Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

Last winter, after the third or fourth time a friend of mine shared some influencer’s post to their story in hopes of winning the giveaway the influencer was running (hence the need to share the post to their story), I had the thought that social media influencers are, in many ways, no different than pastors preaching the prosperity gospel. Instead of asking for money, they ask for our attention and time, and so many of us willingly give it up in an attempt at reaching… something. I’m not sure what, as it depends on your flavor of influencer, but we wouldn’t be so captured if we didn’t think we could get something out of it, even if it's only a chance to peek into the windows of a (supposed) dream life. Which is why I think the premise of Yesteryear is so intriguing.

In Yesteryear, Natalie Heller Mills turns her nascent dream of a farm and a family into reality through the help of social media (and a $5 million check from her father-in-law). Her children wear the perfect palette of neutrals woven out of natural fibers, eat a healthy diet of food grown and raised on their own land, all of it far away from any liberal influences. It’s everything a good Christian woman could ever want, and it's what she peddles each day from her social media accounts. Who cares if she doesn’t know the first thing about farming? Who cares if her husband, the coddled youngest son of a career politician destined to be president someday (in his mind, at least), spends most of his time spiraling slowly down a right-wing rabbit hole of online misinformation and conspiracy theories? She’s Natalie Heller Mills, and she’s self-proclaimed as “perfect at being alive.” But when she wakes up in the past, with a husband who isn’t quite her husband, and children who aren’t quite her children, she finds herself put to the greatest test of her life.

It would be easy to reduce Yesteryear down to being simply a satire of a specific breed of social media influencing (namely, tradwives), and while it is that, it’s also in some respects a demented coming of age tale of a woman who managed to make one defining decision for herself and her future, but immediately bailed out the moment it didn’t align with her expectations. Natalie is not a likable character, and it’s hard to find sympathy for her. She is horribly judgmental, and uses her religion not only as a spiritual armor against evil, but as a weapon to be wielded against any person, particularly other women, she deems as less than. Going viral online and suddenly finding herself with millions of followers is just proof of her superiority over all the Angry Women out there who look at her pictures and watch her videos and secretly wish they could be just like her (may the checks that this attention gets her always clear, forever and ever, amen).

Caro Claire Burke does an excellent job in teasing this story out. She sets things up quickly, then alternates chapters of Natalie’s life leading up to the moment of her time travel with her experiences of now living in the past. There’s an eeriness to the chapters that depict Natalie’s farmstead life, particularly in the moments when she interacts with Mary, who is now her eldest daughter in this strange past. Mary has an adult weariness about her, the kind of weariness that only comes with being forced to grow up too soon, to be mother to both your younger siblings and your actual mother. The more time Natalie spends with Mary, she also realizes the toll this has taken on Mary, and finds herself strangely upset over the thought that someday soon, Mary will have to leave home to become a wife and mother too, just like Natalie, with no other option for her life. And this is just a fraction of the themes Burke touches on in this book. I haven’t even gotten into Burke’s use of gender roles, politics, being online, and wealth in crafting this story, and it would take a more experienced reviewer than me to deftly pull those pieces together.

I won’t get into too much detail about the ending. Wanting to know how Natalie ended up in the past kept me reading, and I think Burke’s choices in explaining how this happened were unexpected and far from any theory I may have had leading up to the end. I can understand why some might find the ending unsatisfactory, but I also think the conventional explanations would have been taking the easy way out, so I was pleased with the direction Burke took.

Yesteryear is a book that will leave an impression on you, and will have you begging your friends to read it too so you have someone to discuss it with. And if you feel inclined to share this review on your social media pages, feel free! Unfortunately, I have nothing for you to win as an incentive to do so. But I thank you for your attention anyway. Don't forget to follow us online!

Also, if Caro Claire Burke wanted to write a version of this story from the perspective of Natalie’s husband, Caleb, I would 100% read that. He may be a manchild, but I strangely found myself more sympathetic towards him than Natalie. Now that I've read Marianne's excellent review, I perhaps need to ruminate on why I feel that way...

No Heaven for Good Boys by Keisha Bush

 

"No Heaven for Good Boys" is the story of two young boys living as talibe in the city of Dakar, Senegal. Their day to day life consists of begging on the street for change, finding new ways to eat, and something still fitting in small ways to be a child. Each night, they return home to their marabout who beats them if they do not reach their daily money quota. 

