Woodman delivers a gripping exploration of war's unending shadow through the lives of two men from opposite sides of global history: Nick Mitchel, a veteran mourning his wife’s death from cancer, and Junichi Takahashi, a World War II survivor grappling with his father’s recent demise. When their respective losses lead them both to the Pacific lagoon known as Truk—a vacation spot for divers that once had been a major Japanese naval base and a theater of much terror and sorrow—a fated encounter between the men forces each to confront the brutal reality of their conflicted pasts. "When does a war actually end?" Nick asks, pondering the perpetual conflict that blurs the lines between the oppressor and the oppressed.

For Nick, Japan was the aggressor. For Junichi, though, his family was undeserving of the hell they endured at the hands of America. Woodman excels in portraying the psychological toll of war when Junichi realizes the possible involvement of Nick in the bombing of his father's ship decades ago, and neither can bring himself to cast the blame aside. Through heart-wrenching narration of Nick's nightmares and haunting visions of his dead comrades during his dives to shipwrecks, Woodman deftly captures the moral dilemmas and guilt that so often follow a confrontation with the long-term impact of our actions, avoiding common pitfalls of romanticizing and dehumanizing soldiers' experiences. "That's the way all wars are fought, by brave, naive young people who don't know what they are doing, but follow orders well."

While the lengthy dialogues at times feel contrived—characters often become overly confessional in their war experiences—the novel offers rich historical insights on the attack on Truk in particular but also, more broadly, the overlooked reality of the costs of war. Trauma lingers, hate perpetuates, soldiers are shell-shocked, bodies are often unrecovered, and survivors are displaced and deprived of food and shelter. Woodman’s empathy and insight will move readers to tears.

Takeaway: A war veteran and a war survivor seek closure from WWII's attack on Truk.

Comparable Titles: Jess Wright’s A Stream to Follow, Gail Tsukiyama’s The Street of a Thousand Blossoms.

Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A-
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A-

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Leung continues the Adventures of Princess Ramele and Prince Peter series in this enchanting second adventure, which finds the heroes embarking on an underwater quest with wizards, knights, fairies, and merpeople. When the young sea dragon Ryoya and his sister, Hoshiko, are poisoned by polluted sea water, their mother's rage over her children's brush with death stirs a cataclysmic tsunami around the land of Porqueh. With the aid of the wizard, Mervyn, and the newest merguide, Clarissa, Ramele and Peter are tasked with finding the ingredients to a magical recipe that will heal both the sea dragons, Ryoya and Hoshiko. But how to obtain such fantastical items as a song from a dolphin, a snippet of a rain cloud, and a drop of hot lava from an active volcano?

As that quest suggests, Leung writes imaginative, playful fantasy that emphasizes clever character and even some educational elements—readers will pick up knowledge about volcanoes and ocean life. As the young royals plunge into an aquatic world of supernatural creatures, Leung employs a fluctuating timeline to explore the perspectives of all the main players, building tension and mystery as everyone tries to piece together what is causing the volatile disturbance in the sea. The world building and character development is magical, and young readers will enjoy how each character has a unique strength that pushes the plot forward in imaginative ways. Also inviting: the crisp, brisk, prose and chapter-heading images reminiscent of stained glass.

Through friendship and heroic rescues, this adventure tackles environmental issues and the importance of diversity and working together as a community, all without slowing narrative momentum. These resonant themes, in Leung’s deft hands, are like buried gems, waiting to be discovered—what stands out most, here, is the author and characters’ love of storytelling itself. This will delight fans of friendly fantasy fun with magic and an ensemble cast of supernatural beings.

Takeaway: Fun, fantastical adventure filled with mermaids, fairies, and sea dragons.

Comparable Titles: Clare Harlow's Tide Magic, A.M. Luzzader’s A Mermaid in Middle Grade.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A-

Click here for more about The Adventures of Princess Ramele and Prince Peter, Vol. 2

The title of Gül’s energetic, esoteric dystopian novel, the first entry in The Hypostasis of Dissent duology, means, in English, “I will not serve,” and that spirit of resistance powers the storytelling as a pair of revolutionaries denounces a world of violence. In the fascist city-state of Vencenza, Governor Crescenzo Zuane De Tullia declares himself infallible, bases his regime on lies, oversees a corrupt judicial system and City Guard, and disappears citizens without a trace. Any sign of emotion is outlawed. Visiting the Hanging Gardens of executed citizens, Giorgianna Damiani’s cold but practical mother announces, “Nothing is worth it.” Girogianna copes with bulimia and cutting herself. As a young woman, Giorgianna witnesses the murder of her beloved friend Emanuela, but the incident is covered up.

