny Yang, her neurosurgeon and a former college classmate she used to fool around with. Some characters are caricatures rather than fully fleshed-out creations, but readers will enjoy Dermansky's humorous one-liners and deceptively light touch. And they will sympathize with Allison, a woman tired of the way men treat her and who fights her inclination to go through life like a swimmer in the ocean: floating aimlessly, drifting wherever the waves take her. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer

Discover: An acerbic, deceptively sweet novel about a woman whose life is upended by cruel men and a Category 3 hurricane.

Film (LBJ) and television (The Good Fight) writer Joey Hartstone draws upon a real-life legal situation in The Local, his striking debut novel that delves into the legal system, big business, racism and small-town life. Hartstone finds inspiration in the towns in the Eastern District of Texas that became the leading jurisdiction for intellectual property litigation.

James Euchre is a successful patent attorney in his hometown of Marshall, Tex., where federal judge Gerald Gardner has set up the template for these trials. The litigations attract high-powered lawyers from bigger cities expecting to receive enormous payouts for their clients. But big-city lawyers bring big-city attitudes, including a disdain for the small-town residents who serve on the juries and are often uneducated. That is where Euchre comes in: he's "the local" attorney to whom the jury is able to relate. When his latest client, tech entrepreneur Amir Zawar, is accused of fatally stabbing Gardner, Euchre is forced to defend him. Euchre resents this new role, as Gardner was his mentor and father figure. Euchre almost hopes he loses this case, but he doesn't want a conviction reversed on appeal.

Hartstone imbues The Local with a credible view of the law and a believable protagonist. At first, Euchre appears to have simple needs--work and binge drinking between cases. But he develops into a fully dimensional character, fueled by an adversarial relationship with his father and a fear that small-town life has left him emotionally stagnant. Hartstone shows that life in a small town can be as nuanced as any urban area. --Oline H. Cogdill, freelance reviewer

Discover: In this impressive debut legal thriller, an attorney must switch from patent to criminal law when his client is accused of murdering a judge.

Boys, Beasts & Men is the first short story collection from Sam J. Miller, whose previous novels have included the grim speculative world of Blackfish City and the horror-noir of The Blade Between. This collection showcases his incredible versatility and imagination in stories that often put a fantastical twist on finding queer love or belonging. It features a story set in Blackfish City's Qaanaaq, but the collection is often excitingly unpredictable in how it swerves between wildly different settings, casually blurring genre lines.

In stories like "Allosaurus Burgers," Miller plays with the potential of introducing a bizarre development--in this case, a dinosaur--into a seemingly familiar scenario about a child struggling to understand their domineering mother. Other stories are set in far stranger worlds, such as "The Beasts We Want to Be," which imagines a version of the post-revolution USSR, in which a machine called the Pavlov Box is used to condition people into ruthless soldiers. Boys, Beasts & Men is tied together by recurring themes, particularly the search for acceptance in a world hostile to queer love. The collection is also bound by a story told in fragments between the main stories listed in the table of contents. This story-between-stories--a frightening, tantalizing meditation on the threat and thrill of storytelling--ends up serving as a distillation of Miller's appeal: writing that walks the knife's edge of fear and excitement. Boys, Beasts & Men is a collection of 14 stories that perfectly captures the desperate intensity of love and is an excellent introduction to a talented writer with wildly varied interests. --Hank Stephenson, manuscript reader, the Sun magazine

Discover: Boys, Beasts & Men is a proudly queer collection of 14 short stories about the search for love and acceptance in bizarre, often hostile worlds.

Following her fantasy debut--For the Wolf, the first of The Wilderwood duology--Hannah Whitten turns the lens in For the Throne toward elder sister Neve and offers another intricately plotted fantasy with elements bordering on horror. Once again, the forest holds secrets and danger, but now Neve is trapped in a treacherous underworld prison with Solmir, a king made mortal. Solmir murdered Neve's betrothed in the prequel and used her in his scheme to destroy the Old Kings, but now Neve must rely on him if she has any hope of surviving the Shadowlands.

Readers may initially have a difficult time warming to morally gray Neve and Solmir after the events of For the Wolf. In Neve, Whitten has created a monster out of grief, a young woman so corrupted by vengeance that her veins run black under skin devoid of color. Where Neve was once desperate to save her sister Red, she's now in need of rescue and, in her darkest times, wonders if she deserves it.

