Categories
Interesting

THE SECRETS OF UNDERHILL

Eleven-year-old Nick Sixsmith and her mother, Theo, pause their itinerant lives as arborists to return to Mistwood, the home of the ancient, magical ironwood trees. Frustrated by their inability to determine the cause of a rapidly spreading blight, Theo returns to the home she abandoned before Nick’s birth to look for clues in the ancestral […]

Categories
Interesting

NINE MINUTES ELEVEN SECONDS

The novel follows Madison Cooper, who’s just started a new job at Know Inc., replacing someone who died in a hit-and-run incident. Her father died in the 9/11 attacks, leaving her with lasting trauma and questions about that day. While attending a support group, she encounters Will, a professional hacker, who helps her uncover that […]

Categories
Interesting

THE LAST PEASANT WAR

At the outset of World War I, agricultural communities in belligerent nations provided many of the soldiers who fought in the conflict. But a large number of those peasant farmers, especially in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, decided either to evade the draft or, once in uniform, desert. These “green cadres” took to the woods near their […]

Categories
Interesting

GATE TO KAGOSHIMA

Born and raised in Scotland, Isla MacKenzie has traveled to Japan to learn more about the Japanese branch of her mother’s family. She hopes to discover whether family lore is true and she’s descended from a warrior who served alongside legendary rebel samurai leader Takamori Saigō. When a strangely out-of-season typhoon hits the town of […]

Categories
Interesting

THE SECRET OF MATTER

Mysterious clues about the location of an ancient superweapon send the South Florida teen into more of the magical, mythical Rymworld’s exotic realms, from the deadly Wytch Isles to the aptly named Forbidden Tundrå. In Rymworld, certain slugs will grant wishes when licked (ew), and foes ranging from cunning trolls and crocodile warriors to robotic […]

Categories
Interesting

THEODORA HENDRIX AND THE SNARE OF THE SHADOWMONGERS

An exciting trip to New York City turns terrifying when megalomaniac Hilda the witch attacks with an overwhelming army of elusive Shadowmongers, who can suck the magic from monsters and, as 10-year-old Theodora discovers, give ordinary humans nightmares for life. As the good monsters, who raised her in cozy Appleton village, gather under the leadership […]

Categories
Interesting

SUNDAY

Every Sunday, Martin, his parents, and his dog, Maize, go to his grandparents’ house. Every visit is the same; bored one day, Martin decides to “[step] out into the unknown.” In detailed, action-packed double-page spreads in muted colors, Martin and Maize trek across several landscapes, from the “freezing cold of ice caps” to the “baking […]

Categories
Interesting

EARL CRUSH

Those in London society who have met Miss Lydia Hope-Wallace know her only as a painfully shy, absurdly wealthy spinster. That’s because almost no one knows that she’s also responsible for the radical pamphlets published by her anonymous alter ego, “H,” on topics like universal suffrage and the right to divorce—not even the Earl of […]

Categories
Interesting

CALL HER FREEDOM

Inspired by the stories of people from the embattled region of Kashmir, Dorabji traces one family’s struggles from the 1970s through the near future of 2030. Aisha first appears as a young, socially isolated child living in the small mountain village of Poshkarbal with her mother, Noorjahan, a midwife. They live alone, and Noorjahan instructs […]

Categories
Interesting

THE PRIVATE IS POLITICAL

Early in his prescient book, legal scholar Brescia points out a stunning irony. We all know this is the era of “surveillance capitalism,” in which the internet habitually violates our virtual space. We understand that purportedly free social media companies (a.k.a. “Digital Pinkertons”) effectively exist to co-opt and sell the private data (“political privacy”) that […]