While this is horrific, the story drives home how commonplace this seems because they are two of many and people never seem to do anything. Furthermore, the book is often highlighting the divide between the rich and the poor, the privileged and the less fortunate. The arbitrary boundaries of religion and culture make any chance of rescue almost taboo, seeming to trap the boys in their situation. The book drives this home by jumping to the perspective of one of the boys' mothers, who struggles against the powerless brought by this boundary.

After finishing this book, I grieved it. Reading the experiences of a 6 year old who is going through such unimaginable amounts of struggle is hard, but it is someone's reality, and his story must be told.

Feel free to check out this book and let me know what you think!

- Leo

Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite

“If you cannot respect this family and this function, at least respect yourself.”

"Cursed Daughters" is a story of generational trauma, following the lives of several Nigerian women of the same bloodline. The story is deeply entrenched in what it is like to be a woman and to have those gender expectations placed upon you. As the title suggests, there is a spiritual element to the story, mystifying their experience into something worth awing at.

I found this book entrancing as it jumped between the perspectives of the women. It follows a very nonlinear story pattern, jumping across years, but stays very coherent all the way through. The information provided in the past provides context to the present, and vice versa. It is an art in writing.

Give this book a try and leave your thoughts. The library's Black Author Book Club is meeting on Wednesday, July 29th (2026) to discuss the book, so come on out! If you liked this book, try Oyinkan's other book "My Sister, the Serial Killer"!

- Leo

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

The 2026 novel Yesteryear begins - seemingly - as a time travel story about a woman at the center of a family farm run on "traditional" values of simple living, hard work and wholesome, organic food production. Oh, and female subservience. And a woman's willingness whether she likes children or not to have as many of them as physically possible until reaching the end of her fertile years. A mix of ideologies and beliefs that isn't wholesome for anybody, it turns out in this story.

It all begins when 24-year-old Caleb Mills and 19-year-old Natalie Heller meet in a church group near Boston. Natalie, a student at Harvard, is an attractive and naive young woman from small town Idaho. Caleb, a graduate of the university unsure of what to do with his life, is from a politically powerful west coast family. All they seem to have in common is having been raised in conservative Christian families, though Caleb's life experience has been more worldly than that of Natalie.

Aside from obvious attractions, it appears that Natalie's lack of worldliness (and presumed lack of discernment) are strong attractions for Caleb. After his campaign of relentless love bombing, the two are married within 3 months. Nevermind the creepiness of her suiter's suffocating behavior toward her; everything else about the vortex Natalie is letting herself be sucked into appears attractive enough. If she was meant to follow Christian family and faith traditions, it might as well be with this impressive family. Instead of the easy life she expected however, during the first year of marriage she finds herself bound to a child-like man who has no ambition whatsoever and who refuses to take responsibility for anything in their life together. As if anyone with such negligible ambition could get into Harvard! 

After a period of financial support from his parents - conditioned on an agreement with her father-in-law that the couple continue growing their family - Natalie realizes that it's up to her to figure out a way to earn a living for her young family. But having given up a full scholarship to Harvard in the middle of her sophomore year to marry this wastrel with whom she is now pregnant with a second child, how is she to do that?  

Thinking over possibilities, she concludes that the only viable one is to become an influencer in the online world of traditional wives - the so-called tradwives. Other women have found it to be lucrative, and for this occupation she has had a lifetime of preparation, having been raised in an ultra-conservative faith community and indoctrinated with beliefs in large families, female subservience, and homemaking over professional ambitions. This perhaps explains the apparent ease with which she walked away from a full Harvard  scholarship when she decided to get married at age 19.  

Her in-laws, exasperated with their son but a little skeptical, don't have any better ideas, and they want Natalie to take their aimless son off their hands. They agree to help the couple set themselves up for this enterprise by purchasing a farm in a remote and beautiful part of Idaho. After settling into it, Natalie's plan falls into place. She begins to create a phony persona and a phony life on Instagram and in videos portraying how an attractive young Chirstian family ostensibly living off the land manages its daily routines. She does it so well and convincingly (to some) that before too long she has thousands of fawning followers and lifestyle aspirants. Meanwhile the family continues to grow along with the family enterprise. A line of popular, ridiculously overpriced Natalie-branded merchandise is developed and soon its website is overwhelmed with purchase orders. Followers enchanted with Natalie and Caleb's rural life don't question how these lifestyle products are manufactured within this "natural" lifestyle. Caleb - learning from YouTube videos and online forums - throws himself into gardening and livestock acquisition and management. He has found that farm life makes him feel purposeful for the first time in his life. Or so he says. And so it appears.

