Book reviews from the staff at the Ferguson Public Library! Check out what we're reading and what we think about it below.
The Scarecrow is a beautiful book for autumn reading. Scarecrow does his job very well and as a result is very lonely because no birds or animals go near him. But everything changes when a young bird falls out of his nest. Scarecrow snaps his pole so he can bend down and save the little crow. They become fast friends but what will happen in the winter when the crow flies south? Will he ever come back? Read this book to find out what happens.
-Julie B.
A Spoonful of Frogs is a humorous story about a witch who is making her favorite witch’s brew, frog soup, for her TV show. Everything goes wrong when she attempts to catch her last ingredient on a spoon: frogs. She chases frogs throughout the town. Will she ever finish her witch’s brew?
With colorful and bright illustrations this book will delight children of all ages.
-Julie B.
It's the day before Halloween. The moon has been so bright, the colorful autumn leaves are covering the sidewalks. I'm gonna be honest, I have not been doing much heavy lifting when it comes to my nightly reading.
I turned back to a childhood favorite, a book that captures the spooky, exhilarating atmosphere of Halloween night as a child. I loved the Goosebumps series as a kid but nostalgia doesn't completely blunt my brain to the fact that most of these books are, well, crap. However, there are diamonds in the rough. Or at least mica.
The Haunted Mask has one of Stine's best protagonists in Carly Beth Caldwell, a timid eleven-year-old. Her friends delight in terrifying their jumpy friend, but their frequent teasing and elaborate pranks hurt and embarrass her. Resentment compounds, and she decides that in order to avenge herself she wants to scare the worst offenders, her "friends" Chuck and Steve.
Fresh from a humiliating prank in front of the entire school, Carly Beth gathers her life savings ($30, or about $70 today!) and rushes to the new party store down the street where she bypasses the gorilla (made with "real hair," the shopkeeper says), vampire, werewolf. None are scary enough! But wait, what's in this backroom?
Stine goes crazy describing these weird masks behind a creaking door: "A hairy black rat's head poked up from a knot in the hair, the rat's eyes gleaming like two dark jewels." Another one has what appear to be "chunks of rotting skin" falling off, "revealing gray bone underneath. An enormous black insect, some kind of grotesque beetle, poked out from between the green-and-yellow decayed teeth." Carly Beth goes for one with less animal life present and practically has to beg the shopkeeper to let her buy it.
When she gets home, she tries it on to scare her little brother: "It was surprisingly warm inside. The mask fit tighter than Cary Beth had imagined. It had a funny smell, kind of sour, kind of old, like damp newspapers that have been left for years in an attic or garage." Ick! Despite the warmth and mildew stench, or perhaps because of it, wearing the mask makes Carly Beth feel different. More powerful. Fierce.
Mean, even.
The anger that she was already feeling about being picked on, being seen as babysish and boring, gathers in overwhelming force when she's wearing the mask. It inspires her to act out in ways that are decidedly unlike the old Cary Beth.
Acta Psychologica published an article last fall about the effect of mask-wearing on the mind, specifically the increase in malevolent creativity. "As a dark facet of creativity, malevolent creativity refers to the intentional use of novel ideas or ways to harm others, damage property, disrupt social order, or undermine cultural values." We see this play out with Carly Beth. She revels in terrifying trick-or-treaters and pelting green apples at houses. When confronted by one mom she thinks: "I'm going to tear this woman apart!"
But how much of this is Carly Beth, and how much is coming from the mask? And when the night is over, will she be able to take the hideous face off?
The book's a blast and the descriptions of Halloween night are so evocative, it brings me back to being a kid in my homemade costume and the thrill of roamin' in the gloamin', pretending to be something I wasn't for one night, and the sense that something magical could happen.
Happy Halloween!
-Michael G.
Perhaps - if you are of a certain age - you may recall the 1964 Disney movie of this name. The novel by British writer Mary Stewart was published in 1962.
