Shaffer (The Wishing Game) plays on portal fantasy nostalgia in this brilliant riff on the Chronicles of Narnia. Emilie Wendell is mourning the loss of her adoptive mother when she discovers she has a half-sister who was kidnapped 20 years ago. She begs the help of famous missing-persons investigator Jeremy Cox. Jeremy and his high school best friend, Rafe Howell, were lost as teenagers in West Virginia’s Red Crow State Park and emerged six months later completely changed. Rafe, now an artist, can’t remember what happened, and ever since the incident his drawings have returned to a fantastical world he can’t explain. Jeremy knows the truth—that they went through a portal into that other realm—but he’s bound by a promise not to reveal the truth to Rafe. When Rafe joins in the search for Emilia’s long-lost sister, the investigation takes both men back to the wondrous but deadly world they once loved. Shaffer manages to capture the joys and magic of childhood innocence alongside the wisdom that comes with age and the heartache and scars that make it difficult to go home again. The taut mystery keeps the pages of this love letter to the fantasy genre flying. Readers will be transfixed. Agent: Amy Tannenbaum, Jane Rotrosen Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Daré’s harrowing sequel to The Girl with the Louding Voice chronicles 14-year-old Adunni’s flight from the indentured servitude she’d fallen into after fleeing her husband. Having escaped her abusive employer Big Madame, Adunni now lives with Big Madame’s neighbor Tia in Lagos, Nigeria. Adunni’s plans to start school are interrupted when she’s forced to return to the village of her birth to atone for the death of her husband’s second wife. Tia, a young professional with painful secrets of her own, accompanies Adunni back to her village, and in alternating narration, the two recount the hours leading up to what could be a mortal reckoning for Adunni and several other girls, who have been accused of causing a drought. While Tia desperately tries to phone for help, Adunni and the others are paraded through the village, then left in the forest, with fatal consequences. The juxtaposition of Tia’s urbane voice and Adunni’s heavy dialect lends itself to Daré’s unforgettable contrast of urban, modern Nigeria with its rural, tribal counterpart. Moreover, Adunni’s natural lyricism is as powerful as her resilience. It adds up to an indelible portrait of a turbulent girlhood. Agent: Felicity Blunt, Curtis Brown U.K. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

The Democratic governor of Michigan shares life lessons and political wisdom in her unsatisfyingly brief debut memoir. Whitmer recaps the challenges she has faced in office, among them a social media attack by then President Trump in the early days of the pandemic, a mass school shooting at a high school north of Detroit, and a headline-grabbing plot to kidnap her that was disrupted by the FBI. But readers hoping for a deeper look at the governor’s life and politics will be disappointed by what reads like little more than standard campaign fare. The book’s most moving and courageous moment details Whitmer’s 2013 decision, as a state representative, to go public with the story of her rape in college in a bid to sink a bill that forced women to buy extra health insurance for abortion coverage. (The bill passed, but Whitmer oversaw the law’s repeal in 2023.) In breezy prose, Whitmer manages to relay some personal insights—folksy wisdom shared by her grandmothers, a family penchant for gallows humor, and the admission that she “ran with a fast crowd” as a student, for example. But the net effect is to leave readers wanting more. There is almost certainly enough material—personal and political—for Whitmer to deliver a meaty memoir. Unfortunately, this isn’t it. (July)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

In this entertaining account, Pulitzer winner DeStefano (The Deadly Don) paints Jazz Age fixture Vivian Gordon as both victim and criminal. Eighteen months after escort and aspiring actor Gordon—born Benita Franklin and nicknamed the “Broadway Butterfly”—was found dead in a Bronx park in 1931, New York City mayor Jimmy Walker resigned, and the political influence of the once unassailable Tammany Hall came to an end. The key was Gordon’s diaries, in which she meticulously catalogued the secrets she’d learned from her high-end clients and recounted being extorted by corrupt judges and cops to pay for dropped prostitution charges. While DeStefano’s account lacks the scope of Michael Wolraich’s The Bishop and the Butterfly, which takes on the same case, or the pace of Sara DiVello’s Broadway Butterfly, which fictionalizes it, he wrangles the sprawling implications of Gordon’s still unsolved murder into an entertaining package. DeStefano paints an alluring portrait of Prohibition-era New York and the mobsters and millionaires who ran it. Photos. Agent: Jill Marsal, Marsal Lyon Literary. (July)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Former flight attendant Newman (Drowning) parlays her professional experience into another nail-biter centered on a commercial airline accident. Nearly 300 people die when the pilot of a plane en route from Minneapolis to Seattle suffers a heart attack and crashes into a nuclear power plant shortly after taking off. The resulting leak at the Waketa, Minn., energy facility raises twin concerns: first, that 900 locals will be exposed to dangerous levels of radiation; second, that the breach could ignite an impossible to extinguish fire that would spread radioactive material across the entire Midwest. Waketa fire chief Steve Tostig spearheads an effort, with support from Nuclear Emergency Support specialist Joss Vance, to contain the radiation and save the country. Like Michael Crichton and other disaster novelists before her, Newman loops several ordinary people into her sprawling narrative, including Waketa schoolteachers and employees at the power plant, but she sets herself apart by giving notable weight and color to the human-scale dramas. She doesn’t skimp when it comes to action, either, resulting in a rip-roaring adventure that’s anchored in palpable emotion. This should satisfy the author’s fans and win her new ones. Agent: Shane Salerno, Story Factory. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 07/26/2024 | Details & Permalink