Vowing to secure justice for Emanuela, Girogianna admires the notorious revolutionary known as The Bauta, who dares to ask, “What moral principle is possessed by this order for which it should stand to be preserved?” As that suggests, Gül brings to this fantasy high seriousness, pointedly archaic prose, and inventive vocabulary that will put off some readers—a typical chapter opens “The gondola rocked to a nauseating halt along the arborescent venules”—but those on its wavelength will find dark pleasures: the impeccable worldbuilding is enticing, the wretched but resolute characters’ cause just, and the plot expansive.

Gül explicitly reveals how such a reprehensible and corrupt state brings out innate cruelty in most, but in Giorgianna and Bauta, who is actually the violinist Cesare, there remains a spark of hope and urgency in a plan to infiltrate the ministerial offices and topple the government. A playwright turned sex worker, Giorgianna questions Bauta’s use of violence, but he declares, “I fail to see how a man like Crescenzo Zuane De Tullia would respond to any language but the one he speaks most fluently.” Astute, immersive, grotesque, yet always bold and boasting serious moral weight, Gül’s complex gothic will entrance and edify readers who relish the challenge.

Takeaway: A challenging but immersive gothic tale of revolutionaries battling a dystopian state.

Comparable Titles: Christopher Buehlman, Nick Harkaway.

Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A

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Pulsing with tense flashbacks,complex relationships of friendship and romance, jolting revelations, and the fate of a vicious bully, this layered and haunting thriller from Gunhus (author of The Torment Of Rachel Ames) smartly plumbs past and present and guilt and justice. Twenty years after the death of fifteen-year-old Wyatt Bucks rocked the river town of Chambers, a group of now-adult friends who believed that Bucks “deserved what he got and got what he deserved” face a reluctant "twisted reunion,” as an anonymous text draws them all back together to a cabin from their childhood. Mitch Ansel, Dan Coates, Kelly-Ann Baldwin, Lauren Renner, and Rick Wilson all know what really happened to Wyatt Bucks on that bridge when they were 13 because they are the responsible parties. After making a pact to keep the secret—and to always meet up if one of them decided to tell the truth—they come together to face the possibility that one of them has decided it's time to come clean. Or that’s what they think.

Often chilling, as Bucks's ghost plagues the protagonists’ dreams and possibly their waking hours, too, Blood Lasts Forever is a non-stop, heart-pounding mystery that develops at a breakneck speed even as it takes trauma seriously. Teasing out the truth of what went down between the “Fab Five” and Wyatt Bucks in the days leading up to his death, Gunhus juxtaposes adolescent reasoning and growing pains with the responsibilities and moral values that the cast matured into as adults.

Gunhus does an excellent job of contrasting victims and villains and blurring the lines of which characters truly fit those roles. Eager to put the past behind them, yet still grappling with the trauma of what they have done, the five all have reason to feel distrustful—not only of each other, but also of the possibility that someone else may know their secret. Morally gray characters and thoughtful coming-of-age drama power this strong, genre-blending thriller.

Takeaway: Tense, haunted thriller of five friends reunited 20 years after a shocking death.

Comparable Titles: Joshilyn Jackson’s Never Have I Ever, Karen M. McManus’s One of Us is Lying.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

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In 1986, Jessie Grandier III, a Black Harvard graduate with grand film ambitions, wakes up in a dingy, roach-infested apartment, a far cry from his once-promising future. He spirals down when slapped with an eviction notice. Desperate, he calls his father for financial help— "the only thing [he] had worth wanting"— but gets rejected. Later, the TV company he works with faces layoffs, leaving him no recourse but to pursue his career as an artist, something he had long believed he wanted more than anything else: "That he would make beauty from nothing. That he would be more than a mere man."

