Life and Other Love Songs by Anissa Gray

Posted on November 6, 2026 by pagesofjulia

From the author of The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls comes another novel that is likewise heart-wrenching and true to life, about family and pain and how we relate to one another. We track several characters at several points in time, mostly in Detroit. The prologue introduces Trinity, a young woman at her father’s funeral in the spring of 1989. They are burying an empty casket. It’s been some years since her father, Oz, just vanished after lunch on his thirty-seventh birthday.

Then we meet Deborah, who in the early 1960s sings with a trio, hoping to make it big and leave her day job washing dishes at the hospital. She’s just finished singing at her group’s regular rent party when she meets young Oz, who is recently moved north from Alabama, escaping a vague trauma and the loss of his father and their home in a fire. Chapters alternate between these three main players: we watch Deborah and Oz court, marry, and have baby Trinity; we watch Deborah approach the very brink of stardom; we eventually see what happened on the day Oz disappeared. Slowly, we piece together the holes in the story: where Oz went. What happened back in Alabama. What happened to Deborah’s musical career. We see the later accomplishments of Deborah and Trinity, and Oz.

The story follows a Black family in 1960s-80s Detroit (and sometimes Alabama), into the 1990s. You would be right to expect difficulties related to race and racism, class, and the Great Migration. There is sexual assault and domestic violence, and there are gay men struggling to exist, let alone be accepted for who they are. These are the challenges – some important points of conflict, in plot terms. There are also the human challenges of relationships, love, and family, which are universal. These are lovely, moving individuals, even when they are haunted, even when they make choices we may not love. Gray writes true people, and I felt for every one of these people, even when I was frustrated with them. It’s beautiful work, a classic unique-in-the-universal portrayal of family and humanity. I’d love to read more in this vein, and hope this author will have more for us.

Rating: 7 Reese’s Cups.

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Lioness Rampant by Tamora Pierce (audio)

Posted on November 2, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Book four in this quartet had me wondering how we were going to get all the loose threads tied up by its end, but we did get there! I am very appreciative of Pierce’s writing (and Trini Alvarado’s narration) throughout, and will miss Alanna. It looks like there are some other books related to the Tortallan world; I’ll see about tracking those down.

In Lioness Rampant, we see Alanna take on the biggest, baddest adventure yet – and perhaps her first proper quest, with a goal of international significance and not just that of improving her own reputation (although that remains important to Alanna, who as a “lady knight” must always be proving herself). She faces hazards out of all proportion, and will have to face old enemies again. We meet back up with every character who has mattered for the four books, including one we thought we’d killed off already, and introduce new heroes. Alanna continues to reckon with her choices and ask herself what it is she really wants out of life.

“I can only blame myself,” she growled. “I could have gone to a convent, never learned to wrestle and be dumped on my head, never have broken any bones or fallen in the dirt. I’d be clean and wear pretty dresses. By now I’d be married to a buffle-brained nobleman with a small fief. I’d probably even have clean, pretty, buffle-brained children.” Trying to wipe her hands before taking the reins, she found her breeches were as muddy as her hands. “Don’t remind me I picked this life. I have no one to blame but myself.”

I’m leaving this plot summary pretty loose: crazy odds, huge ambitions, epic battles, new and old heroes and foes. I am still mulling where we leave everyone in the end: Tortall’s future is more or less secured (to the extent possible) by Alanna’s heroism, and the good work of her comrades. But the hero herself… well. Reader responses will vary. I’m not sure how I feel about it all, but I am very glad that Pierce is making me think and feel all these things.

I would be so glad to keep reading in this world, or anything from this author.

Rating: 8 earbobs for the series.

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Mazywood by Tananarive Due

Posted on October 30, 2026 by pagesofjulia

In dual timelines, the Washington family faces racism and monsters in this engrossing work that is both horror and historical novel.

Tananarive Due’s striking novel Mazywood blends historical Black Hollywood with a horror story involving family legacies and the power of a wish.

Readers meet Mazelle Washington as a little girl in 1926. The lonely youngest in a family of Black stage performers, Mazelle ventures into the woods, to the locally famous Wishing Pool, where she asks for a forever friend. She forgets to say she wants her friend to be human–but when a charming, scruffy white dog turns up, she loves him like no one else. With Scout by her side doing tricks, Mazelle becomes the darling of silent film comedy. Throughout her long career in Hollywood, however, Mazelle faces racism, sexual harassment, and other more personal struggles.

