BeBe enjoys her comfortable life as a caterpillar, munching leaves and crawling wherever she pleases. But after waking up with wings and long legs, her world suddenly feels “strange.” She can no longer “crunch on her favorite milkweed or clover” and feels uncomfortable when “her big wings [follow] her everywhere.” The story uses BeBe’s transformation […]
Tennis isn’t the only thing weighing on Leo: He’s gay and not out to anyone. He doesn’t always agree with his father, legendary tennis player Johnny Chambers, who retired to coach Leo after a multiple sclerosis diagnosis cut his own career short. After Johnny suffers a stroke that keeps him from traveling as much as […]
San Francisco defense attorney Joe Turner’s latest case takes him down south to Barton, Georgia. He’s there on behalf of his investigator, Chuck Argenal, whose 18-year-old nephew is accused of fatally shooting the small town’s high school quarterback. There’s quite a bit of evidence (though no discernible motive) implicating Carl Ledbetter, who’s on the autistic […]
When Redo Hauptshammer arrives from Vienna in the Prussian village of Szonden on the banks of the Oder River in the 1820s, his first task is to bury his murdered young Spanish wife, Odra—the victim of random gunfire—on the same plot of land where he hopes to raise sugar beets. But when he first places […]
In the mid-2010s, the author had a coveted position at a New York media company, family and friends on both coasts, and a romantic relationship. Under the shiny surface, however, life was not so bright: “I developed at an early age an exhausting habit of pathologically comparing myself to others and never measuring up in […]
Yun’s third novel is set on the Sonata, a stand-in for television’s “Love Boat” of the 1970s and ’80s, here hosting a themed cruise where passengers can hobnob with former cast members of the show, renamed Starlight Voyages. The five-day cruise begins on Sept. 16, switched at the last minute to embark from Boston instead […]
Elevating the view as it goes, this perspective broadener invites viewers to join a trio of bright-eyed young cheetahs chasing a gazelle over a grassy plain, then to peer over distant hills to examine a neatly laid out city bustling with traffic and brown-skinned shoppers. From there, a glimpse of a smaller village leads to […]
In 1725, Captain Vitus Bering, under orders from Peter the Great, embarked on an expedition to find a link between America and Asia. The mission failed, but Bering was unwilling to give up, and so in 1733 began the Great Northern Expedition, charting Russia’s northern shoreline and parts of Alaska and Japan. Told from the […]
No sooner does 10-year-old Tick spot the black sails of the offshore Drenish fleet than he knows it’s time to ride for King’s Keep, the mountain fortress that has always protected the people of Ellia from invaders. On a mission that turns extra urgent after he discovers evidence of a traitor at the Keep, he […]
Lia arrives at Anhame, a crafthall for honing anar—the craft of people with “higher senses.” Lia is a fifth-level anar, meaning she has healing abilities. She can also see others’ inner soulforms, which represent people’s true nature (some take the shapes of animals). That alone puts her on the same level as Anhame’s masters, but […]