Gaiter (author of Bourbon Street) presents an uncompromising, incisive story of the will to create, told with rich and urgent prose, juxtaposing Jessie's memories of a bittersweet Louisiana childhood—frequent escapades with friends, abuse at the hands of his father, and last moments with his mother—with the hard realities of adulthood as a Black and gay artist in an America hostile to such people. The narrative pulses through Jessie's psyche, choices, and experiences (like an acid trip at Harvard and a hookup in a Greenwich Village gay bar), illuminating the mind and heart of a man who admires Bach, Mingus, Ellington, and Henry Threadgill for managing to “successfully hide their humanity behind” their art. Jessie’s alienation is evoked with precision: he faces a “human realm from which he stood apart, by design, by nature, by whose fault?” Despite such passages, the narrative is alive with dark humor, striking detail, and urgent sociocultural analysis, magpied into a compelling portrait of Jessie's ambitions—"he imagined himself a life worthy of projection.”

Gaiter defies conventional prose to offer a lyrical narrative that is both tender in recollection and brutal in anger, drawing out a nuanced character in his mid-life crisis, and whose life is made complex by race, sexuality, familial expectations, and personal ambitions. The novel’s challenges and charged insights will reward those fascinated by the pain and work of self-invention.

Takeaway: Urgent novel of art, creation, race, and sexuality in Reagan-era America.

Comparable Titles: Raven Leilani’s Luster, Henry Threadgill’s Easily Slip into Another World.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

Click here for more about A Memory of Fictions (or) Just Tiddy-Boom

Dee (author of The Dirt Girl) gives middle-grade readers a stealth science lesson wrapped in a lively and engaging tale of derring-do. Thirteen-year-old Myles is a typical middle-grader—until he suddenly starts seeing words and emotions visually as energy. When Myles’ friend Sally Munson wears a distinctive pair of purple pants to school, his ability to see emotions as fireballs or soft love is ignited. He struggles to accept and understand his new powers—aided by Sally and a series of boxes Myles’s late grandmother to be given to Myles as he celebrates his thirteenth birthday. Myles comes to realize that humans have a responsibility to bring happiness to others, even those they’ve never met, with Sally helping to prove the truth of the statement.

Dee skillfully conveys basic tenets of quantum physics as she powers readers through the fast-paced story. The author also shows the simple power of kindness and what a difference it can make in a peer who is struggling. Myles proves this when he befriends Lucy, a girl from an often-moving military family. ”We also have a responsibility to not spread misery,” the protagonist opines, with wise words readers will learn from. “And you can’t fake it, because energy is real. You are affecting people around you even when you don’t know it. We need to learn to become aware of our own energy and to contain or control it.” This is tangible advice to readers who may be unconvinced of their important places in the world.

Dee deftly makes the unusual and offbeat believable, with characters who engender loyalty. Skillful plotting and lively prose power readers through the pages, eager to find out the next step in Myles’ complicated destiny. Impatient readers won’t be happy to find that this tale ends on a tantalizing cliffhanger, but they’ll be eagerly awaiting the next installment.

Takeaway: Imaginative adventure emphasizing kindness, inclusion, and quantum physics.

Comparable Titles: Aimee Lucido’s Emmy in the Key of Code, Gordon Korman’s The Unteachables.

Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: B+

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With an emphasis on financial freedom, Duniec’s enlightening debut offers an introduction to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency investing, presenting an historical account of the invention and rise of crypto, a look to its possible future, an introduction to monetary policy, and much practical guidance. Duniec presents this information using a narrative structure, telling the story of a fictional crypto-curious everyinvestor named Roger. Through these eyes, readers get clear breakdowns of the evolution of cryptocurrency from its unregulated conception, the various stages of growth and development, to its current, ever-changing state in global markets. Duniec makes the case that, despite predictions of cryptocurrency crashing due to “drawbacks” like “high volatility, lack of regulations, and cyber-attacks,” Bitcoin has survived and even “thrived”—but that entrants to the market must “become aware of the challenges they might have to navigate.”

Before delving into the nitty-gritty of investing in tokenomics, Duniec uses Roger to explain the fascinating complexities of the industry, technical jargon, global economics, and more. With clear, direct prose, the guide covers Bitcoin’s birth after the collapse of the U.S. housing market in 2008 and the publication of the revolutionary “Bitcoin whitepaper” by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. Roger demystifies the inception of blockchain technology, the various types of cryptocurrencies, crypto wallets, and the problems that plagued the industry in its early days such as high-profile hacking incidents and fraud schemes.

Through dramatized conversations with friends, Roger shares straightforward investment advice but doesn’t shy away from the cons of investing in such a highly volatile asset. While Duniec acknowledges the potential for exaggerated price swings and volatility, financial empowerment is the end goal for readers. “Bitcoin and Crypto could make you a millionaire with the right mindset and balance of careful research, diversification, time, and some luck,” he argues. He urges readers to embrace innovation and be ready to adapt to changing scenarios. This comprehensive guide is ideal for readers new to the world of Bitcoin and digital money investing.

