At Juniper’s school in the city, bullies—seen in the shadows but apparently white—taunt the young girl. On a day devoted to celebrating students’ heritage, they tell her she doesn’t know where she comes from. Juniper’s mojo bag, tucked in her pocket, doesn’t keep the bullies at bay. But soon enough, she packs up empty mason […]
Twelve-year-old Tuva has always felt different; she’s never had any friends. She hides mysterious scars on her neck behind her long, white-blond hair. But when her classmate Axel goes missing in an ominous fog, and Tuva finds his gym partner, Rasmus, being led through the forest by what turn out to be actual fairies, she’s […]
Her firstborn daughter, Onyesonwu, a powerful witch—introduced in Who Fears Death (2010)—transformed the world and left it, while Najeeba herself has become more dangerous and powerful—the kponyungo, sorcerer of fire, wind, and dust. Her mission, to find and kill the awful spirit that terrorized her father’s family, remains unfinished. But where to begin? First, birth […]
When Lizzie Dowling, Queen Victoria’s Irish-born parlor maid, is found drowned near the Quarr Abbey ruins on the Isle of Wight, Julia, who happens to be vacationing there with her grandfather, examines the body over the objections of the local constabulary that the death was obviously accidental and a woman has no business messing with […]
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 […]
Aurora begins to hope that the eccentric doomsday preppers’ mansion could be her forever home, but when the endless rains come, she begins to have doubts. Niko and Jada have BOBs, or “Bug-Out-Backpacks,” stashed in different rooms, and they train Aurora in disaster survival techniques, all while repeatedly moving to higher floors in their home […]
“Four acres, steel fence, two warehouses, three forklifts, one-thousand cars, and a junkyard dog”; for the temperamental, uneducated Harry Saunders, his new wrecking yard in the desert was an empire to command. His 9-year-old daughter, Robyn, wrenched from suburban life in Laguna Beach, California, warmed up to it more slowly. She began working the junkyard […]
In her debut, art historian and podcaster Blackwell Baines explores the haunted-house phenomenon through eight homes—five in England, three in the U.S.—tracing how a loosely defined building type became a remarkably stable cultural symbol, a space that “subvert[s] our expectations of the house (or ‘home’) as a place of safety and privacy.” Each dwelling anchors […]
Prize-winning scholar Nussbaum argues that opera engages in political thought, conveying moral and philosophical ideas about rights and freedoms, gender, rank, and class. Beyond the libretti, these ideas are expressed in the music itself and in the act of singing. Nussbaum devotes half the book to Mozart, whom she sees as “the deepest philosopher of […]
When Meron’s native Poland was invaded in 1939, he writes in this impressive memoir, “Nazi Germany brought an apocalyptic change in my life: from sweet, uneventful, pampered childhood to the horrors of fleeing from monsters.” Seven years later, having fled those monsters, he arrived in Israel in 1946. “I was nearly 16 years old, with […]