This lyrically written novel opens with Nicola ("Nikki") Ferris, an attractive young British woman employed as a secretary at the British Embassy in Athens, having arrived on the island of Crete - today a popular tourist destination but at the time of this novel's publication it was not yet developed as such. Therefore Nicola's arrival is viewed as somewhat of an intrusion by the island residents. She is there to spend a holiday with her Aunt Frances, a London botanist who wants to collect some of the island's native plants.
Before meeting up with Frances - who is not due to arrive until the next day - Nikki runs into trouble around which the story then unfolds. Up in the hills, away from town she encounters a young Englishman named Mark Langley who has been shot and whose condition is deteriorating while he is hiding in an old church. The church is being guarded by a Greek man simply called Lambis, who right away arouses suspicion. Despite that, Nikki's first and unrelenting instinct is to help her fellow Brit survive his assault, and she happens to have the necessary first aid skills and a brain for improvisation in a less than ideal setting for this kind of challenge. In doing so, she learns that Mark's teenage brother Colin was kidnapped in the assault on Mark, who now fears that Colin has been murdered. Once medically stable, Mark warns Nikki to go on with her vacation plans and forget ever having met him and Lambis. But of course she cannot. She becomes more deeply involved in an increasingly dangerous escapade that leads to a breathtaking conclusion.
In producing the Moon-Spinners film, Walt Disney took numerous liberties with Stewart's plot, simplifying it for young movie-goers of the 1960s and changing some of the characters' roles. So even if you saw the movie, the novel is well worth reading as it differs in so many ways from the Disney creation. Since I had seen the movie at age nine and had retained only a vague and enthralling impression of dazzling water, danger and suspense, and a plucky heroine played by a luminous young Hayley Mills - and the magic of the film's name itself - most of the characters and every turn of the plot were new to me.
Stewart's gifts include an ability to create interesting problems, complex characters, compelling plots, evocative and even transportive descriptions of unique and unspoiled places and cultures, and a skill for making a reader feel the physical sensations and emotions experienced by her characters. The Moon-Spinners enabled me to feel variously the island's cool sea breezes, the joy of exploring a new place, the sensation of a cool drink trickling down the throat at the end of a hot, adventurous afternoon, as well as the terror of being chased by a villain into a trap in the middle of the night. Meanwhile the complex plot is tightly constructed, with every detail explained plausibly.
It was pure coincidence that coworker Michael and I were both reading our first Mary Stewart novels at the same time. Feeling equally enthusiastic about this writer, a joint review of these two novels seemed called for. As for the title of this one, you will have to read the novel to learn its meaning.
- Marianne W.
My friend Maggie got this for me on a whim, thinking I'd appreciate the pulpy cover art and a mystery set in a remote convent. I brought it to work for my lunch break and Marianne said she was reading a Mary Stewart book, too!
Our intrepid hero Jennifer leaves her cloistered home in England to visit her cousin in an actual cloister in the French Pyrenees. However, when she arrives she is told that her cousin is dead! The details don't add up, but trying to find out what is the truth leads her into a dangerous mystery.
I found this to be a diverting romantic thriller. The writing drew me in quickly--there is some really beautiful description of nature, like this, when Jennifer first hears the bells of the convent:
"She heard, floating out of the thyme-laden wind, the silver sound of a bell. She tilted her head to listen, smiling, her whole being pierced, rinsed through, tingling with a keen delight."
Also, on the other end of the spectrum, humorous descriptions of English tourists, like here: "Miss Moon dug into her trout with the dogged efficiency and artistic appreciation of a bulldozer."