Mazelle’s narrative thread sees her into the 1980s and runs alongside a 2020s timeline in which Mazelle’s grandson, Johnny Washington, a director of horror films, works in an industry still wrestling with stereotypes. In an upheaval, Johnny takes his wife and two daughters for their first visit to his family inheritance: Mazelle’s ski lodge in the mountain forests of northern California. Even with his own grim memories of the place, Johnny is unprepared for the terrors that await them there.

Due (The Reformatory) expertly interlaces these two narratives, one rooted in historical detail, with cameos by Lena Horne and Sammy Davis Jr., the other neatly focused on 21st-century family dynamics and the development of two strong, nuanced adolescent girls. Drama, history, and bloodcurdling fear combine for a thriller that is smart, monster-ridden, and moving.

This review originally ran in the September 25, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 7 pennies.

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The Woman Who Rides Like a Man by Tamora Pierce (audio)

Posted on October 26, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Book three in a quartet that began here and is flying by. In The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, Alanna has been newly knighted, and the world now knows that she is a woman. We find her traveling through the southern desert (because it is winter and she loathes the cold) with her faithful manservant and trainer, Corum, as her only company. She is in search of adventure, and also legitimacy in the eyes of a court that does not generally approve of women warriors. She finds the first, at least, with the Bazhir, a loose nation of desert folk, and the Bloody Hawk tribe within that people. There is a battle, she proves herself by combat, she is adopted by the tribe; but the existing shaman views her as an enemy, mostly for her gender. After she kills him in a fight she never wanted in the first place, she is tasked with becoming the Bloody Hawk’s shaman in his stead, until she can train a suitable replacement. (There are some interesting cultural questions here; I am more or less as surprised as Alanna that such an important role should go to an outsider.) Of course, the candidates to replace her turn out to be two girls, something that does not bother Alanna but gives the tribe some further trouble.

“I think I’m leaving you in a fairly quiet place,” [Corum] began as he unpacked in his tent. Alanna was watching as she scratched Faithful’s ears. “You weren’t well enough known here that you could get into any trouble, and I thought they’d stay away from ye. But I come back and you’re the mother-blessed shaman of the tribe! You’ve adopted three young ones and you’re forcin’ the women to accept two of their own sittin’ with the men!”

“You’re turning purple,” Alanna commented when he stopped for breath.

But as the Woman Who Rides Like a Man (so called by her new tribespeople, with respect and admiration), she is well placed to push for such a revolution.

In the course of her accomplishments with the Bloody Hawk, Alanna also enjoys a reunion with Prince Jonathan, and they renew their love affair. He asks her to marry him, and one day become his queen; but this will lead in a different direction than he hopes.

By this novel’s end, the prospects for the kingdom of Tortall are looking up, based upon Jonathan’s work with the Bloody Hawk, which is in turn made possible (I’d argue) by Alanna’s relationships. But Alanna’s personal life remains in some upheaval. She’s come a ways from the time when she told the goddess she would never love; in one of her quieter revolutions in what women can be, Alanna takes lovers as she pleases. But she hasn’t settled on what exactly it is that she wants. Luckily, we head into book four with another quest on the horizon.

These books were originally published in the 1980s and have aged remarkably well. I think there is room for some concern in the portrayal of the desert tribespeople, but it does not feel (at least to this reader) necessarily objectionable. I’d defer to a sensitivity reader, perhaps.

I do still love Alanna and her attitudes and adventures, and am looking forward to what the final book in the quartet may hold.

Rating: 7 swords.

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Winter Song by Rebeca Lee Morales

Posted on October 23, 2026 by pagesofjulia

During a small-town Midwestern winter, a young felon who proclaims his innocence and a police chief nearing retirement face off in this debut novel of hard questions and strange loveliness.

Rebeca Lee Morales’s first novel, Winter Song, is quietly astonishing.

In the deep, cold winter of 1986, in a small Minnesota town, police chief Gordon Trent sits alone in the cold house he shared with his late wife, pondering his approaching retirement, which he intends to delay as long as possible. He shares cold toast with the dog, attends the scene of a death by apparent suicide, and visits with an old friend, a retired fellow officer. Then the narrative shifts to focus on Byron Lugo as he is released from prison. Now 26, Byron has served his time for vehicular homicide: a hit-and-run for which Byron is very sorry, but he has always maintained his innocence. Having regained his freedom, he is determined to get his life back: job, car, house, fiancée–although the latter has married someone else. Trent’s belief in justice is, more than ever, what gets him through his work and his life; Byron’s insistence that justice has not been served is unwavering. The two men persist in calm, polite, staunch disagreement, until one of them is proven correct, and lives are once again upheaved.

