Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Posted on May 15, 2026 by pagesofjulia

In June 1973, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, sisters aged twelve and fourteen, were sterilized without their consent in Montgomery, Alabama, by a federally funded agency. Outraged by this terrible violation, their social worker, Jessie Bly, reported it to a local attorney. Eventually, the case went to federal court in Washington, DC. The lead lawyer for the plaintiffs was Joseph Levin Jr. of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This case is considered a pivotal moment in the history of reproductive injustice, as it brought to light the thousands of poor women of color across the country who had been sterilized under federally funded programs.

Take My Hand is fiction, not a retelling of these events (Perkins-Valdez is quick to remind us), but an imagining of “the emotional impact of this moment and others like it.” The novel is told from the point of view of Civil Townsend, who is writing, decades after these events, to her adopted daughter, Anne. Anne is now twenty-three, the same age Civil had been when she’d gone to work at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic in her hometown.

Twenty-three years old. Eager to prove my daddy wrong. Anxious about my mother’s illness. Longing for love. Hoping to make a mark on the world. Young Civil, smiling shakily and unsurely but with all the awareness of a future that remains to be lived.

It is an interesting retrospective. Civil is now a doctor, but she began her medical career as a nurse, feeling that that’s where the work needed to be done (and rebelling against her father, who wished for her to be a doctor like him and like Civil’s grandfather too – a rare inheritance for a young Black woman in the 1970s). The novel flips back and forth between the 2016 journey that Civil makes from her newer home in Memphis, back to Montgomery to visit people she used to know, and Montgomery in 1973. In that earlier timeline, Civil narrates: she went to work at the clinic. She met her first home-visit case, the sisters Erica and India Williams, aged thirteen and eleven years old. We meet the other players in Civil’s life: her father, a doctor in their upper-middle-class Black community; her mother, a painter with mental health issues; her lifelong best friend, Ty, with whom things have gotten complicated; her new friend, Alicia, a fellow nurse at the clinic. Civil’s friends and family support her wish for the Williams family to have better chances, but none commit to it like Civil herself does. From our perspective, it is easy to see that she has terrible boundaries, moving far too deep into the Williamses’ orbit, involving herself in their lives far beyond the role of nurse at a community clinic. But when Erica and India are sterilized without consent, she does her best to seek justice for them, too.

This is a story of reproductive injustice, medical ethics, and racism. It is also the story of a young woman’s coming-of-age, learning about relationships and making her way in the world. It is based on the bare facts of a true court case, which immediately followed the uncovering of the horrifying Tuskegee experiment, and it is true to 1970s Alabama in broad terms. Civil herself is a fictional character – Perkins-Valdez sought but did not find accounts of the nurses at the clinic, so she imagined one. I am impressed by the emotional work of the Civil character, and, perhaps even more tricky, the complexity of certain other characters. There are no pure villains or heroes. The white nurse who heads up the clinic is initially someone Civil admires; then, when she directs the girls’ sterilization, becomes an enemy; but Civil winds up questioning the impulses of everyone involved. Who among us, believing in our own good intentions, does no harm?

I occasionally stopped to consider the way that especially Civil and her age-group peers, Alicia and Ty and others, talk to each other: it can feel a little stilted, a little explain-y, and I wondered if that dialog could have been written more naturally. But then again: these are college-age activists out to change their world. Didn’t we all deliver stiff speeches in that part of life? I think that dialog might have been realistic after all.

Take My Hand is a well-written, thought-provoking book about some of our lesser-known history, that I would strongly recommend. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to read. Perkins-Valdez has done remarkable work in imagination, in execution, and in faithful reporting, and I think it’s an important book.

Rating: 7 records.

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Nymph by Sofia Montrone

Posted on May 11, 2026 by pagesofjulia

This sensual, yearning novel of personal tragedy and first love in the Northern Italian countryside will transport readers of all ages.

Sofia Montrone’s first novel, Nymph, handles the coming-of-age of a girl named Leo, alongside the aging of her family’s Italian agriturismo. Leo and her family–Leo’s Italian mother, her American father, her one-year-younger brother Max–spend every summer at the rural hotel, helping to run the family business. Readers watch Leo move toward adulthood over the course of two summers, when she is 10 and when she is 18.

When she is younger, Leo cleans rooms, collecting the motley items guests leave behind, and helps prepare food alongside her Nonna Tina. Max, who is better with people, works at the front desk. Their mother is unwell and mostly sleeps. Their father, a professor and a heavy drinker, reads and tells stories; his renditions of the epics of Homer are among the many threads that keep Leo captivated. She and Max “want to know where Atlantis is, what feathers are made of, whether hair grows right out of their scalps or from their tangled ends, and he tells them. They have no sense of what is real and what is play, only that the Absent-Minded Professor is a kind of god, all-knowing, and that with the right password, they will be privy to his secrets, which are the secrets of the world.” Leo idolizes her father. By the novel’s second part, the shape of her family will be changed irrevocably, and is still changing. Her Nonna Tina, the hotel’s faithful employee Davide, and Leo’s immediate family are maturing or withering. The hotel is in decline. Leo herself is on the cusp of the next stage of her life, as a newcomer–an American teenager, curious, creative, and enthralling–captures her attention.