One of Whitten's core themes is that monstrousness is in the eye of the beholder. As a half-spider woman says early in the book, "In its barest form, its simplest definition, a monster is merely something different than you think it should be. And who gets to decide what should be, anyway?" Told in several points of view, Whitten's fantasy deftly balances exterior and interior worlds. Monstrous and heroic, these characters are at times hard to love, but Whitten is very convincing. --Suzanne Krohn, librarian and freelance reviewer

Discover: With a growing cast of complex characters and danger lurking, this dark fantasy concludes an epic story of sisterhood, betrayal, curses and redemption.

Luz Alana Heith-Benzan, heroine of Adriana Herrera's A Caribbean Heiress in Paris, has inherited her family's Caña Brava rum distillery and knows three things to be true: "First, corsets in the tropics were the purest form of evil. Second, a woman attempting to thrive in a man's world must always have a plan. Third, a flask full of fine rum and a pistol served well in almost any emergency." When she unexpectedly finds herself at the helm of the family business following her father's untimely death, she takes her corsets to the Exposition Universelle in Paris. She plans to grow a market for her products--with a flask of rum and a pistol strapped to her thigh, just in case. At the exposition, she meets the dashing James Evanston Sinclair, also heir to a distillery and one of the few men at the exposition willing to work with her.

Herrera (One Week to Claim It All) adheres to the happily-ever-after agreements of the historical romance genre without shying away from the often harsh realities of what a strong Black Latina might experience amid the rampant sexism and racism of late 19th-century Europe. Even the cooperative business model of Caña Brava, designed as "an experiment in what industry without exploitation could be," acknowledges the realities of the time period while imagining something better. In this first of a planned series (Las Leonas), readers will find it impossible not to root for the underdog couple, determined to right the wrongs done to them and those they love--including one another. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer

Discover: A refreshing historical romance features a strong Black Latina heroine, determined to secure her family's rum business, and the unlikely Scotsman she partners up with.

New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl has the social graces of Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm character. At least that's the idea conveyed by his only child, journalist and author Ada Calhoun (St. Marks Is Dead; Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give; Why We Can't Sleep), in the vexed but deceptively tender and cleverly conceived Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me. Calhoun sees her fascination with O'Hara (1926-1966) as a way to connect with her likewise O'Hara-besotted dad, who has always given her the impression that he finds her less interesting than his work. "I clung to Frank O'Hara as the one thing that was undeniably ours," she writes, "like a religion to which we both adhered, even if we didn't go to church together."

When Calhoun was nine, her dad gave her a copy of O'Hara's Lunch Poems, but the father-daughter O'Hara bond didn't really solidify until 2018, when she stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews that Schjeldahl had conducted for an abandoned biography of the poet. As Schjeldahl tells it, in 1976, he signed a contract to write O'Hara's story, but the biography was canceled after the poet's executor sister withdrew her support. Suspecting that it was her father's crusty personality that doomed the project, Calhoun decides to revive it. She dons her intrepid reporter's cap, brandishes her charm and, just as Schjeldahl did, proceeds to interview relevant parties.

With Also a Poet, Calhoun seems to have created a new nonfiction genre: the biographical profile within a biographical profile within a memoir. As for readers awaiting the definitive Frank O'Hara treatment, they'll find Also a Poet to be an engrossing placeholder. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Discover: In her vexed but deceptively tender memoir, Ada Calhoun tries to connect with her father, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, through their mutual enchantment with poet Frank O'Hara.

Australian critic and artist Anwen Crawford (Hole's Live Through This) writes a potent elegy for a friendship in her formally ambitious second book, No Document. More than companionship, the relationship she describes is one aspiring to greatness--in art, in ethics, in humanity.

The book is dedicated to Ned Sevil (1980-2010), someone Crawford connected with in art school and pursued as a collaborator through tumultuous political circumstances in Australia, which reverberated throughout the Indigenous land that country was built upon. Trading linear narrative for dynamic line breaks, for erasure poetry, for news stories, Crawford draws lines between the work she did with Sevil, their activism, and the precedents set by their artistic and radical forebears. "All revolutions run into history," she writes, "yet history is not full."