Sensuality and celibacy are ever at odds in a convent story (I had Black Narcissus on mute while I finished this), and Stewart finds a way to show both the romance and the twisted through the story of a beautiful orphan being raised by the sisters. For romance, we have a fiery Spainard astride a sweaty stallion. On the twisted side, we have the convent's bursar Doña Francisca, a super fun character. The Mother Superior refuses to let her take the vow but she still dresses like a nun, only her black robes are silk and her crucifix is bejeweled. Immediately, Jennifer distrusts her. There is a fantastic description of Doña Francisca polishing candlesticks:
"The bursar, who sat above Celeste in what must be the priest's chair, was polishing one of the candlesticks from the altar, her long fingers loving each curve, as they caressed, rather than rubbed it, into brightness. But she was not watching what she was doing; her eyes were fixed on the down-bent head of the girl."
Staring at the beautiful girl while positioned in the masculine seat of authority, practically masturbating a phallic object. "Maybe," Jennifer lamely posits later to Celeste, "She's trying to live through you?"
Sure, Jennifer.
This, and another element that is revealed later in the mystery, seem to be too risque or disturbing for Stewart to fully explore in 1957, but the undercurrents are still fascinating.
-Michael G.
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor is a professor of history at Smith College. She is also the biracial daughter of the late comedian and actor, Richard Pryor, whose raw, acerbic observations of life for Black Americans were enormously popular some fifty years ago. Her new book Something We Said is a memoir of life with her father as well as an account of her own often unsettling coming-of-age experiences. It had me reflecting on the everyday difficulties of being a biracial American, even when you have an internationally famous father.
In on-stage comedy performances and on Grammy award winning record albums, Richard Pryor's unfiltered use of what later came to be referred to as "the n-word" was a jarring thing in the 1970s and 80s. It set the word loose in the culture, in a way for which there had been no precedent. The ubiquitous use of the n-word in RAP and hip hop music would likely not have occurred had not Richard Pryor thrown it down to white America in a way no other Black American had ever done.
Elizabeth, though, could not embrace the word in the casual-seeming way her father had. Hearing it in any context made her flinch. The comedian's trademark use of the word became an uncomfortable legacy for his daughter. How did she deal with it, then? She made it her business to grapple with the word's implications, exploring them in a scholarly methodical way, writing about them for publication, reflecting on her own experience, presenting the topic in a TED talk, and bringing the word up for discussion in her history courses at Smith. That latter activity didn't usually go well, and often left the professor feeling shaken and newly vulnerable.
In all her explorations and in examining her father's notebooks after his death - the notebooks in which he developed comedy ideas - she finds that his use of the n-word was not as casual for Pryor as he made it seem.
Richard Pryor suffered enormously during the first and last decades of his life. He grew up in an environment no child should experience, witnessing things no child should see. By his mid-40s he was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. In between those decades his star rose quickly before he became very debilitated by illness. He died in 2005 at age 65. Something We Said left me with a deeper appreciation of who he was: his complexity, personal conflicts, raw honesty and courage, his tenderness and vulnerabilities, his generosity to everyone around him, and above all his originality.
Pryor was a much more serious man than his public image suggested. He had learned as a child that a way to cut through family tension was to make people laugh. As an adult he used this awareness to cut through the nation's racial tensions.
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor and her father each made it their life's work to unearth the hostile legacy of the n-word, taking a microscope to the word's past and current implications. I think her dad would be proud that she carried on his work in her own, inquisitive way. Something We Said is historically informative while the intimate details of this father's and daughter's lives make compelling reading.
-Marianne W.
After reading about wolves, Moka the dog decides he would like to be a wolf. He was very bored with his life, so one day he runs away. At first he feels very free. But what will happen when he gets hungry and night falls? This is a very charming book about freedom and finally appreciating the comforts of home.
-Julie B.
What a year for #TradWifeHorror! Sarah Langan's Trad Wife is the latest in a series of horror novels tackling the glossy, conservative influencer/lifestyle trend. I wondered if by October I would feel fatigued by the theme, but boy am I glad I gave this one a shot, because this is by far the best take on the theme that I've read this year.