The town that serves as backdrop, Montevideo–known as Monte–is as clearly portrayed as any of its residents, who make up a cast of colorful, flawed, but sympathetic men and women laboring at a no-frills, working-class existence. These include the woman who runs the thrift store, Byron’s soft-spoken father, a diner waitress, and Byron’s small but unwavering group of friends. The novel’s action rises to bar scenes with dancing and pool, a demolition derby, and an act of startling violence. But much of its greatest drama takes place in subtler moments: conversation, reflection, the pulling back of a covering drape. With grace, humor, and wise observations of human behaviors, Winter Song examines what everyday people can and cannot, or will not, live with; forgiveness, justice, friendship, and community; and the question of whether a fresh start is truly possible.

Morales has captured an American town and the human condition, in all their wounds and splendors, and in simple dignity. With deceptively deep focus and nuance, she applies an attention to detail that exalts even snow in “heaping begrimed ramparts” and the stark struggles of humble existence. For all its many tragedies, and a good dose of dramatic irony, this novel is searingly beautiful and surprisingly hopeful in the end.

This review originally ran in the September 21, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 cups of coffee.

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Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi

Posted on October 19, 2026 by pagesofjulia

From the author of Yolk comes this utter delight about two young people struggling to find their ways and their people. I loved it!

We meet Penny just as she’s getting ready to leave home and head off to college, which can’t come soon enough. She figured out in ninth grade “that she wouldn’t be popular until she was a grown-up and that was fine because life was a long con,” and she’s always been awkward. She has a boyfriend she barely knows and doesn’t much care for; it’ll be a chore to break up with him, but he was only with her because he has a thing for Asian girls anyway. She’s used to the microaggressions, like her teacher’s need for her to be “exotic” despite being born in Seguin, Texas. She loves her mom Celeste, who is needy, emotional, and obsessed with beauty products, but she’s also furious with her. It’s a great relief to head off to UT Austin, where she hopes to pursue her writing.

Then we meet Sam, a few years older, who sleeps on a mattress in a storage room upstairs from the coffee shop where he works. Sam would like to be developing as a documentary filmmaker, but he’s broke, estranged from his mother, struggling to keep away from a toxic ex, who, oh joy!, has just told him she’s pregnant.

And wouldn’t you know it: Penny’s assigned college roommate turns out to be Jude, a privileged, bubbly young woman who was briefly, by marriage, related to Sam. Jude and her best friend Mallory latch onto Sam, dragging Penny along for a first meeting which is deeply awkward but also reveals a magnetism that is mutual, though neither realizes it.

Their second meeting is sort of perfect, and (as the back of this book has it) sort of the opposite of meet-cute: Sam has a panic attack on Sixth Street, thinks he’s dying of a heart attack, and Penny rescues him. She recognizes what he’s going through. They exchange numbers, and call each other ’emergency contact.’ From there, contact is near-constant, but only via text message. Within the little screen, their connection is sublime: all awkwardness falls away; “even on text, where there are no inflections or nuance or tone for non sequiturs. You’ve always spoken fluent me.” Penny and Sam would not be the first or the last people to find it easiest to confess their deepest, most vulnerable feelings in a format that’s not face to face. It’s the perfect relationship – if they can just keep it out of the real world. They can’t, of course.

I love that this novel about weird, wounded, awkward young people does wind up a very sweet romance, by a circuitous path. And neither has to change themselves, although they will open up a little. This process opens them up just a touch to the rest of the world, as well, and Penny and her mother even have a bit of a moment. It felt like an echo, because I had just watched 10 Things I Hate About You (for the first time!) with the main teenager in my life, and had a chance to observe that we don’t have to bend ourselves toward ‘normal,’ whatever that is – we just hope to find our own particular brand of weirdo, the ones whose eccentricities match or complement our own. (A song lyric: “I’m lookin’ for baggage that goes with mine.”) It feels wholesome, and preserves what is most odd and wonderful about Penny and Sam.

I’m already working on getting into more of Choi’s work.

Rating: 8 pieces of sheet cake.

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In the Hand of the Goddess by Tamora Pierce (audio)

Posted on October 16, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Book 2 in the Song of the Lioness quartet continues to please. We know Alanna from the eponymous first book, where we left her mid-adventure. We meet her again still in-scene, though we’ve fast-forwarded; she is a competent and respected squire approaching the trial she must endure to become a knight. And she is dreading it, to an extent that feels a little inexplicable to this reader; she has been so good at everything she’s tried so far, although often as not that’s a feature of hard work. Alanna still lives as a boy, now a young man, with only a few close friends knowing her truth. This generally means she’s the smallest, and there is always some self-doubt.