Natalie is so attractive and charming in her videos that within a couple of years - to their astonishment - she and Caleb have a cottage industry earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. But ah, if only she liked children, especially her own! And if only the children didn't find being constantly filmed for public consumption to be so trying! 

In addition to ardent fans, Natalie's videos attract a lot of haters, whom she dubs The Angry Women. The Angry Women are relentlessly skeptical and critical. Natalie tries to ignore the criticisms. Despite the entirely farcical structure of her enterprise, for Natalie it is a psychic contest between The Angry Women and "good Christian women" like herself and her loyal followers. 

Eventually Natalie begins to experience herself as a schism of two distinct personalities that she refers to as online and offline Natalie. Offline Natalie becomes an increasingly angry woman, the impact of which is felt harshly by her family - offline, of course.

In addition to online and offline Natalie there is another duality in the story line: a parallel story that looks like time travel. The short chapters of this novel are organized to switch back and forth between this family's life in the present and its life on the same farm in the year 1855. Their life in 1855 though, is so cold and harsh that re-entering it every other chapter started to feel like a side track I wanted to skip. Natalie herself is constantly trying to figure out how to escape from the 1855 homestead and from her brutal husband. She has little affection for their children, who in return don't show her the affectionate respect one would expect. It's not clear until the very end of the book why we are exposed to this grim, alternate reality.

Back in the present, keeping up the pretense of a perfect and perfectly homespun life nurturing a continuously growing family with love and simple, wholesome, organic food in front of the whole world eventually drives Natalie to exhaustion and an addiction to pills that "calm her down." I stopped reading around this point to listen to a 1966 Rolling Stones song called "Mother's Little Helper," remembering lyrics that capture the dynamics of this family's predicament. 

Had Natalie and her followers read Betty Friedan's 1963 study The Feminine Mystique they could have predicted the outcome. Both Friedan and the Rolling Stones as well as the housewives of the 1950s and '60s had the copyright on the unsustainability of tradwife life.

-Marianne W. 

Goth by Otsuichi

Goth was added to my TBR at a time when I dreamed I'd live in Japan for a year, reading only Japanese literature. Years later, that aspiration has faded, but Goth remained. 

Side question: Do books ever fall off your TBR until they are read? There is a t-shirt I saw online that briefly tempted me, a skull and a headstone reading "Bury me under my TBR." But enough talk about mortality! 

Through a series of short stories, Goth introduces us to two high schoolers obsessed with true crime. Initially, the stories were released online, and they retain that creepypasta vibe and style of writing, with all the limitations that entails. The writing does improve as the collection goes on and the author matures. 

The narration, like the teens, are detached, even as they encounter increasingly gruesome situations. The book is not for the faint of stomach. In the first story, the kids visit a remote mountain in search of a crime scene -- and find it. Even as they find clues to uncover the murderer, they don't turn them over to the police. They are interested in why and how a criminal commits atrocities, not in justice or preventing future crimes. And as in places where Jessica Fletcher goes, there is plenty of violence for the kids to explore. 

The collection cast a kind of spell over me. The first story involves a disturbing series of murders, but mostly serves to introduce us to our mysterious, unnamed narrator and his classmate Morino. The narrator is outwardly normal, he plays sports and jokes with his classmates, but inside he covets a dark fascination with the macabre. Morino, on the other hand, is outwardly "strange," dressed all in black, she is abrupt with classmates and teachers and completely uninterested in social niceties. In other words, my type. The second story explores the inner mind of a criminal while we learn more about our two central characters. Even though, or perhaps because, it is about a person who cuts off as many hands and paws as he can get away with, this is the silliest story, and I'm not sure if it is always intentional. As here, when the narrator is exploring the criminal's house:

"Each time I left a room, I checked to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything, like my student ID, a uniform button, a textbook, or a sock." 

Student ID I can understand, a uniform button, sure, but already that's weird, but why would he leave behind a textbook? And then: Sock. How would you not notice leaving behind a sock? 

And then later, when the criminal has to go to work knowing that his prized collection of hands has been stolen, he obsesses for half a page over hands and here, the repetition lends humor to the macabre: 

"Hands. Hands. Hands were more important than the other teachers. First, there were hands, and then the human followed. There was no point in talking with the human." 

On the last page, the narrator asks Morino what she would be doing if she had been one of the victims. She considers and replies: "It would be very hard to put on a watch."

However, it is the third story ("Dog") where the collection really kicks into high gear. I would argue this is Otsuichi's best writing in the collection, and from this story on I was captivated. What surprised me was I found it rather moving by the end. I wasn't expecting that at all, given how distant we were from the main characters at the start. 

The collection comes together as a whole towards the end, and what is fascinating is to see that through it all has been planted a surprise that makes sense only at the end. There's a lot more a person educated in Japanese mystery stories could say about this (see: honkaku), but that person isn't me. I will note that I didn't read the afterwards or the bonus story. 

-Michael G. 

Never Touch the Dinosaurs by Rosie Greening; illustrated by Stuart Lynch

Five little dinosaurs get into mischief at school. This interactive board book is perfect for toddlers who will delight in touching the bumpy dinosaurs found on each page while learning to count. More books in the series include: Never Touch the Bugs,  Never Touch the Wild Animals, Never Touch the Sharks and others.

This is also a perfect book to go with this summer's reading challenge, Unearth a Story! Reading a book about dinosaurs to your little one helps complete their reading log faster, which means two special prizes and a raffle ticket for the end-of-summer drawing. Find more information and register your family here. 

-Julie B. 

Riding Magic by Kelly Starling Lyons

 While the gorgeous illustrations in this brief, impactful book are reason enough to savor it, it also illustrates an important life lesson. In it, an adolescent girl from a family of horseback riders overcomes mixed feelings about learning to ride, resulting in a significant developmental milestone.

There is one horse Dom loves to spend time with in her uncle's barn, but she is afraid to ride horses, and she envies the ease with which the other family members do it. It takes the better part of a summer, but after gentle encouragement from her uncle, mother and older sister throughout the summer, she has an unusual dream one night that finally enables her to push through her ambivalence and out of her comfort zone. 

Then, wow! What joy she feels on her first ride! There is no going back. Dom's confidence in herself soars. Her world and her self perception have changed irreversibly; she knows that she and the horse she has been building a friendship with all summer in the barn have now crossed through a special portal. "We can do anything. Even fly through the sky" - she thinks. 

This is a book to inspire readers of any age to try that thing they are longing - but afraid - to do, and to experience the exponential growth in self agency and self esteem that can result.

- Marianne W.

Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane by Lindy West

I don't often choose to pick up nonfiction, but I used to read Lindy's work when she wrote for the website Jezebel, and the release of this book came with a bit of drama that had the internet buzzing for a bit. The upside of that drama is that it made me want to read it myself and form my own opinions, but the downside is that I definitely started reading it with an opinion already half-formed, so let's dig into it!

Adult Braces recounts Lindy's solo road trip across the continental United States in 2021, from her home in Seattle, WA to Key West, FL, and back again. It's a trip outside of her comfort zone, coming in the midst of a deep depression and the realization that when her husband, Aham, told her that they were polyamorous and that they intended to remain so after marrying her, they really meant it. And that's where the source of the drama came from - as Lindy did publicity for the release of Adult Braces, and people started to read the book, folks began to wonder if Lindy had been pressured into a polyamorous relationship (she, Aham, and their third partner, Roya, had come out as a throuple a few years ago), or if this was something she actually wanted.

After reading the book myself, I have to say that I'm unsure. My take on memoirs is that they are, on some level, a conversation between the author and the reader. The author is attempting to not only memorialize something about their life, but to also invite the reader into that life, and asking them to consider how they would react. Lindy also makes that point midway through Adult Braces, when she reveals that Aham was dating not just Roya, but another woman who violated the few guidelines Lindy had put in place when she and Aham had discussed his polyamory:

I could write this book in a way that would make you hate Aham's guts and pity me for staying with him. Or I could write it in a way that makes him sound tortured yet wise and makes me sound like a codependent freak. It's all true. All nonfiction is actually fiction.

Much of Adult Braces is stressful to read, if only because we're in Lindy's head with her. The bits she includes about Aham do make you hate his guts, even if that wasn't her intention, but she also takes her typical self-deprecating humor so far that she manages to come off like a codependent freak. Many of the chapters that don't directly recount her road trip instead focus on her mental health, as she goes through therapy, struggles with her self-esteem, and more. Peppered throughout are moments where Aham pops up, and what she chooses to share, doesn't shine that great of a light on him. From this, it's easy to understand why readers/commentators/social media posters would feel like Lindy was pressured into polyamory, and that Aham would only be into polyamory for all of the wrong reasons. Still, it's also funny in places, which provides some balance against Lindy's overwhelming poor sense of self.