Takeaway: A comprehensive beginner’s guide to Bitcoin and crypto investing.

Comparable Titles: Saifedean Ammous’s The Bitcoin Standard, Ben Armstrong's Catching Up to Crypto.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A-

Click here for more about Crypto and Bitcoin

Missun, a Chartered Retirement Planning Counselor, takes a refreshing detour by urging readers to “rethink” their retirement plan, keeping “matters of the heart” at the forefront. He includes all the conventional advice—the nuts-and-bolts of personal finance, setting up emergency funds, portfolio management—but also delves into the why behind retirement planning, emphasizing how to uncover cognitive blind spots that may derail investment strategies and stressing that “investing early and often is essential.” Beyond the day-to-day grind of retirement planning, Missun urges readers to make a positive mark on loved ones and the world at large.

Missun recounts his divorce as a key turning point in his own life, “a catalyst for profound personal growth” that sparked his desire to live with purpose moving forward. To that end, he educates readers on behavioral biases (recency bias, or ascribing more significance to recent events then is accurate, and familiarity bias—sticking to what’s already known—are just two on his list) and shares functional steps to overcome them, as well as outlining helpful resources on how to devise investment policy statements, a five-step method for creating an investment game plan, and more. Missun’s background in statistics is evident throughout, and some sections (notably a chapter devoted to risk management) are heavy-handed when it comes to statistical analyses.

Though some of the information may feel basic to seasoned investors—including an intro to social security benefits and estate planning—Missun’s debut offers readers several jumping off points that will help them immediately pursue active retirement planning. For those uncomfortable with going it alone, he breaks down the different types of available assistance, ranging from health care planning to portfolio critiques, emphasizing that, above all, financial advisors must be able to help clients articulate their long-term vision. “Retirement planning feels overwhelming for many,” he acknowledges, but readers will feel more prepared when armed with his actionable advice.

Takeaway: Actionable advice on retirement planning steps, with heart.

Comparable Titles: Mitch Anthony’s The New Retirementality, Joseph R. Dominguez and Vicki Robin’s Your Money or Your Life.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: B+
Marketing copy: A

Click here for more about Holistic Retirement Planning

Gardner’s debut makes an impassioned case for returning America to economic self-sufficiency and national security via a revival of its once highly productive domestic labor force. Gardner, the proprietor of a highly specialized manufacturing business and son of a mechanical engineer, takes on such economic titans as Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and Paul Krugman in his defense of tariffs and criticism of so-called free and fair trade, which he calls “disastrous” and “the destruction of countless family-built American businesses that for hundreds of years supported this country.”

Beginning in the years before the American Revolution, Gardner notes how domestic manufacturing was the force behind the phenomenal acceleration of the United States. Homegrown manufacturing nurtured by tariffs played a critical role in the rapidly growing country, he writes, an act that peaked with America’s victory in World War II—and in the international dominance that followed. But as jobs subsequently went overseas in a bid to exploit cheap labor in a post-war economy, it left many once thriving manufacturing-based cities in a wake of desperation.

Gardner argues that in many areas, including in America, free trade has backfired. He points to the lopsided effects of such deals as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the ramifications those deals have had on the working class, both in the U.S. and abroad, producing largely flat wages and a generally declining standard of living amid a growing wealth gap. Gardner also criticizes many foreign competitors for unfair labor practices, environmental degradation, and various abuses—including intellectual-property theft and forced labor—while simultaneously providing an abridged yet illuminating history of labor in the United States. He does leave readers with hope, arguing for a “national, government-funded marketing campaign” to foster our manufacturing industry and notes that “middle-class employment is a guardrail against economic hopelessness and blight.” This is an informative, discerning call to action.

Takeaway: Impassioned case for restoring America’s manufacturing industry.

Comparable Titles: Robert B. Reich’s The System, Farah Stockman’s American Made.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

Click here for more about Manufacture Local

Alive with telling detail, incandescent prose, and fresh insights into her adopted nation and city, Clementi’s sweeping memoir follows her from a childhood in Rome that found her dreaming of New York City, to graduate school in the “bubbly ferment” of Brandeis, near a Boston that is stubbornly not Manhattan; and then to exciting, unexpected opportunities in New York. Her circuitous route at times proves harrowing. She endures relentless sexual harassment as a young writer and thinker in Rome—"America may be militaristic, imperialistic, and hypernationalistic,” she notes, “but it recognizes the right of ‘No’ for women”—and later endures assault and rape during a brief New Jersey marriage.