This chameleon approach--with its numerous ideas about artistic expression, political power and colonial violence enjambed at alarming angles--can make the book's exquisite sentences challenging to absorb. Nevertheless, Crawford's devotion to her subject persists as safety in a storm. "Nothing we made was meant to last," she says of her work with Sevil. "Nothing we made has lasted for as long as what we made by making together."

No Document is an elegant memoir of grief, at once as personal as a dead loved one and as global as a ravaged earth. Near the conclusion, Crawford says bluntly that she does not believe that art-making can change the world by simple virtue of its materials; however, its capacity to imagine a better, freer future still makes it a noble pursuit. This extraordinary book may be slender, but it carries the weight of the modern world. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness

Discover: This elegant and eclectic volume pours out grief for a dead loved one and a plundered planet while still finding hope in the act of creation.

Design critic Alexandra Lange (The Design of Childhood) turns a nostalgic but clear eye on the shopping mall as an icon of consumerism intimately linked with the American Dream in Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall. This thorough, culturally aware history will surprise and inspire audiences who may feel they already know the story of the shopping megaplex, and provides a tour not of malls themselves, but of what they have meant to the people who gather in them.

Lange begins with the birth of malls in the 1950s, when suburban planning overlooked the need for gathering places. Architect Victor Gruen, inspired by a 10-story department store in downtown Detroit, created the first malls with the idea of making every day a perfect shopping day for a demographic largely composed of white, stay-at-home mothers.

Lange's design analysis of iconic malls such as NorthPark Center in Dallas, Tex., and the Minneapolis tourist destination Mall of America will engross architecture buffs, but she fully hits her stride when boiling down the synergy between spatial design elements and the evolution of U.S. culture. Not only did shifting economic tides affect malls, the mass entrance of women into the workforce left malls dealing with record numbers of unattended teenagers. A seeming haven for youth getting their first taste of independence, yet in many cases welcoming only white youth from the desired economic class, malls created their own security forces and tacitly upheld racist policies. Lange envisions more diverse and sustainable uses for malls, inspiring readers to see these behemoth structures as a vital and versatile resource for the future. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Discover: Design critic Alexandra Lange takes a nuanced and often inspiring look at the history and future of shopping malls as architectural and cultural icons.

In The World as We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate, edited by Amy Brady and Tajja Isen, 19 notable writers share intimate reflections on how accelerated climate change has led to corresponding transformations in their lives, homes, neighborhoods, jobs, relationships and mental health.

In presenting striking firsthand accounts of a global phenomenon, Brady and Isen hope to encourage "humble and humane dialogue" that will ignite climate action at the individual level. The Covid-19 pandemic added a layer of complexity to the stories in this collection, rendering it a living testament to the challenging realities of surviving and writing through a global health crisis.

The World as We Knew It opens with a gorgeously descriptive essay by Lydia Millet on the changing ecosystem of the magnificent Arizona desert. An appreciation of nature's majesty and raw power runs through stories about invasive fish species on the Caribbean island nation of Dominica; the altered rain patterns witnessed in California's Sierra Nevada mountains; and the spiritual and ecological fallout of a World Bank-sponsored dam in Uganda.

The essays in The World as We Knew It capture a specific moment in human history, a time when older generations experiencing the "new normal" of accelerated climate disruption can recall childhoods when our environment was more stable. Each of the essays in this collection presents an opportunity to engage thoughtfully with climate change-driven experiences that will help readers feel less alone as they confront, within their own communities, this unprecedented time in the history of our world. --Shahina Piyarali, reviewer

Discover: A startling collection of 19 essays documenting the impact of climate change at the individual level, by a geographically diverse group of writers.

The history of the Broadway production of Grease is a case of a plucky original musical that beat all the odds. Word-of-mouth made Grease--which opened to mixed reviews on February 14, 1972--a popular show. Later in the year, it garnered seven Tony nominations. When it closed after 3,388 performances on April 13, 1980, it had broken the record as the longest-running play or musical on Broadway.

