Middle school hasn’t been easy for Izzy. Her twin, Ari, chose to attend a prestigious performing arts academy, leaving Izzy to navigate Kagan Middle School on her own. Ari has countless after-school commitments, practices her violin constantly, and, in a move that breaks Izzy’s heart, decides she wants her own room. Izzy, stinging from the […]
It’s the Sunday before Tess Lowell’s second wedding, but the painstaking planning for her union to practically perfect state Senate hopeful Warren Ashley didn’t prepare her for the drama that’s about to unfold over a week at her family’s Cape Cod estate. Because unbeknownst to Tess, her troublemaking brother, Sebastian, invited her ex-husband, Peter Hyun, […]
In August 1993, Stevens was public defender for the courts of the North Slope Borough in Utqiagvik, Alaska, previously known as Barrow, a fishing town with a majority Inupiat population. While on vacation in the Lower 48, Stevens learned of the possible rape and double homicide of sisters Bernice and Wanda Ipalook of a large […]
She calls herself Kikiloa, but she’s better known as Mitochondrial Eve: the woman from whom all people now living are descended. Born in “the deep night of Africa’s great rift valley” some 200,000 years ago, she was betrayed by her father, impregnated, and enslaved. In the present day, we find her living in San Francisco, […]
When Mama Opossum goes out foraging, all 10 of her joeys come along for the ride, clinging to her back. When she stumbles and falls, all 10 roll off in different directions. Readers are invited to join Mama Opossum in searching the nighttime forest. (“There’s no time to lose. Let’s get to work!”) She finds […]
Three siblings look ahead to a long weekend, with older sister ’Tea in charge while Momma is working. Middle child Taylor is delighted that morning to find the titular postcard in the kitchen. Indeed, the whole neighborhood is abuzz with excitement over the opportunity to exchange their postcards for a surprise box “filled to the […]
Now that Halloween is in the rearview mirror in Eylan Hollow, Bailey Briggs is gearing up for the Christmas season at the Lazy Bones Bookshop, which she runs with help from her dedicated crew of workers and her big furry dog, Jack. At a reception where two competing historical societies will discuss mapping the town’s […]
Worsley was the chief curator of Britain’s Historic Royal Palaces for more than two decades and thus has a unique frame of reference on her subject. A political, social, and royal history, her book is braided with personal anecdotes. She recounts stories of the palaces’ “human inhabitants, all of them, high and low,” and she […]
“Triangles are everything,” Parker writes in the introduction, “and everything is triangles.” The following 10 chapters bear titles like “Going the Distance,” “Getting Triggy With It,” and “Making Waves.” Within his exploratory and everyday applications of triangles, the author describes rounding corners on a racetrack (“the bike did lean just over 45° from vertical. Which […]
Happy families are truly not all alike: “every family is unique, particularly in the United States,” due to “varying family compositions and the ethnic mixture” of the population. Currie-McGhee uses this broad diversity to explain that “statistical averages” are not the same as being “typical.” She provides relevant quotations from and brief portraits of members […]