But Clementi refuses to yield her story to horrible men. Despite moments of tension and heartbreak, South of My Dreams is a richly pleasurable read, its heft and discursiveness lightened by a restless intelligence and a passion for living. Her first days in New York find her falling in love with an Upper West Side diner and then hoofing it all the way down Broadway to the Battery. “What a pity that immigrants’ first impression today is but a frigid airport,” she writes. That energy persists when, in the late 1990s, she finds work as a reporter for the Queens Tribune (“$16,000 a year, no expense reimbursements”) before moving on to Town & Village (for whom she once interviewed a thoroughbred pug), and elsewhere. Apartment hunting, how sex and dating differ from sitcoms, the city’s deep Jewishness, and the surprising way Bill Clinton is responsible for her green card, are all explored with wit and vigor.

A late destination, teased by the title, surprises: Clementi becomes “the eccentric Italian professor of Jewish literature” in South Carolina. That adjustment compels, but Clementi is especially strong on the topic of cities and self-authorship, noting that her New York is a bit of a fantasy but that “I invent it a little too, hoping that my version will make room for me.” NYC lovers will find much to feast on.

Takeaway: Exuberant, incisive memoir of dreaming of and inventing a New York life.

Comparable Titles: Tova Mirvis’s The Book of Separation, David Adjami’s Lot Six.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

Click here for more about South of My Dreams

Miller’s sophisticated and resonant parable about inequality hits the right tone with empathy and revelation. Seventeen-year-old human, Rikki, is a midnight rider, a racer who rides the fire-breathing hell-horse, Elchron. His racing partner and frenemy, Darian, is a lupista, a wolf-like humanoid with big ears, fur, and a tail. In church, humans and lupista are taught that through the higher power’s grace, lupista successfully protested their enslavement by the humans and now live in peace as equals. Skeptical Darian, who lives with oppression every day, is tired of being told he should be grateful for what lupista have. He tells Rikki that the truth of this “tolerant” society lurks in the church’s basement. There, Rikki encounters a dangerous-looking manticore—part tiger and scorpion with a human face—who convinces him that society still separates humans and lupista. “I bet you never even considered it possible: a world without labeled categories of people,” it said. Rikki makes it his mission to convince the town of the injustice.

Carefully written with allegory, acerbic observation, and the striking details that bring an imagined world to life, the story navigates one side’s propaganda versus the other side’s lived reality: theaters feature lupista actors only as background characters, scientists claim lupista are inferior because their brains are wired differently, and there’s the derogatory name Footsies because lupista don’t wear shoes. At first Rikki is blunt, confronting clueless humans with insults, which only causes more adversity. But when the manticore’s solution is to kill anyone who disagrees, Rikki realizes that Darian and even Elchron have roles to play in making people listen.

With engaging, swift-moving prose, appealing dialogue, and much emotional urgency, Miller’s inventive fantasy setting reveals the truths and lessons we can learn for our own society. This consequential, fast-paced fable is captivating for its diplomacy and heart. A fantastic and timely allegory, this is fantasy at its best.

Takeaway: Relevant fantasy parable about social injustice between humans and werewolves.

Comparable Titles: Susan Dennard’s The Luminaries, TJ Klune’s Wolfsong.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

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Seaborne’s twelfth Divisible Man thriller kicks off with welcome vigor, starting with a desperate chase, high stakes, interlocking mysteries, and chapters that fly by, all as series hero Will Stewart takes flight on the trail of his dear friend, Pidge, whose identity may have been compromised by the militant white supremacist group Company W. (She embarrassed them, anonymously, in an earlier entry.) The setup briskly invites in new readers while reminding fans why they have stuck with the series—yet again, Seaborne makes the process of launching a prop plane tense and exciting, and the cast of pilots and law enforcement pros he reintroduces on the (literal) fly proves, as always, irresistible. That dazzling set piece is just the start, though, as Twelfth Knight soon finds Will and his friends rushing to take on Company W in Texas, where a young woman has been murdered—and Company W might have support in the highest echelons of state government.