One of the trajectories she goes through in this novel is her resistance to ‘love’ (or, as it sometimes seems, sex). It is also increasingly necessary that she live the truth of her identity. It’s never been a question that Alanna feels like a girl – she even wishes for a little more knowledge of how to wear women’s clothing and be ‘pretty.’ She poses as a boy for the privileges it provides her, to study the martial arts, and not as a matter of identity. So, one of the places we see her moving is toward declaring her true identity – but only after she achieves knighthood.

The other plot thread that provides tension is that of a threat to the throne, most pointedly in the form of its heir, Prince Jonathan, who is Alanna’s good friend and perhaps something more. The threat comes from inside the royal circle, and is magical as well as substantial; a supernatural weapon is used to obscure the truth, leaving Alanna mostly alone in fighting it. That storyline will come to a head alongside the question of where Alanna puts her breasts, as one friend forms that inquiry.

I still appreciate Trini Alvarado’s reading of these books, which is just a little clipped in a way that feels just right. (Maybe I’ll describe that better in book three.) It’s all a grand adventure, and I feel invested in the growth of our heroine, who very much rides into the sunrise at the book’s end. Even after these decades, she feels like a worthwhile hero, not at all dated. See you soon!

Rating: 7 phantom swords.

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Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson, transl. by Elizabeth Portch

Posted on October 12, 2026 by pagesofjulia

“Where are they going?” asked Moomintroll.

“To places where I’m not,” Snufkin answered…

“Loaded with cinnamon, sharks’ teeth, and emeralds,” said Moomintroll.

I got this off a list of recommendations, somewhere! (isn’t that always the way) that I can’t find now; I think it was a list of cozy winter reads. It’s my first introduction to the Moomins, although apparently they’re a force in the world – and visually just a little familiar, so who knows.

The Moomin household (in the Moominhouse) includes a bit of biological family – Moominmamma, Moominpappa, and Moomintroll – and quite a few more found, or built, or adopted, like the Snork Maiden (Moomintroll’s romantic interest) and her brother Snork, Moomintroll’s best friend Snufkin, the Hemulen, and the Muskrat. Etc. This family is all love and caring, even when there is bickering. We meet them first as they prepare for winter and a long sleep: “All Moomintrolls go to sleep about November. This is a good idea, too, if you don’t like the cold and the long winter darkness.” (I read that later on in the Moomin trajectory, they do discover that winter can be fun too.) And then they awaken, and interact with each other and with their world in a spirit of joy and wonder. Moomintroll, Snufkin, and Sniff find a hat, a great glorious top hat, that changes things (and people!) into other things – this will cause many problems, and some fun, before it is time for the hat to move on.

This book is marked as being for ages 9-12, and that feels about right. I enjoyed ripping right through its chapters (stories? but linked). I think they work well for younger readers, or for older ones looking for simple, parable-like tales. I can imagine wanting to spend more time in the simpler world of the Moomins. And the illustrations are delicious! Glad I found this quirky series.

Rating: 7 pancakes.

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Free Love: Adventures in Marriage and Polyamory by Michelle Tea

Posted on October 9, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Through the context of the author’s own adventures in marriage and polyamory, and interviews and research, this thoughtful study explores various means of living “many loves.”

By the time she sat down to pen Free Love: Adventures in Marriage and Polyamory, Michelle Tea had indeed lived an adventurous life, “from straight to bi to lesbian to dyke to bi again and now and forevermore the one-stop shop of queer,” among other journeys in identity and lifestyle, sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. In this work’s opening present day, she is a wife (“a relationship that took root in the landscape of my divorce”), a mother, and–not for the first time–grappling with the concept of monogamy. She is easing into the idea of “nonmonogamy as a real orientation within [her],” and in these pages, explores its various forms, in history, in her personal life and preferences, and through interviews with friends and acquaintances as well as cultural figures. Always open and nonjudgmental about a range of ways of nonmonogamous life, Free Love is a fascinating and candid analysis.