“Nymph” refers to “those maidens that live in the rivers and trees” as well as “a baby grasshopper,” whose short life plays a role in Leo’s. Montrone’s debut tracks these several processes in prose as lovely, fleeting, subtle, and shocking as growing up ever is. Ten-year-old Leo experiences the fallibility of her most beloved elders, and 18-year-old Leo finds her first love and still more loss. These tentative steps toward adulthood are set against a striking rural and natural setting, punctuated by the World Cup games that hold Italy rapt. “The mountains are nimbed with green light. Dark shapes swoop over the grounds, whether bats or birds she cannot say, only that they form black whorls like clouds.” Nymph is concerned with growth, shedding, and origins. “Where does the story of one’s life begin? At birth, with one’s parents or grandparents, the first days of Italy and its legions of secretive, long-suffering women, Odysseus?” This nuanced, wise novel expands with quiet understatement to reach profundity.

This review originally ran in the April 17, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 pearl earrings.

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The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill (audio)

Posted on May 8, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Another wonderful story from Kelly Barnhill, and I’m so delighted to learn that there are many of them! Joy!

In mythic tones, we open with chapter 1: In Which a Story Is Told. (All chapters are titled this way.) “Yes. There is a witch in the woods. There has always been a witch in the woods. Will you stop your fidgeting for once?” Some chapters are voiced like this one, with an unnamed storyteller addressing an unnamed child (we get some hints as to their identities only very late); others are more traditional third-person narration. We begin in the Protectorate, a place ruled by fog and cloud and sorrow, where the Elders, led by Grand Elder Gherland, uphold an important tradition. Once a year, on the Day of Sacrifice, they place the community’s youngest baby in a circle of sycamores in the dangerous woods to be taken by an evil witch, that she not destroy everything. The Elders are supported by the Sisters of the Star, who dwell in the Tower, holding all knowledge and skill; they are formidable warriors as well as scholars, mysterious and separate from the rest of the Protectorate, whose citizens, if not Elders, live in poverty and deprivation. We are also informed early on that Grand Elder Gherland knows there is no witch. The sacrifices are instead meant to keep the people subjugated and sad and under the thumb of the Elders.

But we also watch while a witch – a kindhearted, helpful witch, who lives in service to those around her – travels through the woods to collect this year’s sacrificed infant. She has no idea why the Protectorate’s people insist on doing this silly, cruel thing, abandoning infants in the woods, but each year she makes the trip and carries the infant, keeping them safe, warm, and fed, through the woods to the people in the Free Cities on the other side, where she rehomes them with loving families and they grow up safe, happy, loved. So there is a witch, and she does take the babies, but not like the Protectorate thinks.

The witch is Xan, and she is 500 years old. There is a bog monster named Glerk who is poetry-obsessed and much, much older, older even than magic. They are accompanied, in their lives deep in the woods by the bog, by a dragonling named Fyrian, who is just still very small (despite also being 500 years old), but believes himself to be simply enormous, because Xan and Glerk let him think he is – they say that they are giants. These are all characters of love, whimsy, silliness, and good humor, as well as of profound good. They are joined by Luna, the latest abandoned baby, whom Xan accidentally enmagics. And as the story unfolds, we also follow Grand Elder Gherland (not a sympathetic character); his nephew Antain, who wants for the Protectorate to do better; Sister Ignatia, head of all the sisters, who has a murky past; and a mother who becomes a madwoman in a tower but can be so much more. This is a grand fairy tale of a story, with dark, scary woods, dragons, volcanoes, sacrifices born of fear and of love, tigers, shapeshifting, paper birds, devotion, magic, built families… it’s a gorgeous book about everything. The beast, the bog, the poem, the world: “they are all the same thing, you know.” “I am the bog and the bog is me.”

I was reminded of “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” and “The Lottery,” most obviously in the early, baby-sacrifice scenes, but throughout with certain metaphors about what loyalty is earned to whom, and who should give up personal priorities for a greater good. There were several delicious layers of dramatic irony and miscommunication, and misdirection about who the bad guys are (‘guys’ in this case being gender-neutral, obviously). I found it a lovely story about goodness, courage, love, and the many ways we care for one another and make families. Like one of our protagonists here, I have also struggled with the observation that “there is no love without loss,” but Barnhill makes an argument that it’s worth it. Christina Moore narrates tremendously. I’m such a fan. Do check it out.

Rating: 9 bunnies.

PS: I found out after the fact that this is billed as a book ‘for young readers’ and was quite surprised. That is, all violence and threat of violence is quite tame – baby ‘sacrifices’ entail just placing them gently in the woods where they are collected safely, and the worst injury suffered is a bunch of paper cuts (like, the worst paper cuts of all time) – but I found the themes complex and thought-provoking. I was thinking of this as a work of great imagination and whimsy, not one for young readers (I’m seeing ages 8+, and grades 5-9). So, take this as a strong recommendation for all readers.

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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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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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