Further complicating matters for Will is the pregnancy of his better half, Andy, a highly capable police detective who refuses to sit this one out, much to Will’s chagrin. The mystery that follows involves clever ciphers, banking hijinks, and the bloody consolidation of white supremacist power. For all the exciting showdowns and sequences of tension—perhaps the most suspenseful involves an unpiloted plane in airspace it shouldn’t be in—the story is powered by Seaborne’s commitment to testing his characters. Will agonizes over his desire to shield Andy from danger, while FBI agent Leslie, an invaluable source of info, risks her career to help.

Helping Will is dangerous because Will could be—according to feds—“the greatest threat to our national security since Bin Ladin” due to his supernatural powers: the ability to vanish and to unshackle himself from gravity. Seaborne again finds fresh uses for these skills, but his series, admirably, sources its thrills in many other places, too, especially aviation action, smart detective work, and relationships that humanize the superheroics.

Takeaway: Swift, vigorous action thriller in a series that continues to soar.

Comparable Titles: Natalie Zina Walschots’s Hench, James Byrne’s The Gatekeeper.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

Click here for more about DIVISIBLE MAN - TWELFTH KNIGHT

The latest historical novel from Villhard (author of Company of Women) captivates with a Roarin’ Twenties journey through the leather-helmeted early days of American football. The legendary and charismatic real-life star Harold “Red“ Grange, with his red hair and dynamic playstyle, leaves an indelible mark on the game, symbolizing the era when the sport was raw and unpolished. Grange works as an ice man to build strength in the off-season, before big pro money and agents were the norm. His partnership with opportunist C.C. Pyle connects him with Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst, and Charlie Chaplin, while two women, Polly and Helen, offer true insights into a man challenged by his overwhelming celebrity.

Sharply told, pulsing with energy, this meticulously crafted historical fiction celebrates the legends but also critically examines the complexities of football’s early years, exploring excessive violence, the financial struggles of teams, and the dawn of mass-media celebrity. For all the crisp excitement of the gridiron action, and the impassioned considerations of questions like who invented the idea of the “running game,” Villhard deftly dramatizes football as business and life, finding fruitful tension between the reputed purity of college football and the perceived greed of the professional ranks, when in truth the pro teams could barely pay players while college coaches and the NCAA profit with increased incomes, intense loyalty, and monumental stadiums.

Villhard’s portraits of legendary figures prove rousing, including George Halas, who builds the league with entrepreneurial ingenuity through his roles as a player, coach, and owner of the Chicago Bears. The era’s vigor fizzes in the storytelling, especially as Grange’s cultural impact, highlighted by his foray into movies, broadens his appeal beyond the gridiron, while iconic writers Grantland Rice and Walter Camp shape the public’s perception of the sport. Preserving the legacy of Red Grange for a new generation makes this a must-read for both football enthusiasts and history buffs.

Takeaway: Exciting novel of pro football’s origins and first superstar.

Comparable Titles: David Neil Drews’s Iron Tigers, James Whitehead’s Joiner.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

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This surprising diaristic novel follows a young woman named Lauren who opens her tale with a dispatch from her mother’s womb, in 1989, musing about how the world will see “a proper lockdown”—as in the Covid-19 pandemic—some 31 years later, but that we all begin life in one. The novel that follows charts Lauren’s childhood, student years, and early adulthood, her thoughts, desires, and observations about everyday life (“Is it a fact of life that only mothers can cope with poo,” she wonders), as Lauren recounts happy times with her wealthy family, charts their prodigious intake of Prosecco and cigarettes, muses on the friendships she attempts to maintain even as everyone ages and seemingly grows apart, and considers all that she can become as she excels in school amongst her peers.

Early on, Lauren seizes on the idea, floating in the family, that she could one day be a movie star, and Lauren takes steps in that direction, enrolling in the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. But Lauren's life is changed forever when tragedy strikes and she is forced to grow up fast and adjust to her new normal. Nicholson eschews conventional scenecraft and pacing for summarized reports of Lauren’s experiences that sound like actual diary entries (antsy budgeting; kisses noted; movies logged as viewed). Eight Mile High paints the emotional life and the everyday detail of a determined and intelligent young girl with insight and some playful wit. The novel’s present is like a fog of feeling from which milestones and adversities suddenly emerge or vanish; the storytelling emphasizes how choices become habits and fates become sealed.