This oral history, as told by the original actors and crew, is skillfully assembled by Tom Moore (the musical's original Broadway director), Adrienne Barbeau (who earned a Tony nomination playing bad-girl Rizzo) and Ken Waissman (who co-produced the show with Maxine Fox). The producers auditioned 2,000 actors to find the original 16 cast members. Barry Bostwick, who played the original Danny Zuko, recalls that the "cruelty of the process was unnerving." Ilene Graff reminisces about playing Sandy during her two-and-a-half-year run, starring opposite 11 actors who played the role of Zuko, including Bostwick, Richard Gere, Jeff Conaway and Treat Williams. Eighteen-year-old John Travolta remembers taking a role in the touring company against advice from other industry professionals. There's also a funny and delightfully starstruck round-robin of memories from the 1976 cast, who recalls the time Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton attended performances and invited the cast out to Sardi's for a drunken gathering.

Five decades haven't dimmed the memories of the cast and crew members of Grease, who have built affectionate friendships. Packed with photos (most are backstage pictures taken by the actors) and warm memories, this engaging oral history is a treat for theatre buffs and earns its standing ovation. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

Discover: Celebrating the semicentennial of the Broadway musical Grease, this affectionate, starry-eyed oral history will delight theater buffs.

Kapaemahu began as an animated short film. The award-winning production team of Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson now sets their script onto the page, resulting in a spectacular picture book featuring stills from animation director Daniel Sousa's moving images.

"Long ago," four Tahitians settled in Waikiki. "The visitors were tall and deep in voice yet gentle and soft-spoken." Most importantly, "They were not male; they were not female. They were mahu--a mixture of both in mind, heart, and spirit." Their leader was the titular Kapaemahu; each member of the quartet was skilled "in the science of healing." The people erected a monument of "four great boulders" into which "the healers began to transfer their powers," then the mahu disappeared. Eventually, "everything changed." Wordlessly, Sousa shows how Christianity took hold, foreign soldiers took charge, progress eventually brought high-rises and tourists--"the stones of Kapaemahu were forgotten." The stones were finally recovered, but "the fact that the healers were mahu has been erased."

The book, like the film, is bilingual, with the film's Olelo Niihau language ("the only form of Hawaiian that has been continuously spoken since prior to the arrival of foreigners") followed by an English translation. Wong-Kalu is "Kanaka--a native person descended from the original inhabitants of the islands of Hawaii," and "also mahu, which like many Indigenous third-gender identities, was once respected but is now more often a target for hatred and discrimination." Sousa's full-page bleeds and saturated palette of predominantly deep earth colors display potent images. Light heightens Sousa's superb imagery: glowing golds underscore gentle strength; soft, wispy white captures healing energy. Power continues to flow through transparent prose and magnificent visuals, gifting audiences with insights celebrating acceptance and inspiring strength. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

Discover: A lauded animated short film about powerful ancient third-gender healers in Hawaii gets transformed into a glorious picture book reclamation.

Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui said, "If you touch something, you leave a charge on it and anybody else touching it connects with you, in a way." Anatsui didn't physically touch Bottle Tops, but his work clearly charged author Alison Goldberg (I Love You for Miles and Miles) who in turn electrifies her audience with this inspiring biographical picture book. Accompanying Goldberg's stimulating narration are striking, dramatic illustrations from Elizabeth Zunon (Bedtime for Sweet Creatures; One Plastic Bag). Together, the creators produce an engrossing introduction to a monumental African artist.

Anatsui found deep meaning in an ordinary, discarded object: "With bottle tops, he had found a material close to hand that evoked his history and environment. They had a past, and could have new meaning too." Goldberg guides readers through Anatsui's career, showing his creative evolution, his "idea of including the memories of old objects in his art" and his desire to connect his pieces with the history of his people. The artist's passion for telling stories in sculpture is inspiring, and the charm of the book is enhanced by his quotes woven throughout. Zunon takes a similar approach to the illustrations that Anatsui takes to art: Anatsui stitched the parts of bottle tops together to make his sculptures portray texture and dimension. Zunon fittingly patches together paint and cut paper collage--thus developing the same artistic elements--to depict him and his incredible creations.

In the spirit of Anatsui's work, Goldberg includes an activity at the back of the book, a brilliant addition to enhance the experience of learning about art. From cover to cover, Bottle Tops is a sensational reading experience. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

Discover: The distinctive work of Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui takes shape in an inspiring, eye-catching picture book.

This YA mystery is an exciting, slightly supernatural romp through the glitzy, glamorous Chicago of the Roaring Twenties.

Eighteen-year-old Ruby splits her nights between "glamming around parties" with her high society friends and poisoning men whose crimes against women have gone unpunished. She uses her mind-reading ability to hunt "killers, monsters, abusers, men who discarded women with no more care than tossing out a spent cigarette." When her trail of bodies draws the attention of an unassuming yet brilliant morgue employee named Guy, Ruby finds herself falling for perhaps the only person capable of uncovering her secret. Ruby and Guy's dual points of view create suspense as the two become ensnared in a deadly web of political corruption.

Kendall Kulper (Salt & Storm) upends the conventions of a traditional noir caper with a story of a femme fatale heroine who kills to protect vulnerable women. Ruby's characterization as a deadly and competent "glam gal" who loves "good parties and hot jazz" challenges stereotypical portrayals of the flapper girl as silly and shallow. "Sweet and soft" Guy is a romantic lead who embodies non-toxic masculinity; his relationship with Ruby is both swoon-worthy and built upon mutual respect. Fans of Libba Bray's The Diviners series should enjoy this feminist and fantasy-tinged historical mystery. --Alanna Felton, freelance reviewer

Discover: A flapper girl uses her mind-reading abilities to exact murderous revenge on powerful men in this rollicking Jazz Age mystery with a magical twist.

Sorceline has been eagerly awaiting the first day of her summer apprenticeship studying cryptozoology with Archibald Balzar on the Isle of Vorn. Under Balzar's tutelage, she'll learn all about various cryptids and how to care for them. A classmate's disappearance, though, sets off a chain of bizarre and dangerous mysteries in this diverting middle-grade series opener.

Everything about the Isle of Vorn thrills Sorceline. It's "creepy, gloomy, and super scary" and full of cryptids, "amazing creatures that most humans don't think exist." The students on Vorn are ready to learn and determined to impress Balzar in hopes of being chosen as his assistant. Sorceline quickly demonstrates an aptitude for cryptozoology, which gains her both admiration and annoyance from her classmates. But on a late-night quest for unicorn blood, classmate Tara goes missing. Frightened Sorceline and her remaining classmates must find and rescue Tara, or they fear one of them may be next.

Sorceline is the first English translated work by Sylvia Douyé and is a compilation of three Sorceline graphic novels already published in France. Disney Academy graduate Paola Antista (Cats! Purrfect Strangers) brings to life the world of cryptids in a manga-influenced illustrative style that depicts cryptids from Roman, Greek, European and Persian mythology and folklore. Her characters and creatures are expressive and the novel's format features broken, overlapping and asymmetrical panels that help move the plot along at a rapid pace. Sorceline is wonderfully atmospheric and immersive, and the Isle of Vorn is shrouded in irresistible secrecy. --Kyla Paterno, freelance reviewer

Discover: A girl is brought to a mysterious island to study cryptozoology in this diverting middle-grade series opener.

Readers familiar with Lyla Lee's exuberant YA debut, I'll Be the One, will be tickled to see that singer/dancer Skye Shin is "topping the charts" in Lee's equally ebullient sophomore YA novel, Flip the Script. Like Skye, Lee's new protagonist, Hana Jin, is a Korean American teen entering Korea's rigidly regulated entertainment industry. At 16, Hana is "breaking out big" in her first starring role in the brand-new K-drama Fated Destiny. She's understandably nervous: "I may look like I was born and raised here in Korea, but I'm from Florida." Her parents left their comfortable American lives and moved to Seoul for Hana after she was scouted in middle school. Four years later, she still doesn't "feel Korean enough," but she's about to make her dreams come true.

Hana's co-star is Bryan Yoon, an international favorite K-pop boy band member. Despite his "magnetic" star power, the debut ratings prove disappointing. Top studio executive Mr. Kim has plans: 10 pages of contract negotiations later, Hana and Bryan agree to fake-date for a PR boost. To add more spice, the execs cast Minjee Park--Hana's best friend and fiercest rival--to create a love triangle. Sparks fly... but maybe not where they were expected.

Lee expertly creates fabulous fun, but with plenty of sharp prods at social media bullying, gender inequity in entertainment, obsessive fans and--most blatantly--homophobia. She inspires hope--and demand--for change even in the most traditional societies by nimbly highlighting LGBTQ+ support among younger generations. The result is astutely exposing entertainment indeed. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

Discover: Lyla Lee's marvelous sophomore YA novel about teens navigating the inequities of Seoul's K-drama industry both entertains and elucidates.