I haven't read Sarah Langan before, but this book was blurbed by Paul Tremblay, Grady Hendrix, Mariana Enriquez, and Sarah Pinborough, all authors I admire. Also, Alma Katsu was a first reader for this book, and her novel The Hunger is excellent historical horror (a supernatural twist on The Donner Party).
Trad Wife opens with an ambiguously ominous scene set in 2020 before introducing us to our main character, a New York journalist. Jenny Kaplan goes viral for a personal essay and then just as swiftly is cancelled for the same revelations that made her famous. A chance to get her career back on its feet comes when a beautiful, charming influencer spreading the gospel of "traditional family values" from her Pennsylvania farm invites her to write a feature.
And here, Langan gives us a nuanced portrayal of the appeal of influencers and trad wifes. From the perspective of Jenny's sister, Melissa, a lonely Jersey housewife; two women sinking into debt after falling for the pernicious allure of Mia's pyramid scheme; and even Jenny herself, we can empathize with the comfort that comes from being seen, even if it is parasocial and illusory.
Because so many people are lonely. In her own career, Jenny has learned the grim necessity of self-reliance. "There are no guardrails. There is only you." However, life has taught her the value of helping other women: "There's a rule, an unspoken code: At parties and bars, at backyard barbecues and bathrooms at long-haul rest stops, when a woman asks another woman for help, she has to give it." From a combination of these beliefs, she agrees to stay at Black Swan Farm for a week. She feels compelled to stay with Mia out of a sense that she may need outside assistance.
That same sense of being "seen" that was so comforting takes on a predatory feel as Jenny's stay at Black Swan Farm lengthens. She has increasingly disturbing dreams, she starts losing her hair, and are there words in the yellow wallpaper?? As she observes more concering details about Mia's life, she also grapples with her own life choices and relationships with people.
This is such an original story, but references horror classics like The Yellow Wallpaper; The King in Yellow; and the OG Trad Wives, The Stepford Wives. I loved this book. Highly recommend.
-Michael G.
-Julie B.
-Julie B.
"The pestilence cooked away pretense and showed people's souls, as surely as it eventually showed their bones."
While the Black Death stalks Europe, a disgraced knight joins a strange young girl and a wine-sodden priest on a heaven-sent quest. I found this an immensely satisfying read, well-told and moving. The characters are well-developed, the plot compelling, and the writing of the interstitial parts with their Biblical overtone evocative.When it begins, you can't tell if the horrors our characters start to hear about are exaggerated Dark Age superstition or supernatural forces until an actual river monster appears, followed soon after by a visitation from a wheezing, bleeding Saint Sebastian. Each chapter is progressively more harrowing as our characters meet a succession of demonic forces and witness the devastation of a plague that makes 2020 seem positively cozy by comparison.
In a way, the book felt like an Odyssey-inspired video game set in the medieval times, a hellish road trip story with rest stops designed by Hieronymus Bosch.
-Michael G.
-Julie B.
-Julie B.
-Julie B.
When new neighbor, Nelly Gnu pays a visit to Llama Llama’s house, Llama Llama must learn how to share his toys. But when Nelly Gnu starts to play with Llama Llama’s Fuzzy Llama, there is dolly drama! Llama Llama has decided he doesn’t want to share anymore. Will Llama Llama learn to share his doll? Perfect book for young children learning to share.
-Julie B.
Appropriately, I finished Sanctuary around five in the morning between two of the last blazing hot days in August. A few years ago I tried and failed to read Absalom, Absalom! but really wanted to give Faulkner another chance after watching Paul Newman simmer through The (very Tennessee Williams-influenced, very Hollywood) Long, Hot Summer. The poster for that barks: "The people of Faulkner...the language of Faulkner...the world of Faulkner!" Well, that's a gross over-simplification.
While Sanctuary's more straight-forward plot is accessible, his writing still caused me to trip in a way his Nobel Prize in Literature still doesn't convince THIS humble Missourian is entirely artistic and intentional. It gives the impression of a disorienting, kleidoscopic whirl, where not even the characters speaking to each other in the same world seem to be able to connect. Or maybe that was the moonshine.
