Starting her third year at the Arcanum Training Institute for Marvelous and Uncanny Endeavors, Ella, a 13-year-old Black girl whose great-grandfather, Jean-Michel Durand, created the institute, has a lot on her plate. Along with keeping up with her magic lessons, Ella’s determined to uncover more of the secrets and lies surrounding the world of Conjurors […]
In this melancholic assemblage of more than two dozen short stories, the author examines the austere conditions of human life in the American West and the backwoods of Pennsylvania; the formidable and unforgiving nature of the terrain serves as an analogue for the human soul. In the titular story, aging oil-rig hands Otie and J.L. […]
“Nothing ever happens if you don’t say yes, even if…it seems like a bad idea at the time,” writes Vilanch at the end of a meandering catalog of onscreen disasters, some so improbable that it’s amazing they made it past the cutting-room floor. Take a sitcom with Charo, the cuchi-cuchi Spanish “force of nature” who […]
What fun! Fans of challenging seek-and-find puzzles will love this clever book, comprised of 10 “fantastical connected mazes” set out on double-page spreads. Each maze is packed with tiny, cleverly illustrated details and minuscule human figures (they’re generally too small to discern skin color), set against a variety of scenes, among them the Magic Forest, […]
The author was a child living in the Bahamas when local Bahamians were “rebelling against three hundred years of British domination”; in response, her English mother and stepfather moved the family to Geneva in 1963. There, Moore was enrolled in a finishing school that she found cold, gray, and stodgy. She resolved to make the […]
Issey is an enthusiastic burglar living in an attic apartment in present-day Boston. He’s part of a collective of crooks who rob and fence delicate valuables, priceless heirlooms, and other items from the ritzy neighborhoods and campuses of Boston and Cambridge. Unfortunately for Issey, the group has had enough of him bringing only knickknacks of […]
In the sweet—and sometimes challenging—blur of her first nine months of motherhood, bookworm Cam has found domestic joy with her daughter, Polly, and her husband, Luke, as well as enough downtime to do some pleasure reading, so she’s nervous about returning to her job at a London literary agency. Her first day back certainly doesn’t […]
Chloe Barnes wants nothing more than to build up a healthy clientele for the weed-themed bakery she started in Azalea Bay, California, when her Grandma Rose needed help with the side effects of chemotherapy. So, she reluctantly agrees to be interviewed by podcaster Calista Bryant on the Azalea Bay episode of Starch Nemesis. Calista, who’s […]
Years before Manisha, the protagonist of 2024’s A Drop of Venom, met monster slayer Pratyush, her older sister, Eshani, made a secret trade with the shades, exchanging her life to ensure the survival of her fellow naga. Hiran, the brooding Gatekeeper of the Nightmare Realm, whose spirited sister, Holika, can manipulate dreams, has repeatedly appeared […]
Historical fiction writer Epstein rescues Dickens’ Fagin from his reputation as a slimy character who exploits orphans, training them in thievery in the clotted, filthy streets of Victorian London. Epstein’s Jacob Fagin is a lonely, emotionally wounded man; a master pickpocket to be sure, but also a victim of virulent antisemitism from all classes of […]