Those unusual choices, plus a tendency toward long paragraphs, diminish narrative, though the story, turning on inheritances and what sense Lauren can make of what others want of her, builds to surprising, even noir-ish twists. Eight Miles High covers wide swathes of a young woman’s learning how to live, from crawling to surviving Los Angeles.

Takeaway: A young star-to-be’s surprising coming-of-age, in experimental journal form.

Comparable Titles: Alissa DeRogatis’s Call it What You Want, Bethany C. Morrow's So Many Beginnings.

Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: N/A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: C
Marketing copy: C

Click here for more about Eight Miles High

Australian student Maxwell’s picture book debut is a sparkling, compassionate fable that takes place at the base of “the Wish Tree, [...] an old enchanted tree [...] in a big, green field in the middle of nowhere.” Where the roots of the Wish Tree enter the soil, fairies founded a metropolis called Sparkle Time City, where they live in harmony among bees, birds, and other creatures of the Wish Tree ecosystem. That harmony is threatened, however, with the arrival of vengeful goblins who have been living in squalor due to the loss of a most prized, magical possession: “the Great Diamond of the Goblins.”

Maxwell’s vibrant illustrations have a lively, imaginative, but still-childish charm that will inspire young readers to consider telling their own stories. Maxwell brings fresh personality and pizazz to the fairies, goblins, and pixies that struggle for peace in the war for the diamond; the author delineates fey personalities through outfit choices and even includes an amusingly precise scale of the creatures’ bodies (“fairies are 100 times smaller than goblins” and “the pixies towered over the fairies but were still much smaller than the goblins.”) Sparkles and glittering stars adorn almost every page, and each creature has its own unique style, expression, and identity, like “Fire Fairy,” whose “wings are like flames,” and the royal goblin family.

Without the diamond, Maxwell presents the goblins’ domain, by contrast, as colorless and dismal; even the light from their bonfires is dull and gray, and after centuries of enjoying the diamond’s magical power given their long lifespans (“goblins live for over 1,000 years”) all they want is their home back. However, their method of getting their home back, centered on assumptions and revenge, creates more problems than solutions. Goblins and human readers both can discover an important lesson in this story from Maxwell, who readers will hope continues to write and illustrate many more.

Takeaway: Charming, glittery story of what happens when goblins make assumptions

Comparable Titles: Sophia Spencer’s The Bug Girl, Ul de Rico’s The Rainbow Goblins.

Production grades
Cover: B-
Design and typography: B
Illustrations: B
Editing: B
Marketing copy: B

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McGavin and Cornell’s patient and methodical self-help manual offers both a comprehensive diagnosis of the problems that become the sticking points in people’s lives, and remedies to get unstuck. By “deliberately inviting a felt sense” of what keeps you stuck “and then spending time with it,” rather than ignoring or seeking to vanquish it, we can “untangle,” be happy, and be free. Through a mixture of powerful personal anecdotes, astute theoretical analysis, and concrete, easy-to-follow instructions, McGavin and Cornell have created an indispensable manifesto of personal healing.

The authors draw their techniques for unburdening yourself from past baggage and harnessing your full potential from Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing, a landmark work of psychotherapeutic theory and technique, thoughtfully adapting and translating his ideas for contemporary readers. In doing so, Untangling explores many terms—“getting a felt-sense,” “Parts,” “Self-in-Presence”—which are both key to its power as an actionable resource and its potential undoing. Readers who master these patiently explained and readily understood terms will find that they easily interlock to produce potent, multivalent meanings that can be effectively converted from theory into practice. But this language sometimes slips into the cryptic, and the urgent meaning behind it can become obscured.

Fortunately, McGavin and Cornell are highly trained and intuitive teachers. Their personal stories of overcoming alcoholism and depression ground the ideological advance of the book whenever it becomes unmoored from its pragmatic tracks. Clear analogies also aid understanding, as when they explain “change alone” not being enough to heal: “If the ocean liner is sinking, it doesn’t help to rearrange the deck chairs!” The volume of itemized, actionable information, such as how to practice the five “Powers of Presence” to create an environment conducive to untangling, or “resourcing” to remain “relaxed, open, and energized,” is so ample that it’s hard to imagine the reader who won’t come away better off.

Takeaway: Methodically detailed motivational program for anyone who’s ever felt stuck.

Comparable Titles: Manis Friedman and Rivka GoldsteinCreating a Life That Matters, Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly.

Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

Click here for more about Untangling