The three young women at the center of O’Hare’s debut—Róise, Maggie, and Harley—are closing out their 20s with a bang. Though “Róise assumed they would evolve naturally from twenty-something buck eejits into secure and self-actualized young women who had skincare regimes and remembered to pay the council tax on time,” this is definitely not on […]
Auld focuses on an African beetle, but as her information-packed book notes, similar species are found on every continent but Antarctica, and “in forests, farmland, and deserts,” as well as in the savanna. Among the many books about the dung beetle, this one stands out for tracking a particular beetle’s life cycle, but without giving […]
Alyte learns about the world through a series of encounters with other creatures, all of them trying to comprehend their place in a great chain of being. It’s a fairly terrifying adventure: He continually learns that eating or being eaten is part of everyday life, and that dying is “the natural order of things.” In […]
Zay must now finish his junior year at Broadlawn Alternative School, which is located hours away. The day he finds out he has to move in with his aunt and uncle (who live near Broadlawn), his white father is released from prison. Zay isn’t happy about Keith’s release; he feels betrayed by Ma for not […]
The women of Delilah Bea’s family are cursed: Anyone who falls for one of them will immediately forget their beloved. Delilah is determined to break the curse during her Calling, during which she has six months to successfully complete a quest or lose her magic forever. But when a stranger named Kieran Pelumbra turns up […]
Waking up to the first snowfall of the year, Chiyoko wants to build a snowman, but Papa says there’s no time. Today, they’ll be going to the misogura, a wooden barn, to learn the family business of making miso. Throughout the day, Chiyoko and Papa clean the tubs, cook rice, sprinkle powder to make kōji […]
It’s been 27 years since Karl left his native city of Ters, Albania, for a better life in Greece and, ultimately, America. The death of his father has brought him back home, however, and he finds a city just as riddled with contradictions as it was when he left. Ters is a city in which […]
It was sci-fi writer William Gibson who said that the future is already here; it’s just very unevenly distributed. Kobie, a contributing editor at Wired and the futures editor at PC Pro, would probably agree, as she romps through a series of gee-whiz ideas for machines that have failed to fulfill their much-hyped promise. The […]
On an environmentally devastated Earth, Leah and Rachel Silverton, orphaned sisters born a year apart who can pass for identical twins, struggle to get by. Leah has severe asthma, but each year the government offers 16-year-olds the opportunity to try out for a chance to live in the Floating City on Venus. Only 50 boys […]
Rather than construct narratives for their 20 randomly ordered selections, Pintos and Iannuzzi toss pithy fact bits and spot images across each spread around a full body portrait, with inconspicuous arrows here and there to link related items. Though at least systematic when it comes to providing range maps, typical sizes and weights, conservation status, […]