The plot is gripping, though, and frightening. It concerns Temple Drake, a college girl who hops from dances with collegiate boys to car dates with the townies. After one of her dates drunkenly crashes his car on the way to a bootlegger, Temple is stranded among dissolute lowlifes in a ruined plantation house. The following events are nightmarish and the novel deals unflinchingly with the aftermath. It's honestly still a shocking, disturbing read, full of sex, violence, and the thankless struggle for justice and love. If you want a "cleaned up" version, the first movie adaptation with Miriam Hopkins is fantastic: The Story of Temple Drake.
-Michael G.
Recommended to me, if you can call such a dubious statement, with: "Can I show you an illustration I think is hot but might make you think I'm messed up?" Nameless is a nightmare-logic horror story, mostly set in space in an alien prison, but also in haunted minds and a Victorian house of occult abominations.
A layered, existential Lovecraftian story without actual Lovecraft, Morrison draws instead from myths and writings that originated pre-Lovecraft and may also have inspired the master of cosmic horror. It's frightening, disturbing, and the illustrations are excellent. This vision of an omnipotent, invisible lifeform polluting minds and threatening "eternal agonizing torture in a cosmic concentration camp" is a terrifying version of Christian God.
- Michael G.
Rhyming text about a clam who loses her pearl in the ocean. Mr. Fish tries to help her find the pearl but there is one problem: he is afraid of the dark and the further he swims down the ocean, the darker it gets. Will he be able to save the day and brave the dark to find Ms. Clam’s pearl? Read this whimsical book to find out.
-Julie B.
Terry has big dreams and a lot of hats to go with his them including a football helmet, a painter’s beret, and a scientist’s hat, among others. When everyone tells Terry he can only do one thing, Terry proves them wrong. Read this book to find out what Terry does!
-Julie B.
-Julie B.
"One Leg on Earth" is a novel centered around a girl who has freshly moved from her home town to the larger city of Lagos, Nigeria after having earned an internship at the construction center for a new development called "Omi City". She is quite anti-social, struggling to find the way to connect to others and be grounded in her own life. Everything takes a turn when she becomes pregnant.... at the same time as pregnant women are mysteriously being overcome with the urge to take their own life.
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...
"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
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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
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.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo realizes on the first day of senior year that what she wants, more than anything, is her forty-year-old creative writing teacher. Her attraction to him is sparked by his honesty, his frank admission of disappointment in the way his life has turned out. It seems so unlike the evasions and defenses of everyone else she knows. His fine lines, his paunch, even his B.O excite her more than the slim bodies, pouty lips, and floppy hair of her previous lovers. Her pursuit of him is relentless.
Former child actor Jennette McCurdy made waves with her best-selling memoir I'm Glad My Mom Died and Half His Age is her debut novel. By its very premise and aggressive/suggestive cover, it aims to shock and discomfort.
As soon as I heard about it on the New York Times podcast I placed a hold and once it was available I read it in three sittings over the course of 24 hours. It's bitingly funny, sad, and thrilling. Waldo dispatches love, boys, her absent mother (who hops from man to man pathologically) with swift and merciless humor, and she herself is not immune from her own cynical judgement. Her binge-eating junk food until it hurts ("I've always derived a strange pleasure from the pain of junk food. Icees vacuumed up through a straw in less than a minute so the brain freeze hits hard. Nachos packed with so many pickled jalapenos that my nose runs. Kettle chips heaped into my mouth, my hand a claw excavator, forcing them in as their rugged edges cut my gums.") and filling online carts with fast fashion she knows she'll never wear are cyclical coping mechanisms for the loneliness and disconnect she feels.
There is something in Waldo that is akin to the (anti-)heroines of Otessa Moshfegh's Eileen and unnamed protagonist of My Year of Rest and Relaxation: Disaffected and lonely, with an intelligence and humor that eviscerates.
