BOOKLOVES

A richly imagined Dickensian prequel that breathes luminous life into the Ghost of Christmas Present—and the generous soul who became him. In The Ghost of Christmas Present: The Spirit of the Frozen Thames, the second volume of Scott A. Johnson’s Ghosts of Christmas Trilogy, Johnson answers one of Dickens’s most tantalizing unanswered questions: who was […]

Some romances announce their intentions in the first chapter. This one does it in the first text message, when a lovestruck third baseman admits his heart trips over itself every time his sister’s best friend pops up on his phone. Just for the Plot by Meghan Quinn is the second book in the Bay Area […]

Another Grumpy Iguana tale as sweet as sweet potato fries Sweet Potato is different. While her brothers are out playing games about eating as many bugs as they can, all Sweet Potato wants to eat are mangoes and sweet potato fries. And while her family is sleepy in the sun, she wants to go on […]

A sometimes raw, always luminous exploration of motherhood, martyrdom, and women’s untold stories    By the time the unnamed protagonist of Book of Hours goes into labor, the reader has followed her through more than 100 pages of distinctly female bodily unease, from an adolescent eating disorder to adult fertility struggles sharpened by the dehumanizing […]

What do you do with a thriller that hands you the killers before the first chapter even begins? That is the gamble at the heart of Getting Away With Murder by Shari Lapena, her tenth stand-alone novel, and it mostly pays off. The prologue puts you on a pitching sailboat twelve miles off Manhattan, watching […]

Some books announce their intentions in the first line. The Lovers, the Liars, and Me by DeAndra Davis opens with its narrator shuffling her absent mother’s tarot deck and asking the ancestors for guidance, and in that single image you already have the whole novel: a girl clinging to borrowed wisdom because she has not […]