Maximum Shelf author interview: Kelly Anderson

Posted on May 4, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of The Wild Beneath, here’s Kelly Anderson: Proof That Magic Exists.

Dr. Kelly Anderson is a family physician with fellowships in HIV and emergency medicine. She has worked in rural and remote emergency departments, spent 15 years at the Inner City Family Health Team at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, and built the clinical team at Felix Health. She completing the Bookends Novel Fellowship and the Gateless Writing Academy and is a certified Gateless writing teacher. Anderson spent much of her childhood in British Columbia, and now lives in Guelph, Ontario, with her family. Her first novel, The Wild Beneath (Park Row, August 4, 2026), is an astonishing story about beauty, magic, and loss on land and sea.

Where did this story begin, for you?

portrait of Kelly Anderson (photo credit: Nicola Toon)

Kelly Anderson
(photo: Nicola Toon)

This story began in 2019 while I was quietly drowning inside my own life, working shift after shift in the emergency department. Somehow, even though I was highly functional and effective at my job, I felt disconnected and flat. I had forgotten what I wanted and needed. I never planned to write fiction. I was doing a three-point turn in my driveway on a winter morning; the sun was blindingly bright and I’d forgotten my sunglasses. It was Walker that found me first, and the idea that as people, we can turn into other things. Metamorphosis. I needed to find metamorphosis in my own life, and it started with writing the first lines of The Wild Beneath.

Those opening lines have a matching sense of huge change. Did that represent directly the need for change in your life?

I knew I wanted to feel more alive. But I had no idea how to do it, and it took me years to change the building blocks of my life. The closer I got to writing Annie’s freedom, the more recognition I faced about my own unrelenting desire for it. Eventually, I left emergency medicine and academic medicine–two things I couldn’t imagine doing before writing the book. I still practice medicine in ways that feel important and meaningful to me, but I had to change the containers I was in and build new ones.

You have been involved in two kinds of work that appear to be very different: medical practice and novel writing. How does one inform or inspire the other?

I think they’re similar work, in that both writers and doctors care so deeply about understanding people. In medicine, we see the most unpolished, vulnerable versions of our patients. In writing, we’re trying to understand human intimacies in order to make our characters feel real on the page–so we can benefit from their wisdom in our own lives. I love my work in medicine. It’s a privilege, and it informs the way I write. It’s an honour to be involved in healing, and at times, I watch modern medicine save lives. But writing is the thing that saves my own life–in small and big and repetitive and enlightening and surprising ways each day when I sit down at my desk.

Your characters and scenes are fully and physically tied to the natural world. Did that require research?

I wanted Hale’s Landing to feel as real as possible, so readers could fall for the landscape in the same way I fall head-over-heels for the Pacific Northwest each time I’m there. British Columbia was my childhood home, so writing about it feels innate. But many experts shaped the details. I’ve read more whale articles than I can count! Understanding whale communication–the little we know about it–felt important to get right. I gathered everything possible about humpback songs; how they’re shared and evolve over seasons and time. I am so grateful to all the wildlife, avian, tugboat, and forestry experts that were willing to spend hours on the phone with me (literally). Please check out the acknowledgements for a long list of these kind human beings.

Are writing and research separate processes?

Always back-and-forth. I write my scenes in uninterrupted 25-minute chunks. If I don’t know something, I insert a placeholder and come back after I’ve researched.

More importantly, I watch for what surfaces in my own life as research. For example, while I was writing The Wild Beneath, friends would send me relevant documentaries or articles, and say, “I don’t know why, but I think you need to read-watch-see this.” It would be an item about sperm whale clicks or tsunamis or women crossing the ocean in a sailboat or logging in Alaska. When things repeatedly surface in front of me, I take it as a sign it belongs in the book.

Where is the line between so-called hard science and magic?