Will Waldo get what she wants? What does she want, really? McCurdy mixes a blend of unhinged and seductive to comic effect, creating a character and a voice full of desire and rage that is completely her own.
-Michael G.
After Catherine unilaterally decides to open her marriage, the Floyd family descends into chaos, involving multiple over-the-top scandals, each fit for an episode of a zany tv show.
With its rapid fire wit and colorful characters in a harbor town, this family comedy shares DNA with the cartoon Bob's Burgers. The father fumbles his good intentions, the fabulous mother loves her booze, the daughters are fearless, wacky, and brilliant. There's even a larger-than-life billionaire villain. One of the side characters I loved was "War Crimes Wes," the veteran boyfriend of the eldest daughter who is a staunchly adoring man with no imagination and something like Crohn's Disease, which gives him a pained stoicism everyone immediately respects. Each chapter focuses on the perspective of one character, usually rotating among the family members, but including others, like Wes.
Though the Floyds share a house, they each live largely separate lives. It is satisfying and lovely to see how they meet up in the end in a patchwork sort of way that affirms what a healthy family looks like.
-Michael G.
Thirteen-year-old Lucas Dubois - so named because he was found in the woods as an infant (dubois meaning "of the woods") - lives in an orphanage. Daily life is routine and tedious, everyone is always hungry, and a couple of the other boys are a constant menace to him. After he gets a job delivering produce to local institutions in his small French village, however, the quality of his life begins to change dramatically. The people this lonely boy encounters and the relationships he builds outside of the orphanage begin to elevate a life that had previously seemed to hold very little promise.
The German occupiers in his village have imposed a suffocating stranglehold on everyday life. On his vegetable delivery rounds, Lucas begins to see things that disturb him. He sometimes hears secrets discussed among adults who don't always notice this quiet boy as he makes the daily deliveries. Before long, he has seen and heard enough to compel him to join the underground resistance to the Nazis. The more deeply this resourceful boy gets involved in subterfuge, the more dangerous life becomes.
The Lion's Run is categorized for readers aged 8 to 12. A good story is a good story however, and this suspenseful and beautifully written novel has a universal appeal not restricted to age.
I have read many novels about the Second World War and I have hiked mountain trails on the French side of the German-French border, where some of that war's most vicious conflicts were carried out and where barbed wire, stone and iron remnants of it are still prominent along the mountain trails. In this novel I learned more than I ever knew about the Germans' systematically brutal and exploitive treatment of the French during that war. Moreover I found unsettling echoes of some of the worldwide threats on today's horizons: the rise of racial supremacy sentiments in both the US and Europe, fears about people's safety, the official aggressions, detainments and deportations of people the government deems undesirable, the increasing US use of government surveillance on citizens, and the race-based pronatalism expressed by white supremacists. There are echoes of The Handmaid's Tale in this novel, as the Germans under Hitler were indoctrinated that "boy babies are only future soldiers and girls are only future mothers of more soldiers." Therefore in order to replenish the German population, during this military occupation thousands of teenage French girls were systematically romanced and impregnated by German soldiers and then separated from their babies.
In an echo of that human predicament, even the poor orphanage cat - "a good mouser" - was immediately, forlornly separated from the kittens she bore each year - though for the opposite purpose. I also learned things about horses I'd never known, and fell deeply for one particularly winning horse in this novel.
After extraordinary twists and turns, the book concludes with an ending that is triumphant for Lucas and sad for other characters. The story's end is a new beginning for him, leaving him with much more confidence in himself and his future.
This is a book I didn't want to be done with. I want a sequel!
-Marianne W.
From award-winning librarian and the new host of Reading Rainbow comes this delightful book celebrating inclusion and the wonders of the public library. The colorfully illustrated book explores all that the library has to offer, including not only books but cooking classes, gardening classes, board games, musical instruments and of course, story time! This book will appeal to children 3+.
-Julie B.
-Julie B.