If you're looking for a travelogue, then this isn't the book for you. While Adult Braces is structured around Lindy's road trip, the focus really isn't on the places she visits, though she does recount stories about people she meets along the way, hikes she takes, and so forth. Most of her trip is pretty formulaic - she camps in her ridiculously painted rental camper van or spends the night with friends or family, as she travels southeast to Key West. She doesn't have some huge revelation as she makes her way across the country and back, other than that with distance, she finds that she can think about opening her relationship with Aham to include Roya without feeling an all-consuming panic like she did while she was at home. As she travels alone, she begins to realize that because of her mental health, she was suffocating in a box of her own making, too afraid to try something new, and that fear includes being willing or not willing to take a risk in her relationship to make her partner happy:

Maybe the lesson isn't that I finally learned whether or not I wanted Aham, or Roya, or polyamory, or monogamy, it's that, for once, I ran toward the thing that scared me the most and leapt into an unknown that caught me and made me feel alive again, taught me to trust my instincts again, showed me that what I desire is to feel desire, to feel unafraid, to feel more everything, to be hungry. Maybe that's its own accomplishment, worth celebrating, or at least worth granting some space to breathe, and maybe it's all I can do to take one step at a time deeper and deeper into life.

Now onto what's really important, which is my opinion about the central theme of this memoir: Lindy's attempt to explain why she was finally willing to accept polyamory. My experience is very limited when it comes to romantic relationships, and I don't think I could ever be in an open relationship, but like a lot of other folks on the internet, I feel like there are a lot of red flags here that Lindy is willing to ignore in order to stay with Aham. It doesn't help that by focusing on her internal struggles and avoiding a full recounting of their relationship (admittedly, something we are not owed as readers, but also something that undermines the whole point of committing this to paper), we are left with what little crumbs she gives us, and those crumbs are moldy. There's a point in the story where she shares that she and Aham developed a routine where they would lay in bed together after waking up in the morning and only talk about good things. It's a cute idea, until Lindy explains that this was a routine they only started doing because she would wake up, begin worrying about a bill or task that needed to be done, share that with Aham, and that would cause him to panic, get upset, and then act distant towards her the rest of the day. I thought of that anecdote as I got to the end of the book, when Lindy shares that Roya is so good at taking care of mundane tasks, like paying bills the moment they arrive, or labeling leftovers in the fridge. I couldn't help but to wonder: were they actually building a more stable relationship by adding a third partner that they both share, or did Lindy just get an unpaid personal assistant that Aham has permission to bang with her knowledge (and sometimes her participation)? Perhaps I'm being too reductive by focusing on that.

In conclusion, Adult Braces is at times infuriating and humorous. I'm not sure if I could recommend it as a general recommendation, but if you also caught wind of the drama and are curious to read it and form your own opinions, please do.

P.S. I should note that the next book I read after this one was a monster romance where a wolfman couldn't stop wagging his tail any time he was around the curvy baker, and to be honest, that's the kind of love that we all deserve.

The Second Life of Mirielle West by Amanda Skenandore

Historical fiction - a made up story that is set in the context of actual history - teaches a reader about history while providing the rich satisfaction of an unforgettable novel. This novel published in 2021 scores high on both counts. 

In a previous review for this blog (September 22, 2025) I wrote: The best novelists are able to create a cast of characters who come from vastly different life experiences and are on differing trajectories when their paths cross and lives intertwine within the framework of a compelling story. I'm repeating that here because author Amanda Skenandore achieves this in The Second Life of Mirielle West, a story of a fictional 1920s Los Angeles socialite whose soft and self-centered life is derailed by a devastating personal tragedy followed by the contraction of leprosy. Yes, leprosy. 

With Mirielle, we enter the world of the leper colony - as they were called 100 years ago - and all the horrors endured by residents after they are forcibly admitted by law to what was in fact a real-life institution located outside of New Orleans for more than a century. Founded in 1894 and originally called the Louisiana Leper Home, it was the only hospital in the country that provided care for people with leprosy. Before a cure was developed, the fear and stigma surrounding this illness was ruinous to patients and families.  

The book's fictional characters are drawn skillfully enough that you can't stop thinking about them. Their sorrows and disappointments become yours while you learn about an astonishing chapter of medical history that most of us know very little about. That in itself is a rich payload, delivered in an un-put-downable story. A very worthwhile read as both a satisfying novel and an instructive bit of history.  

-Marianne W.