Are science and magic separate, or actually the same thing at different points of human discovery? Is magic just science that we haven’t discovered yet, or don’t yet have the tools or language to measure? In medicine, I’m frequently reminded of how provisional our knowledge is–what we “know” about the body is often temporary and replaced by something else more “true.” In the novel, the imaginative elements point toward what lies beyond our current knowledge of nature, but I wonder if parts of it could actually be true. What we call magic is the presence of mystery–the recognition that we can’t fully explain life with our current models. I’m always on the lookout for magic. If everything were fully explained, there would be no awe, no reverence, no reason to keep listening.

Where do you find magic in medical work?

I think your question speaks to a more general human conundrum–where is the magic? Is there any left? When we aren’t looking for magic, or believe there is none… we can’t find it anywhere. We aren’t sure it exists. But when we believe in something, the evidence for it grows because we’re paying attention. To help me, I have a list in the back of my notebook called “proof that magic exists.”

When I say magic, what I mean is: I believe that life is bigger than we can understand with the human mind, and that benevolent forces are all around us. I choose to believe this because I see it, and because it’s a beautiful and supportive way to live. Because I’m looking for magic, I find proof of it in the smallest of places, including every day in medicine.

It feels like this story could have been set nowhere else than this stretch of Pacific Northwestern coast.

When I was little, I would wander the beaches of southern British Columbia and think to myself: everything is okay because the ocean is here. I believed it. I might still believe it. The trees and water in the Pacific Northwest feel primordial and wordless in a way that awes me. I have so much difficulty fully describing the awe that I had to write a whole book about it.

What are you working on next?

I’m in the middle of writing my second novel! It’s a love story, with similar reverence for the natural world woven inside, and I’m excited to see how it unfolds. I also write a weekly Substack that explores writing, intuition and the mystery of being human.

This interview originally ran on April 7, 2026 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Maximum Shelf: The Wild Beneath by Kelly Anderson

Posted on May 1, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on April 7, 2026.

Kelly Anderson’s debut novel, The Wild Beneath, is an astonishing act of imagination, firmly rooted in the physical world of a small coastal village and in the ocean itself. With threads of the magical laced throughout, a limited cast of characters wrestles for balance between land and sea and in their relationships with one another. Ever surprising, this spellbinding story holds both science and wonder, always in close touch with the natural world.

The Wild Beneath opens with a scene of beauty and terror. “She begins with a lullaby that sends coyotes fleeing up mountains. Honeybees abandon their hives to the shrill calls of songbirds and barking dogs. Beneath the seafloor, the tectonic plates loosen and rearrange…. A liquid mountain rises in the Pacific Northwest.” The earthquake and tsunami destroy a human settlement and take many lives; the effect is power and pain and loss, described in harrowing detail, but “the ocean will call it a song.” The ocean is never far from the consciousness of Anderson’s characters.

Annie MacLeod is 19, and it is an accident of timing that she happens to be ashore with her grandmother Ruth when the tsunami hits their Canadian village, Hale’s Landing. In all her life, she has spent very few nights away from her parents and their sailboat, Amphitrite. “Maybe they’re not dead,” Ruth tells Annie, although hope fades with time. The two women scour sand and scum from Ruth’s cabin and sift the detritus on the beach for mementos or for anything useful to meeting their most basic needs. Annie suffers from blinding grief and a change in her relationship to the world around her, due to events just before the tsunami that are not immediately revealed. She’s also experiencing a fracture in her relationship with Evan, the boy she’s grown up with, the two of them pushed and pulled like tides. Evan has spent summers on Amphitrite since they were both small, but for most of the year he belongs to the land, where his father, Isaac Hale, runs the timber company that gives the town its name and livelihood. Where Annie is accustomed to listening to the ocean’s nuanced song, Evan listens to the trees.

Then, at the edge of the land and the end of the world as she’s known it, Annie encounters a new arrival walking slowly down the beach. Washed up on the shore, stark naked, about her own age, with “a startling vacancy about him, not fully there, looking past her. His irises are sea-urchin grey with streaks of silver.” He accepts the name Annie offers him: Walker. It seems to Annie that he emits a hum, a sound she feels deep in her bones, that soothes the parts of her that have been jangled by recent events. “This out-of-place person in front of her… who is he? Why does she want him to like everything about her?” Walker is tall and handsome, but almost above those descriptors: he seems elementally tuned to the ocean in a way that speaks to Annie’s bones. He makes her feel safe in a different way than Evan does. In an entirely disordered world, Annie–raised by her two loving parents and by the sea, mostly outside of human society–is unsure of where to turn. Toward her best friend and first love, who offers both stability and complication on land? Or toward the strange newcomer, whose pulse feels like home, and who beckons her to return to the ocean?

With lyricism and a quiet sense of awe, The Wild Beneath reveals a careful focus on balance, rhythm, push-and-pull relationships. It is inhabited by many paired forces: Annie’s parents, Evan’s parents, the land and the ocean, Walker and Evan, the question of whether one stays or goes. Anderson orders the book by the tides: Low, Slack, Flood, High, Ebb. Within each section, there are shifts in time: Now, Before, Six years after, Forty years before. These cycles punctuate Annie’s experiences, which are highly keyed to the natural world: humpback whales, tide pools, sea stars, sand dollars, wind. Flashbacks also offer glimpses of Annie’s father, who was himself once a young person navigating the push-and-pull of land and sea. He loved the ocean, but Annie’s mother seemed preternaturally linked to it–like Walker now. Annie’s upbringing on the boat was one version of balancing those two approaches; now in adulthood, she must chart her own. In perhaps another cycle, Annie’s life represents an attempt to balance her two parents’ experiences of their world, but readers will wait for most of the book to discover what those experiences were.

Anderson offers a novel that is quietly astounding, beautiful even when it conveys profound pain. With unhurried but propulsive pacing, she draws readers into a plot that is both bewildering and bewitching. The Wild Beneath asks wise, subtle questions about the line between science and magic, and suggests that both are found in the natural world. Annie’s struggles with grief, with coming of age, with tough choices, and with a sense of being pulled in two conflicting directions at once, are both universally recognizable and shockingly unique. Her story is haunting and unforgettable.

Rating: 8 oysters.

Come back Monday for my interview with Anderson.

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Son of Nobody by Yann Martel

Posted on April 27, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Profound, heartrending, and endlessly absorbing, this novel of ancient Greek myth and modern family upheaval will transport any reader.

Booker Prize-winner Yann Martel (Life of Pi; The High Mountains of Portugal) intricately nests one story in another in the excellent Son of Nobody. Protagonist Harlow Donne narrates to a specific audience: his eight-year-old daughter, Helen, named after Helen of Troy. Harlow is, or rather was, a Homeric scholar, and he describes to his beloved, story-loving child the year he spent in postdoctoral study at Oxford University. His discovery there of a previously unknown text relating the Trojan War contained many departures from (and frequently “more offbeat” than) Homer’s version. With a blend of erudition and creativity, Harlow pieces together from fragments what he calls The Psoad. This text forms the novel’s body, with copious footnotes by Harlow detailing both the discovery and restoration of that text, as well as his personal life as it slowly unravels during his year away at Oxford, while his wife and daughter remain at home in Canada.

Harlow’s voice is nuanced, clever, and learned; he paints himself a devoted father if admittedly imperfect husband. The narrative in the footnotes conveys Harlow’s academically controversial restoration alongside his journey through scholarship, love, family, and loss. The Psoad is itself a fascinating read for any lover of Greek myth; Harlow argues “that the heroes of the Epic Cycle, in this case Psoas of Midea, created the space for the appearance of their complement, Jesus of Nazareth, the other foundational figure of Western culture.” These layers, and their quietly complex interplay, showcase Martel’s strengths: subtlety, profundity, humor, pathos.

This review originally ran in the April 3, 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: 8 chameleons.

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It’s Hard to Be an Animal by Robert Isaacs

Posted on April 24, 2026 by pagesofjulia

The sudden ability to hear animals speak offers perspective, romance, and adventure to an awkward young man in this whimsical, tender first novel.

Robert Isaacs’s first novel, It’s Hard to Be an Animal, is a feat of humor, yearning, adventure, angst, and romance. In following a lonely, self-doubting protagonist, this remarkable debut manages to be about all of life, in its most unlikely twists.

Readers meet Henry on a first date at a sidewalk café in Manhattan. Nervous Henry is an inveterate doormat, but he is funny and kind. His coworker Jackie has set him up with Molly, who is playful and ebullient; Henry is quite sure she’s out of his league, but she likes him nevertheless. “Within the hour” of their meeting, “a migrating songbird weighing less than an ounce would upend his life.” Coffee goes well, so they take a walk in Central Park, where Henry spots a magnolia warbler. The sweet, decorative little bird considers the pair, and then speaks. “Fuck off,” it says clearly to Henry and then continues in a similarly foul-mouthed territorial vein. When Henry gets home to the apartment he shares with an exuberant Belarussian named Yaryk, he discovers that his housemate’s two betta fish are involved in an exchange of creatively nasty insults. The situation continues with dogs, a police horse, pigeons: Henry can now hear animals talking. If that fact were not shocking enough, they all seem to be terribly angry. He questions his sanity and finds the animals’ rage depressing.

Henry thinks himself a failure in all parts of his life, but readers can see that he has true friends in Yaryk and Jackie; he handles workplace dramas with aplomb, if also self-denigration; Molly’s attraction to him is genuine, even as they weather miscommunications verging on the Shakespearean. Painfully conflict-averse, Henry is challenged enough by human drama; fat-shaming sparrows and judgmental pythons threaten his threadbare mental health but also offer perspective. When he overhears subway rats discussing a body-disposal site, he inadvertently lets it slip to the unusually adventurous Molly. The budding couple soon find themselves enmired in the New York City subway system and an intrigue of increasingly high stakes. And a neighbor’s yappy Pomeranian turns out to be just the font of wisdom that the pushover Henry needed. In a newly cacophonous world, he may finally find his own voice.

It’s Hard to Be an Animal is one laugh, dire escapade, or poignant moment away from either disaster or nirvana. Hilarious, heartfelt, ever-surprising, Henry’s story is one of hope, redemption, and self-discovery.

This review originally ran in the April 3, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 windows repaired.

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The Iliad, the Odyssey and All of Greek Mythology in 99 Minutes or Less presented by Buckhannon Community Theatre

Posted on April 20, 2026 by pagesofjulia

This was a deeply fun production by my local community theatre group. There was a big clock onstage, to which the players freely referred, breaking the fourth wall just a little bit in a fun way – there were also playful references to anachronisms. The Iliad, the Odyssey and All of Greek Mythology in 99 Minutes or Less (by Jay Hopkins and John Hunter) is an unserious but impressively thorough survey. This production went a little closer to 100 minutes, but still what a feat!

Just six actors split well over 100 parts between them. They generally talk very fast, and they make lightning-fast and near-constant costume changes to indicate character changes: you know the sort, just a pair of glasses or a hat or a scarf, or standing up on a box or sitting on a chair – the bare minimum prop to differientiate one part from another. Between the fire hose of information, the fast speech, and the constant part changes, there is obvious built-in humor, much of it written in and some of it (we assume) incidental. (My date and I did wonder about one or two moments when an actor might have been in error, or it might have been part of the script!) Such an undertaking requires a little patience and looseness from both audience and players, and that worked out fine here. It was absolutely silly but really extremely fun and very well done – I’m very impressed by the memorization alone, let alone all that delivery. I thought the writers and the players captured the spirit of the original myths (as I know them) well: it’s all a bit absurd and often silly itself, and as with Shakespeare, we sometimes take it a bit seriously just for its antiquity, beyond what serves.

A very impressive production by a small cast. I’ll have to look out for more from this tight little group!

Rating: 8 biographies.

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A Perfect Hand by Ayelet Waldman

Posted on April 17, 2026 by pagesofjulia

This twist on the historical romantic drama considers a lady’s maid, the valet she falls for, and the wider world for which she yearns.

A Perfect Hand by Ayelet Waldman (Bad Mother; Daughter’s Keeper; Love and Treasure) is a captivating historical drama, an appealing romance, and a story of political awakening, cleverly packaged as a novel of manners. This shapeshifter reads as an engaging and witty work of escapism until it turns to more serious-minded concerns, while never losing its charm. Set in English country estates and the grimy city of London in the 19th century, the rollicking narrative ranges from frivolous upper-class parties and fancy dress to the literal and metaphorical dirty laundry that the service class must process.

Alice Lockey, the daughter of a tenant farmer, has done well for herself, working her way up to the position of lady’s maid to Lady Jemima, the silly, indulged elder daughter of a lord. Alice is skilled, intelligent, and eager to learn and to better herself; she hasn’t decided what that will mean but is reluctant to follow her mother’s advice to pursue marriage as a highest aim. Then she meets Charlie, a similarly above-average valet (also having climbed above his humble beginnings) to a viscount. Charlie and Alice tumble into the meager courtship that they can sneak on their half-days off, but they wish for more. Quickly realizing that their employers’ marriage is the only route to their own, they determine to set up Lady Jemima–infatuated with another man, who is a bit of a rake–and the deeply eccentric Lord Wynstowe. This is a tall order, but the young lovers are highly motivated and well positioned for persuading.

Even as their schemes near fruition, however, Alice learns and yearns and grows. A reader (unusual for her class, but encouraged by Lady Jemima’s iconoclastic spinster aunt), she encounters pamphlets by Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. Questions of class reflect directly on her life and Charlie’s; certain versions of feminism seem aimed at her lady’s class rather than her own, but Alice wonders what the suffrage movement might do for even a servant girl. Between sewing ribbons and lace onto her lady’s latest dresses and washing her foul undergarments, running her errands and helping her dress, Alice considers the various lives she might wish for, if she were able to choose for herself.

A Perfect Hand works subtly on several levels, exulting in the details of the Victorian setting (dress, diet, and indignities), exclaiming over Alice and Charlie’s sympathetic romance, and pressing the exceptional heroine toward her best and truest self. Waldman even exposes a fun and poignant final surprise in the narrator’s identity. With a nod to Jane Austen but a firm focus on the servant class, this versatile novel will entertain and stay with readers long past its final pages.

This review originally ran in the March 31, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 seedcakes.

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The Queen of Blood by Sarah Beth Durst (audio)

Posted on April 13, 2026 by pagesofjulia

I’m so taken by Durst’s Spellshop series that I had to find more, while she works on book three. The Queen of Blood is a departure in one way most of all: as is right there in the title, this one is a fair bit more bloodthirsty. I found it also intriguing and thought-provoking, and I’m looking forward to the next two in this trilogy as well, but make no mistake, this is not the cozy fantasy that Spellshop is. This is a fantasy about the things that are out there to get us, with a note of Hunger Games.

We meet Daleina first when she is six years old, and we see her come out lucky – or special – several times in her youth, when those around her are not so lucky. Because of these experiences, and for the sake of her dear parents and her beloved little sister, who believes in the elder sister’s ability, Daleina chooses to compete to attend one of her land’s special academies. There she will develop her affinity for calling and hopefully controlling the spirits. In Renthia, where Daleina lives, spirits animate all ‘natural’ forces: fire, ice, water, air, earth, trees. The spirits want two things: to create (which is why we have fire to cook with, and wind, and plant life), and to destroy – humans, in particular. The spirits hate humans, but they also need the balance provided by human control. Thus the land is ruled by a queen, chosen for her ability to manage the spirits. Queens are chosen from heirs, who are chosen from candidates, who are trained in the academies. (These are all women, as only women have affinity for spirits, although men may serve as champions and protectors.) Daleina is not terribly powerful, but she is highly motivated, and she brings an unusual perspective to her training. Her drive to protect her loved ones brings her into the orbit of the standing queen, Fara, whose powers may be waning; and the disgraced champion Ven, whose complicated past and secret campaign to save lives even in exile will impact Daleina’s own trajectory. Despite the highly competitive nature of their training, Daleina will form profound friendships with her classmates at the academy. She will encounter a chance at love. And she will risk everything for that oldest goal: to keep her little sister, and everyone else she loves, safe.

I was captivated by Khristine Hvam’s narration, with all the voices you could want (including those of fictional creatures). It’s a world to get lost in, with high stakes, double crossings and intrigue, romance and terrible danger, and the usual pains of coming of age. There was plenty to think about, and I’m looking forward to more – but this is a decidedly blood-soaked story, if that’s of any concern.

Love the imagination on Durst, and will be continuing to follow her.

Rating: 7 pies.

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Ravensong by TJ Klune

Posted on April 10, 2026 by pagesofjulia

As ever, here you will find spoilers from previous books in the series, but no spoilers for this book.

Book two in the Green Creek series is as devastatingly wonderful as the first. I did miss the audio format, which I’ll be returning to for book three (as soon as it’s available – hurry!).

This is Gordo Livingstone’s story. We know Gordo well from Wolfsong, but only from Ox’s perspective and in Ox’s lifetime; here, Gordo’s own childhood and upbringing with the Bennett pack alternates with a later timeline, starting with the time that Gordo spent on the road with Joe, Carter and Kelly, and beyond the events of book one. Somewhere I saw the four books in this series as being about four relationships; if book one was Ox’s story and centered his relationship with Joe, book two is Gordo’s story and focuses on his relationship with Mark. (No spoiler there: we knew they had something and now we know a whole lot more.) I will also say that there is a developing theme about the legacy of fathers. Ox and Gordo both had fathers who hurt them, and whose words continue to be present for the sons long after they’re gone. Their mothers remain present, too – Gordo’s mother left her son some difficulties, while Ox’s was all goodness – but the fathers-to-sons legacy feels like a greater throughline, especially with the male Bennett alphas taking surrogate places for each man. (Alphas can be female in this world, but the Bennetts, so far, have male ones.)

In some ways this is a continuation in kind. The Bennett pack is terribly powerful; they are a very loving and devoted family but also can be a demanding one; this level of commitment can be painful and costly, but the pack does its best to care for its own even when the process hurts. There is more, as one character termed it, mystical moon magic (romance, love, and definitely sex – not plentiful, but gorgeously written when we do get it). There is violence and war. Other wolves, bad witches, human hunters. There is a new threat in this book. It will take everything they have to stay whole, individually and together. There is love and lust and there is such angst, and for my money, Klune writes all of these (and the sex!) as well as anybody does. I’m stoked about book three, Heartsong.

Rating: 8 tattoos.

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Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan (audio)

Posted on April 6, 2026 by pagesofjulia

This was a wild one, recommended by Liz, and very deservingly so. I’ve been putting off writing this review and have realized I just need to come to terms with not doing it justice. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is about the intersections and tensions between literature and technology; about love and friendship and belonging; about problem-solving and teamwork; and about the big questions of life.

In contemporary, post-Covid times, we meet Clay Jannon, who after art school went to work for NewBagel in an initially promising techy design/PR/marketing career position, but NewBagel (following an attempted rebranding as the Old Jerusalem Bagel Company) went bust, and Clay’s been out of work at a rough time to be out of work in San Francisco. Then he happens upon Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, where he is hired by the elderly, twinkling, mysterious Penumbra as a night clerk. From 10pm until 6am, Clay sits at the front desk among the short shelves of used books, which he very infrequently sells to the very infrequent customer. A little more regularly, he is called upon to help card-carrying members of an enigmatic club to access the very different volumes on what he thinks of as the Waybacklist. The bookstore is long, skinny, and vertical, with very tall shadowy shelves accessible by vertiginous ladders. The books on those shelves are in code.

Clay is an engrossing narrator of this story, so self-deprecating that the reader is nearly as late as he is to realize that he can be quite a resourceful problem-solver. He is lucky (or is it luck?) to be surrounded by an assortment of talented, eccentric friends: his best friend since sixth grade, the once-doofy now-millionaire CEO of Anatomix; his roommate, a special effects wizard; the cute girl he meets along the way, a Google-employed genius; a fellow Penumbra clerk and archaeology graduate student; and more. These are just some of the characters (in every sense of the word) who come to Clay’s aid as he tried to solve the many, layered mysteries of Penumbra’s. What is in the coded books in the Waybacklist? Who are the people who come in the night to borrow them? Each question’s answer only unlocks more questions, and the stakes keep getting higher. It evolves into a quest narrative, reaching beyond Penumbra’s compelling bookstore. Clay and company wind up chasing, among other things, a centuries-old and seemingly insoluble riddle, which will involve Clay’s childhood favorite sci fi/fantasy series, a secret society, and the history of one of the world’s best-known typefaces.

At just 8 hours audio (or around 300 pages), Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore feels far more all-encompassing than such a neat package would imply. It’s one of those stories that feels like it’s about everything at once, which I love. Also, books and bibliophilia, even in the face of wild technologic advances: what’s not to love? Ari Fliakos narrates with great energy and personality; I wholeheartedly pass on Liz’s recommendation of the format as well as the book itself. I’ll be looking for more in the Penumbraverse.

Rating: 9 red t-shirts.

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The Pillagers’ Guide to Arctic Pianos by Kendra Langford Shaw

Posted on April 3, 2026 by pagesofjulia

In the Arctic, homesteaders dive for antique pianos and struggle to survive in this compulsively readable first novel of adventure and familial love.

“My little brother, Finley, drowned the first time wrestling the Napoleon pianoforte under the galactic starlight of an Arctic sunset; the way he later told the story, the piano had it coming.” The Pillagers’ Guide to Arctic Pianos is a wildly imaginative story centered on the adventures and trials of a homesteader family in the Arctic. Kendra Langford Shaw’s first novel follows these determined renegades as they establish and struggle to keep lives, livelihoods, homes, and community in a tremendously harsh environment.

Chapters alternate between characters and perspectives, beginning with siblings Milda, Finley, and Temperance; their parents, Viola and Fry; their ancestor Moose Bloomer, who began his immigration to the Arctic Territory as part of a large train of settlers but was, at 12, one of a few survivors to make it onto the permafrost; and the shrinking but hardy next generation. In a fantastical twist, each settler family brought a wildly impractical piece of equipment. “Issuing each family a map and an orange flag, the deed to their land hing[ed] upon their ability to ‘civilize.’ They were required to bring salt pork, botanical texts, and pianos–music, music being what would elevate the territory from raw, unbroken land into a homeland worth having.” Moose’s train lost and abandoned pianos across the region before settling and striving; pianofortes, surprisingly preserved by freezing waters, washed about the floors of the ocean and the Kamikaze River. Later homesteaders work as piano hunters. Antiques pulled up from the deep command impressive prices. Readers meet Finley when he is a young boy obsessed with recovering his family’s Napoleon, and this obsession will guide several lives.

In this strange Arctic world in which sunken pianos are desirable prey and their ivory keys can be found in the bellies of trout, glaciers melt, sea levels rise, and scant resources dwindle. Families battle the elements for survival, and they love one another in traditional and nontraditional ways. Viola, Fry, and their children live in a house on stilts, farming octopus and collecting sea beans, with a sea lion as a pet. They yearn only for “what other families had long ago achieved in terms of the conveniences of modern life: sanitation and heating ducts, coffee, dental work, telescopes, beehives.” Shaw’s imagination is broad, her characters delightful, and their fates often painful but also transcendent. The Pillagers’ Guide to Arctic Pianos is a lovely profile of a singular, stark place and a small, tight cast of indelibly colorful characters: a heart-wrenching, unforgettable debut.

This review originally ran in the March 23, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 pips.

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