Mount Shasta, Calif., high school senior Izumi Tanaka is a normal 18-year-old American girl: she enjoys baking, watching Real Housewives, and dressing like “Lululemon’s sloppy sister.” But Japanese American Izzy, conceived during a one-night stand in her mother Hanako’s final year at Harvard, has never known the identity of her father. So when she and her best friend find a letter in Hanako’s bedroom, the duo jump at the chance to ferret out Izzy’s dad’s true identity—only to find out he’s the Crown Prince of Japan. Desperate to know her father, Izzy agrees to spend the summer in his home country. But press surveillance, pressure to quickly learn the language and etiquette, and an unexpected romance make her time in Tokyo more fraught than she imagined. Add in a medley of cousins and an upcoming wedding, and Izzy is in for an unforgettable summer. Abrupt switches from Izzy’s perspective to lyrical descriptions of Japan may disrupt readers’ enjoyment, but a snarky voice plus interspersed text conversations and tabloid coverage keep the pages turning in Jean’s (Empress of All Seasons) fun, frothy, and often heartfelt duology starter. Ages 12–up. Agent: Erin Harris, Folio Literary Management. (May)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink

Kelkar’s (Bindu’s Bindis) novel features Oceanview Academy middle schooler Sonali, whose stoicism contrasts with her love of Bollywood movies’ melodrama. Stuck in a Los Angeles home with constantly arguing parents and her sensitive nine-year-old brother Ronak, Gujarati American Sonali, 11, tries to make sense of her world through the Hindi movies she’s seen all her life. Ever since an earnest public attempt five years ago to stop her parents’ fighting led to widespread embarrassment in front of family, Sonali has resolved to hide her emotions and do her best to ignore her parents’ arguments. But her efforts prove futile when her parents decide to try the “nesting” method of separation, where they take turns living in the house with Sonali and Ronak. The contemporary narrative takes an entertaining fabulist turn as Sonali’s life begins to transform into a Bollywood movie, with everything she feels and thinks made apparent through her “Bollywooditis.” Sonali’s first-person perspective is sympathetic as she navigates friendship and family drama, and Kelkar successfully infuses a resonant narrative with “filmi magic,” offering a tale with universal appeal through an engaging cultural lens. Ages 8–12. Agent: Kathleen Rushall, Andrea Brown Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink

When she was six, Justice Kasric watched her blue-eyed merchant father play chess with the Faerie King. Now 15, Justice believes the event was merely a dream. She spends her days yearning for adventure, watching from the sidelines while her 16-year-old sister Faith, as slender and golden-haired as Justice but not as curious, becomes the toast of Victorian London society. One night, however, their father shatters their comfortable lifestyles when he forces the family—Justice, Faith, their younger brother Henry, and their constantly medicated, distant mother—into a locked carriage that takes them to a shadowy mansion. Justice’s discovery that the Faerie have invaded the human world and are targeting her family gains further urgency when she learns that her parents are on opposite sides of the conflict. Together, the Kasric siblings—including older brothers Benedict and Joshua—must find a way to save their family. While characters lack depth at times, and insufficient historical details don’t fully evoke the Victorian setting, Klaver’s (the Supernatural Case Files of Sherlock Holmes series) rich, lyrical descriptions augment the fantastical source material in this engaging series starter. Ages 13–up. Agent: Lucienne Diver, the Knight Agency. (May)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink

Nine years before this novel begins, eight-year-old best friends Esme Randal and Kayla Price snuck out of their cabin at Camp Pine Lake in Texas. They swore never to discuss the terrible events that followed, but when the girls, now 17, return to the camp as counselors-in-training from their hometown of Lewisburg, Pa., that proves easier said than done. Someone begins sabotaging camp activities, and ominous—and increasingly public—threats appear, referencing that fateful summer. The only other person who knows Esme and Kayla’s secret is a local girl named Lillian Campbell, whom they left to fend for herself that night in the woods. They’re loath to voice their suspicions of revenge lest they get in trouble or look bad in front of hunky fellow counselors Jake and Olly, but as events escalate, they realize they may not have a choice. Narrating from Esme’s increasingly apprehensive first-person perspective, Preston (The Twin) pays homage to classic summer camp slasher films. The underdeveloped, predominantly white cast relies heavily on stereotype, and the clichéd tormenter’s motive feels unearned, but horror fans will likely appreciate this paranoia-fueled tale’s gruesome, shocking close. Ages 12–up. Agent: Jon Elek, United Agents. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink

Inspired by her own family’s refugee journey from Vietnam to Hong Kong, Văn’s (If You Were Night) spare picture book, powerful in its deliberate simplicity, follows a black-haired, pale-skinned child as they, their guardian, and two younger siblings join other asylum seekers for a perilous maritime voyage. In a third-person voice, Văn anthropomorphizes objects, relaying their wishes: “The dream wished it was longer,” one spread reads, as a balding, mustached guardian holds the protagonist close, and a guardian with a bun rouses the second child to dress them. “The clock wished it was slower,” the subsequent pages read, as the two children tearfully hug their mustached guardian goodbye. The narrative continues as the now family of four make their way onto the boat and beyond. A final-act switch to first-person perspective drives home the journey’s personal nature. Intricate, lissome fine-lined art by Ngai (Dazzle Ships) recalls classical Asian compositions, Japanese woodblock prints, and an evocative sensibility in a gradated, surrealistic color palette. A seamless interweaving of elegant prose and atmospheric art marks this affecting immigrant narrative. Back matter includes heartfelt author’s and illustrator’s notes. Ages 4–8. (May)

Correction: A previous version of this review misquoted the book's text.

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink