Etiquette for Lovers and Killers by Anna Fitzgerald Healy

Posted on May 26, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A bored townie in 1960s Down East Maine comes into her own when both romance and a series of murders enter her orbit.

Anna Fitzgerald Healy’s debut novel, Etiquette for Lovers and Killers, is a darkly humorous, lighthearted romp of a mystery set in mid-1960s Down East Maine with an unusual heroine. Billie McCadie is a townie in Eastport, on Passamaquoddy Bay, where “fishermen squatting in trailers” abut “Vanderbilts languishing in mansions.” She’s never felt at home with the other locals, who fail to appreciate her sarcasm or her ambition to study linguistics and work in a museum. “I’ve grown up listening to their sock-hop hopes and Tupperware-party dreams, but my aspirations don’t fit in a casserole dish.” Since the tragic death of her parents, Billie, a “twenty-six-year-old virgin,” lives with her grandparents and works as a seamstress at Primp and Ribbon Alterations. Her great thrill, aside from the novels, dictionaries, and etiquette manuals she loves, is checking her post office box for rejection letters responding to her many employment applications to museums around the country.

But then comes the fateful summer when Avery Webster notices her. Billie receives an envelope containing a love letter to an unknown Gertrude, along with an engagement ring. She is invited to a solstice party at the fabulously wealthy Webster family’s estate, where she discovers a freshly murdered corpse–Gertrude. Avery has the potential to be Billie’s first taste of romance, but the strange communications pile up, along with the bodies, in sleepy, previously crime-free Eastport. And Billie leaps into all of it, because “Who needs a life when you’re busy investigating a murder?”

Billie’s wry narration of these events is peppered with wordplay and the occasional footnote commenting (still in Billie’s voice) upon the etymology of “home,” “love,” and “tuxedo.” Chapters are prefaced with relevant quotations from the book of etiquette that belonged to Billie’s mother, which emphasize that even amid a murder case, a sex scandal, and a budding romance, in 1960s Eastport, one must be mindful of appearances and manners. Billie’s never been in such danger, but she’s also never had as much fun, finally coming into herself, gaining confidence, and learning what she might want from life aside from a museum job: “So what if I’ve ended up in a Highsmith rather than an Austen? I’m the main character, and I need to start acting like it.”

Stylish, playful, and more than a little tongue-in-cheek, Etiquette for Lovers and Killers blends intrigue and romance into a perfect cocktail. Billie herself offers a delightful combination of bookishness, wit, and questionable decision-making that will keep readers on edge until the final pages. Healy’s debut is good, not-so-clean fun.

This review originally ran in the May 19, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 stilettos.

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The Tiny Things Are Heavier by Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo

Posted on May 23, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A young Nigerian woman seeks home and belonging in a network of troubled relationships.

Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo’s The Tiny Things Are Heavier is an expansive first novel about a woman searching for home, love, and belonging. Sommy is a Nigerian immigrant to the United States, a graduate student in literature, a sister, a daughter, a lover, a friend–but all of this leaves her still seeking a sense of identity.

Sommy left for graduate school in Iowa just weeks after her beloved brother Mezie’s suicide attempt. She feels isolated in the cold Midwest and tormented by guilt; Mezie will not take her calls. Eventually Sommy makes a few friends, and deepens and complicates her relationship with her roommate, Bayo, a fellow native of Lagos with a boisterous personality she is slow to appreciate. Then she meets Bryan, a biracial American with a Nigerian father he never knew. She struggles at first to interpret his interest: “She can’t say whether he’s flirting back. If he were a real Nigerian, she would know for sure.”

Their relationship proceeds slowly and then, after a rocky recovery from an early challenge, quickly. Sommy finds Bryan magnetic: handsome, wealthy, and a talented writer. In their second year together, they travel to Nigeria. It’s Sommy’s first time home, and the first time she’s seen or spoken with her brother since his suicide attempt. It’s Bryan’s first time in Nigeria. They search for his father, and Sommy shows Bryan her family, her neighborhood, her home. But a series of events culminating in a shocking tragedy causes Sommy to reassess her most important relationships and to call her core values into question. She is forced to consider yet again what it would mean to find a sense of belonging and home.

Okonkwo makes a wise choice to tell this story through Sommy’s compelling close third-person point of view, which portrays her as anxious and exasperated, strong-willed and intelligent, cynical and devoted. She loves her home even as she works to escape it. “If life, she thinks, its surprises, the slices of deep joy contained, its ruggedness and impliability, its contradictions, the implosion of it, the nonsense of it, were a physical place, it would be Lagos.” In returning, Sommy feels “the loss of a place for which to pine. She had gone home, and home did not feel like home.” Through Sommy’s experiences in Nigeria and in Iowa, Okonkwo asks her readers to reflect upon class, privilege, race, gender, and their interlocking power structures, as well as the importance of place to one’s sense of self. The Tiny Things Are Heavier is thought-provoking and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the May 13, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 bottles.

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VenCo by Cherie Dimaline

Posted on May 19, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I waited too long to get to this one that was recommended by Liz. Punch line: I think the title’s ‘Co,’ which felt corporate to me, turned me semi-consciously away from this book for a while. (I’ve had it on the shelf for maybe years, since Liz told me I should read it.) And… that’s very much the point, in the novel. As the cover shows (I’ve been looking at just the spine all this time!), ‘VenCo’ is a hidden-in-plain-sight reworking of CoVen. As in witches. Hidden behind a corporation. Very clever. So clever I missed out on reading this great book for longer than I should have. (Facepalm.)

I also read this book immediately following one called Lessons in Magic and Disaster, which is yet to be published so you haven’t seen my review yet, but keep your eyes peeled, because the two books back-to-back could not have been more perfectly paired. Chef’s kiss.

Okay, so here we are in VenCo, beginning with a prologue, “The Oracle Speaks.” Three women in three luxury vehicles pull up outside an understated building in Los Angeles. We get descriptions as they head inside, and the descriptions are a juicy, lovely start. They are the Maiden, the Crone, and the Mother, and together they form the Oracle. They are concerned about time; it’s running out; the circle must be formed under tight deadlines, but the sixth witch is a doozy, they assure each other. Cut to chapter one, “The Legacy of Lucky St. James.” Here we meet Lucky, who is struggling in Toronto. The orphaned (adult) child of an absent father and an alcoholic, but compelling, mother, Lucky lived with and was cared for by her lovely grandmother Stella until the roles reversed and now it would be more accurate to say that Stella, with dementia, lives with and is cared for by Lucky. The younger woman is scraping by, about to be evicted, dubiously employed, unsure how she’ll continue to provide for Stella. Cut again, in chapter 3, to Meena Good, a witch and leader of a coven-to-be, in Salem, Massachusetts. (Yes, we do see how predictable that sounds, but bear with us.) Meena’s group of five witches is introduced from here, until their path intersects with that of Lucky (who reminds me very much of someone Chuck Wendig would create), and the delightful, messy Stella. Every one of these characters is an absolute joy. Even though their story has much darkness and cynicism, they are steeped in and practicing love, just as hard as they can. Except for the one really evil character, who I haven’t mentioned at all yet.

It’s expansive and wonderful: I love how the magic fits neatly into a world we mostly recognize as absolutely and realistically our own. (I love the way Salem, Mass. is handled, the self-aware nod to what a perfect town this is for witch-hunting, ha, but also really.) The stakes are sky-high, the women are doing their best with conflicting goals, they are balancing loyalties and loves and basic survival needs. The future (we hope) coven is something we’re all rooting for.

I found this an easy world to get lost in and felt genuinely sad when the pages closed. I’ve already ordered more from the same author.

Rating: 7 spoons.

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Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West by Kelly Ramsey

Posted on May 16, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This beautifully crafted memoir features both dramatic action and deep soul-searching by a woman on an elite wildland firefighting crew.

Kelly Ramsey’s Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West is a memoir of wildland firefighting and gender, but also of trauma, family, and navigating love and life at any age.

Ramsey’s expertly structured narrative shifts in both place and time, beginning with a hazardous fire event in her firefighting career, then moving to where she started that career (the Klamath River and its surrounds in Northern California), then a Kentucky childhood and her parents’ story. She paints a portrait of her mother that is a masterclass in the single-paragraph capsule profile. “Raised in a home where someone might vacuum a spill from the front lawn, my mom grew into an inquisitive, determined woman who was in the right almost as often as she believed she was.” Ramsey’s father was an alcoholic, eventually homeless and lost, whose absence caused the grief she may have been fighting along with the extreme challenges of becoming a wildland firefighter and other, still more self-destructive behaviors. This introspection occurs in flashbacks and fragments alongside the main timeline in which Ramsey, in her late 30s and after a wildly varied life, joined the Rowdy River Hotshots.

Hotshots live in barracks or on the road, sleeping on the ground as often as not, packed into a crew transport with their firefighting gear, working shifts that sometimes stretch to 24 hours in tremendously hazardous conditions. They hand-dig firebreak lines, run chainsaws and carry swamp brush, and hike vertiginous slopes under loads that can exceed 70 pounds, often amid active fire. The only woman on the crew her first season (and the first in nearly a decade), Ramsey was also one of the smallest and one of the oldest. She and “the boys” wrestled individually and collectively with how to treat her difference while integrating her into a crew that was necessarily tightknit: they relied on each other for survival.

Showcasing lovely writing and storytelling, Wildfire Days contains just enough firefighting and fire suppression policy history to contextualize Ramsey’s personal journeys. Ramsey is far from a saintly character, and she portrays her own less flattering moments clearly: worrying over her tendency to smile and people-please; her fear that she aligned herself with her male fellows in singling out the next woman to join the crew. This honesty is refreshing. Not a hero, Ramsey lets readers see her earnest and imperfect strivings. Her growth by the memoir’s end is ongoing, but impressive. “Here was the secret I kept stumbling upon: that our deepest wounds were the fertile soil of our growth. New life tended to spring from bitterest ash.” Tense action, fraught self-examination, pain, triumph, and romance make Wildfire Days propulsive and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the May 8, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 smiles.

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Earthly Materials: Journeys Through Our Bodies’ Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations by Cutter Wood

Posted on May 12, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This weird, wonderful exploration considers the social, cultural, and political implications of bodily emissions as well as their science, but shines brightest in its empathetic storytelling.

Cutter Wood (Love and Death in the Sunshine State) offers a spellbinding collection of facts, observations, and musings in Earthly Materials: Journeys Through Our Bodies’ Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations. In 12 chapters that might be termed “essays” and Wood calls “stories,” he considers mucus, urine, blood, semen, menses, milk, flatulence, breath, feces, vomit, hair, and tears. While readers will certainly gain new and fascinating scientific knowledge, what makes Earthly Materials so special is storytelling: Wood’s compassionate, funny, earnest explorations through unexpected subject matters adjacent to bodily fluids.

At a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he meets impassioned graduate students and views beautiful stellar-like magnifications of mucus, which resemble Hubble Telescope photographs. He discusses the political and financial implications of donating blood and delves into the discomfiting r/NoFap Reddit forum. In the absorbing true-crime case of Formula Mom, a Florida woman is investigated and sentenced to prison for creating a large-scale business that bought and sold infant formula.

Tongue-in-cheek, Wood describes the flatulence customs and practices of the preadolescent male in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. To explore vomit, he joins the Soul Quest Ayahuasca Church of Mother Earth and takes its sacrament. These experiences and studies often yield hilarity in Wood’s expert prose: dryly witty, comically verbose, and poignant. Wood finishes with the inexplicable tears of a Wimbledon finalist, in this thought-provoking philosophical study that exemplifies human interconnectedness through the rather surprising lens of bodily fluids and expulsions. Earthly Materials will change the way readers think about the mundane in unanticipated and transcendent ways.

This review originally ran in the May 2, 2025 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 stills in the brambly Appalachian holler.

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The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig

Posted on May 9, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Former best friends reenter a scene of horror in this clever, terrifying novel about the dangers that lurk in friendships, home, and the self.

The singular Chuck Wendig (Blackbirds and more) brings his trademark blend of humor, profanity, and shrewd observation to the weirdly charismatic The Staircase in the Woods. Chilling, disturbing, and deliciously entertaining, this horror novel stars a group of one-time best friends who reunite as adults across a chasm of time and trauma. Nick is as abrasive as ever, but at least he gets them all back together again. Hamish has traded in his Birkenstocks, jam bands, and extra weight for fitness, church, and family. Lore (formerly Lauren) has achieved professional success, but only through an increasingly belligerent go-it-alone approach. Owen (aka Nailbiter) is barely surviving his mental health woes. And Matty, once their golden boy, hasn’t been seen since that day in the woods in 1998. Five teens went camping, four came back out again. Now, more than 20 years later, they have a chance to try to find out what went wrong–or lose themselves like Matty did.

Four dysfunctional adults walk into a different set of woods, fighting among themselves and against their own demons, and enter a sinister otherworld that may have consumed their friend. Wendig’s narrative emphasizes the strengths and failures of friendship, and the difficulties of both childhood and adulthood. His snark is obscenity laden but also earnest in its compassion. The Staircase in the Woods deals in torture, violence, and abuse, especially within families, portraying how connection to place and the importance of home can cause at least as much pain as comfort. The result is haunting and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the May 2, 2025 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 cuts.

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The Giver by Lois Lowry

Posted on May 5, 2025 by pagesofjulia

My favorite now-13-year-old* wanted to talk about this book which I, surprisingly, had never read. (I’ve read some Lowry but this one missed me. My favorite was Number the Stars.) So, what do you do? I got a hold of the book.

I’m impressed by this clean-lines novel which feels expansive, but whose ~225 pages zipped by in a single day for me. It absolutely reminds me of Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” and Jackson’s “The Lottery,” but this longer book (compared to those two short stories) develops its characters further: Le Guin did not name characters, and Jackson gave us the briefest of sketches, mostly to type. Both of those choices serve their stories very well, I think, but The Giver is doing more, going further.

The tale is set in a community where everything runs very much according to system. There is a great emphasis on uniformity and order. All the children born in a single year (always 50 of them) turn one year old, officially, in December; some are great big babies and some are newborn, but by the time they are three, we’re told, it all evens out. There are certain milestones at each year, including, importantly, the Nines receiving their own bicycles. But the big one is the Ceremony of Twelve, where each child is given their lifetime assignment, their job. These assignments are made by the Committee, which spends a lot of time throughout the children’s lives – but especially when they are Elevens – observing them for preferences and talents. After the Ceremony, the Twelves are no longer children, but adults, albeit early in their training.

Our protagonist is Jonas, and we meet him as he’s approaching becoming a Twelve. Somewhat unusually, he has no idea what his assignment will be. Most children understand their own predilections, but Jonas is truly unsure. At the after-dinner ritual where everyone in his family shares and discusses their feelings, he shares his apprehension (he has thought hard about this word, because precision in language is important to Jonas), but his parents assure him the Committee always chooses well. (It is partly through this ritual that the reader learns about families in this community. Always two children, one male and one female, per household. The parents were carefully paired with the same kind of methodical, clinical decision-making as the assignments. Jonas’s father is a Nurturer: he takes care of babies their first year, after they are born to a Birthmother [shades of Handmaid’s Tale] and before they are awarded to an applicant couple. Jonas’s mother works in Law and Justice. His little sister is a Seven.)

And then the Ceremony of Twelve, where Jonas is selected for a very special role, one he’s never heard of before. Jonas is to be his community’s next Receiver of Memory.

From here on out, his life will not resemble that of his friends. He sees little of them, in fact. They enter training to work in various parts of the community, but Jonas is shut away with an old man, the former Receiver, who now requests that Jonas call him the Giver. He transfers memories to Jonas: memories of a time before the community embraced Sameness. It is only when Jonas begins receiving these memories that the reader learns just how much has been missing from his life.

So. It is a bit of a parable, and offers up similar questions to the two classic short stories I mentioned above. But it goes deeper than either, and in its details, feels closer to reality. (“Omelas,” by contrast, with its nameless character-types and invitation for the reader to fill in the details they prefer, is much more strictly a parable or thought experiment.) I absolutely appreciate the thought-provoking nature, and the emotional impact of each reveal. It feels like a truly great place for a middle-school-age class to dwell and discuss, and I can’t wait to hear more about my young friend’s experience both with the book and in the classroom. My copy included some supplemental text at the back, including a ‘guide for discussion and classroom use’ which seems potentially genuinely useful, but most special are the supplements from Lowry: “Ever After” describes the many inspirations for this story which I loved and found revealing, and her Newbery Acceptance Speech was such a treat as well.

Easy to read in one sense, but with Big Themes that require careful consideration. Excellent matter for thoughtful conversation at school or at home. I can’t wait to talk to my friend about it.

Rating: 8 snowflakes.

*She and her sister account for the books at this new tag.

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The Wildelings by Lisa Harding

Posted on May 2, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Lifelong friends splinter and suffer in their first year of college under the spell of a charismatic older student in this atmospheric roller coaster of a novel.

Lisa Harding (Bright Burnings Things; Cloud Girls) will haunt readers with the psychological drama of The Wildelings, a compulsively readable novel in which a woman looks back on her college days and a long-lost friendship.

Jessica is introduced as she begins therapy, newly divorced, in her 40s. The novel’s inciting event, however, is not divorce but a new play by an old acquaintance. Asked by her therapist to write down her memories and “start at the beginning,” Jessica recalls her first year at Dublin’s Wilde College and “The Unholy Quintet: Mark, Linda, Jonathan, Jacques, and me.”

Linda had been Jessica’s best friend since childhood. When the underprivileged, underparented pair achieves surprising slots at the “pretentious arty” college, Jessica is highly ranked for her beauty as well as her acting prowess; Linda, as ever, dwells in the shadows. But just as Jessica enters a charged relationship with the sexy Jacques, Linda finds love with Mark, a magnetic fourth-year playwright and director, after a false start with golden boy Jonathan. The older student’s grasp on the group tightens, especially after Mark casts Jessica in what he claims will be a breakout play. Mark proves treacherously adept at directing the people around him, on and off the stage.

Harding gives Jessica a self-excoriating, incisive, bitter, and evocative first-person voice. The Wildelings‘ inexorable plot is like the proverbial train wreck: shocking, electric, impossible to turn from. Its psychological tumult verges on horror. With this atmospheric roller coaster of a novel, Harding offers pulsing intensity, gut-wrenching emotional upheaval, and high drama in every sense.

This review originally ran in the April 18, 2025 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 freckles.

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Even the Darkest Stars by Heather Fawcett

Posted on April 28, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I just went ahead and followed Ember and the Ice Dragons with another Fawcett book for younger readers. This one is a bit darker than that; I see that Ember is catagorized as middle-grade where this one is young adult, for what that’s worth.

Even the Darkest Stars is set in a magical-world version of the Himalayas, with yaks and butter tea and very high, very cold mountain climbing. But a parallel world to our own, in which an emperor rules over a huge region, keeping everyone safe from the witches of a bygone time. Our protagonist is Kamzin, a teenaged girl in the village of Azmiri, which is far from the emperor’s Three Cities. Her father is the village Elder; her mother was a great explorer in service to the emperor, but she’s been dead for years. Her older sister Lusha will be the next Elder. She studies astrology. As the younger daughter, Kamzin’s fate is to be the village’s next shaman. She is apprenticed to the current shaman, but is a poor student. Instead, Kamzin has always felt a strong pull to travel, to climb, to run, to map, to explore. When the emperor’s Royal Explorer, the famous River Shara, comes to the backwater of Azmiri, Kamzin knows she must stop at nothing to become a part of whatever has brought him here.