Tea (Against Memoir; Valencia) merges her own past with external sources, in the context of interviews and conversations, so that her voice remains present throughout. For example, she talks with scholar-historian-archivist Jeanne Vaccaro, writer/musician Brontez Purnell, and an artist she calls simply Z because “I’m charged with protecting her anonymity, so crucial for her exciting, global sex life.” Tea describes her own fantasies in the context of the 1989 film Last Exit to Brooklyn, adapted from Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1964 novel. She shares joys and heartbreaks, ecstasies and pains, in anecdotes of relationships and every part of her life. Through storytelling, she introduces less-familiar readers to terms like “metamour” (the partners of one’s partner) and “compersion” (the opposite of jealousy; “a feeling of shared happiness or fine-fellow-feeling at my partner’s extracurricular dalliances”). With friends, historians, researchers, scholars, and cultural icons, she discusses sex, desire, shame, free love communes, government control of women’s bodies, risk aversion, the “relationship escalator,” plural marriages, motherhood, aging, and jealousy, always through a lens of queerness. Tea reports that it is an ongoing struggle to both love and deepen bonds with one or several individuals, and to remain open to a wider world: “It’s so hard to strike the balance of held, beloved security, and raw, autonomous adventure.” The challenges of polyamory are real, she acknowledges, but in refrain, she also argues, it is worth those challenges.

Free Love demystifies, educates, explores the margins, and questions received wisdom. To that end, Tea hopes her reader finds in these pages “inspiration… revelation, permission,” and, perhaps most simply, more love.

This review originally ran in the September 14, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 cards.

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The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (audio)

Posted on October 5, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Best book of the year. Thanks, Liz

An epistolary novel, via audiobook with a multitude of narrators: Maggi-Meg Reed reads the correspondent herself, Sybil Stone Van Antwerp, a formidable woman turning 73 when we first meet her. The rest of the cast read the parts of others, those who correspond in turn with Sybil, and several of these read more than one role: Jane Oppenheimer, Carly Robins, Jeff Ebner, David Pittu, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Mark Bramhall, Petrea Burchard, Robert Petkoff, Kimberly Farr, Cerris Morgan-Moyer, Peter Ganim, Jade Wheeler… and “various,” who I assume are Steve West and Jen Siebert?, two names verbally credited on this production but who I can find nowhere in print (so I’m inventing those spellings, sorry, best effort). While usually a single narrator handles a novel well, changing voices for different characters, I do appreciate the choice here. For one thing, a letter rarely opens with “Dear Sybil, this is John” or whatnot, and as I learned the voices (and accents!), it helped.

So. An epistolary novel, told entirely in letters (and less frequently, emails or notes) to and from our eponymous main character. Sybil is a hell of a character. I would call her, especially early on, indomitable, indefatigable, domineering, pushy, opinionated, bossy – some of these being the things we call a strong woman when we don’t like her very much. This book has pulled off that rarity: a generally unlikeable protagonist whom we still care deeply about. I did find myself applauding Sybil from time to time, especially later in the book, but she’s not easy to like. She is a flawed but eventually deeply sympathetic character, who has lived more than seven decades and has collected her share of disappointments and regrets. Remarkably, she is still capable in her 70s of learning new ways to be, trying new things, and – rarest of all – admitting she was wrong. By the end I’m quite proud of her (although I’m still not sure she’d be easy to like). We follow her selected correspondence for most of a decade, until it ends. And in these years, as Sybil puts it, her life is very full. Among other things, she entertains two suitors; finds some of her biological family for the first time (after adoption as an infant); embarks upon international travel for effectively* the first time; experiences a life-altering medical change; and navigates several important apologies or discussions of old wrongs. These are deeply impressive.

[*with an important exception which she argues should not count.]

I don’t know that I will attempt much more plot summary. Evans offers a full cast of fascinating characters as correspondents, including Sybil’s family (one adoptive brother with whom she is close; one adult child with whom she is not) and loved ones (her best friend with whom she has exchanged letters since they were children), strangers (authors and other public figures), and friends new and old. I felt the most tenderness for Sybil when she was addressing children, which she does with remarkable gentleness and wisdom for someone who can also be quite harsh, and when she was facing her own old mistakes. There is a customer service representative she emails with, who becomes quite something else (despite one of Sybil’s more face-palm faux pas in her opening missive). The richness and variety in these correspondents is delicious. I especially appreciate that while many of her regular letter-writers are of her generation, there is some diversity in age as well as in most every other sort of identity. Sybil tells us that we’d be surprised: much of the time she writes to someone, they write her back.

The argument is made that it’s easier to tell hard truths in writing than out loud, and we do get some heavy confessions and storytelling, from Sybil and from others. It is often a sad book, and Sybil is troubled and scarred, but she is as strong and awesome as she is flawed, in the end. I did really appreciate such a nuanced portrait of a protagonist who is both older and not automatically likeable; I think the novelist’s feat here is complex. I can’t stop thinking or talking about it, and I feel sure this will be the best book I read all year.

Rating: 9 cakes.

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