Esperance by Adam Oyebanji

    What happens when people start randomly coming up drowned... in their own homes... with lungs full of sea water? It is a mystery Ethan is tasked to solve, even now as a Chicago detective down on his luck.

   This book was one of those reads where if you don't think too hard or deep dive into any of the topics, its fun. It was entertaining as a run of the mill mystery, but it was somewhat superficial with the themes it seemed to be exploring even with the sci-fi components. These themes in question seemed to be racism, xenophobia, colonialism, revenge, and reparations... among others. 

    I will give it its flowers though, because there were many instances where it was somewhat funny and snarky with its dialogue, only so effective because of the context surrounding the characters. There was also sapphic relationship that was progressing over the course of the book, which was an unexpected touch.

    All in all, it wasn't the most groundbreaking read, but it's nice if you want a sci-fi mystery to keep you entertained for a while. Give the book a try and let me know how it goes!

- Leo

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

 

    "Half of a Yellow Sun" is a story driven by the lives of everyday people who are torn apart by a war, finding ways to not lose any more parts of themselves. The book takes place during the Nigerian-Biafran War from 1967-1970.

    It follows primarily three characters: Olanna, an Igbo woman with roots from a wealthy family who has moved in with her university professor lover; Ugwu, a boy from a village hired as a servant boy for both Olanna and her lover; and Richard, a white man from England who strives to be a writer and is the lover of Olanna's sister. 

    Each one of our characters has similar, yet drastically different circumstances because of their identities. We watch as they see the horrors of the war unfold. We watch as they begin to face these horrors on. We watch as they find everything under the yellow sun they can cling to to fight these horrors off. 

The books is elegantly written and is a classic among Nigerian literature, making beautiful and insightful commentary about race, ethnic disputes, politics, war, and class. I'll share my favorite line of the book that made me bust into tears when I read it, as I feel it perfectly encompasses the effect of war, especially in relation to the title:

"Darkness descended on him, and when it lifted, he knew he would never see _______ again, and that his life would always be a candlelit room; he would see things only in shadow, only in half glimpses..." 

Please give this book a read and let me know what you think!

- Leo

Necessary Fiction by Eloghosa Osunde

    Necessary Fiction is a story of stories taking place in Lagos, Nigeria all centering around a group of queer individuals. Queerness is something still somewhat taboo in Nigeria, so to see the community, love, and experiences of the group is a beautiful spectacle. Some of the stories even involve a more spiritual component, pulling from Nigerian myth and lore.

    The book scurries across multiple perspectives while also juggling nonlinear storytelling, often going back in time. Each chapter follows a different person within the group, with some being revisited after time has passed.

    I think this book was entertaining, but longer than it needed to be. Some of the sections could've been reduced or didn't need to be there, but were still compelling nonetheless. Some of the characters also seemed to try very hard to seem interesting, which given the circumstances, I kind of understand. But my biggest gripe was the fact that many of the parents of the queer folks.... were also queer? Almost all of them. I found that very strange.

    All in all though, the book was engaging and beautiful, with the primary luster coming from the love woven between the relationships, until it becomes a manifestation within the self. Check this book out if you're looking for any queer black stories, especially those of African origin!

- Leo

I Want to Be a Vase by Julio Torres, illus. by Julian Glander

 With its bold, aspiring statement title, humorously quotidian central figure, and vibrant digital 3D art, I Want to Be a Vase is a fascinating creation. It concerns what happens when a toilet plunger decides one day that it wants to be a vase. Confusion among the other objects in the apartment ensues, with the vacuum cleaner the loudest naysayer. 

The plunger's determination to become its own version of a vase frees other objects to explore more meaningful work: The stove pot wants to hold trash, the mirror wants to be a pillow ("a sharp, breakable, dangerous pillow!"), and the mug wants to be light (just light, not a lamp). 

The vacuum looses its innards over the perceived chaos, but eventually comes around when it realizes that when everyone has a job they are happy with, its own work can be accomplished faster and easier. 

It's a playful, nuanced story about self-actualization. Reading it to a class of children, I found it to be a little wordy and sly, worth really sitting with and exploring its ideas one-on-one, but I was delighted by the children's observations. One normally very sleepy and quiet boy observed of the first three pages (a view of a city at the foot of a mountain range; the city; the window in an apartment building) that what it was doing "was like a movie," which really seemed sophisticated for a five-year-old. At the end of the story, the Book itself tells the reader it would love to be a hat, and so we took turns with the students trying on different looks, which was a really fun way to end story time. 

-Michael G.