And after some brief intrigue and machinations, we wind up with a race. Lusha, the obnoxious older sister, takes to the road with one of River’s own retinue, aiming to beat the Royal Explorer himself to the top of Raksha – the highest mountain in the world, never climbed by a human, which defeated even Kamzin and Lusha’s late mother. Kamzin succeeds in joining up with the great River Shara, a handsome young man – younger than she’d expected – whom she finds bewitching. Also in their small party is Kamzin’s best friend, Tem, a far more accomplished (though untrained) shaman. And a stowaway: Kamzin’s familiar is a fox (or foxlike critter) named Ragtooth. They share a close bond but also he is apt to bite her. Oh and there are dragons: they are more tangential here than in the last book, but your standard ‘house dragon’ will eat just about anything remotely edible and in response, their bellies put out light. So an alternative to a lantern is to feed your scraps to a dragon. Part pet, part appliance, sometimes a nuisance. It’s quite fun. There’s a lot that is fun in this imaginative world… but also, Kamzin’s world and everyone she loves is in grave danger. It takes a while for the true nature of River’s quest to Raksha to be revealed, but once it is, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

This is a compelling story, populated by mystery, magic, fun creatures, breathtaking landscapes, true friendship, the germ of romance, and a tortured coming-of-age made harder by the possible end of the world. There is also great adventure, death-defying climbs, races for fun and for life-or-death… bit of a Princess Bride list there. My favorite part is that it ends with a clear nod to a sequel, which I’ll have my hands on in a day or so. But yes, also darker than Ember. More bad things happen here, and more is at stake. I may not hand it off to the thirteen-year-old yet. But I am so in for book two.

Rating: 7 sour apples.

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A Sharp Endless Need by Marisa Crane

Posted on April 25, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This poignant coming-of-age novel combines outstanding sports writing and heartfelt expression of the teen experience, set to small-town Pennsylvania basketball.

Marisa (Mac) Crane’s second novel, A Sharp Endless Need, is a propulsive, perfectly crafted coming-of-age story centered on basketball and queer sexuality. With razor-honed prose, Crane (I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself) offers authentic descriptions of teen angst and young love as well as exemplary sports writing, and a few memorable sex scenes.

Crane’s protagonist, Mack, is a star point guard and the only one at her small-town Pennsylvania high school who is Division-I bound. Between her junior and senior seasons, her beloved but troubled father dies, and on the heels of this trauma, a new girl transfers to the team: Liv is being scouted by the same schools as Mack, and the two are instantly inseparable. Their on-court chemistry is transcendent; off-court, they share good times but are also nearly immobilized by a desire that both are at great pains to conceal. Mack’s senior year is marked by larger-than-average difficulties: grieving her father, struggling with her distant, disengaged mother, playing hard with drugs and alcohol, and grappling with a sexuality that feels firmly forbidden in her community. The basketball scholarship she’s headed for feels imperative. Her mother sees it as a financial necessity; Mack knows it’s bigger than that. “I needed a future that was all basketball all the time because it was the only future I could imagine for myself. Basketball, I knew, was the only thing keeping me alive.”

Mack’s first-person voice is written from a distance of some years, a voice of wisdom looking back on her high school days. This perspective is one of the novel’s strengths. It is the older, wiser Mack who observes that another player “didn’t notice or appreciate the poetry of her pump fakes–she simply used them for their designated purpose. I guess what I mean is there was no romance.”

Anyone who’s ever been a teenager will relate to Mack’s broader struggles with self-destructive behaviors, desires, and pain. Her particular challenges involve a devotion to craft and the one-and-only ticket out that basketball represents. “Everything outside of that stadium, our problems, our anxieties, our fears, could wait; nothing else mattered but this last play.” The best sports writing evokes not only movement, sensory detail, and skill, but passion, and Crane has a firm grasp on these facets. As Mack’s final season nears its close, her relationship with Liv, her college decision, and more hinge upon a handful of choices and impactful moments. A Sharp Endless Need is unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the April 14, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 photographs.

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