Lioness Rampant by Tamora Pierce (audio)

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

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

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

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

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


Rating: 8 earbobs for the series.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Rating: 7 swords.

Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Rating: 8 pieces of sheet cake.

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

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

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

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

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


Rating: 7 phantom swords.

Alanna by Tamora Pierce (audio)

I’m certain I got this title off a recommendations list somewhere on the Shelf Awareness site, but that source appears lost to me now. It’s a book about as old as I am, but has not paled, nor does it feel especially dated. Trini Alvarado narrates this audio version, and I liked her style: a little unadorned, with a snappy pace, not lingering; but still with emotion in dialog.

Alanna is a twin of minor nobility, with no mother, and a distracted father. Her brother Thom (being a boy) is destined to go to the king’s court to train to become a knight – something he wants not at all. Alanna (being a girl) will be sent to a convent to study magic. Though powerful, she’s not crazy about that set of abilities; she’d rather study the fighting arts in Tom’s stead. And so it is Alanna’s idea to more or less switch places: they forge letters that send Thom to study magic, on his way to becoming a sorcerer, and invent his twin brother Alan, who will go to court to serve as page, then squire, then hopefully knight.

Accompanied by family servant and former soldier Coram (who is reluctant to help, but confesses that Alanna was always the more talented fighter, and anyway she threatens him with her magic), “Alan” does indeed go to court. The training is hard work, but her pride is helpful in the context of the chivalric code. She discovers quickly that it is important to take punishment without complaint. When she is bullied, she does not tattle, but trains harder until she can defeat her enemy on her own terms. Despite being the littlest, she overcomes obstacle after obstacle. She must eventually reveal her magic to save a friend’s life (especially because that friend is an heir to the throne); it is harder still to reveal her true identity as Alanna, but puberty comes for us all. I loved everything about this story of adventure and intrigue, and only found that it ended too soon, practically mid-escapade – but that only leaves me ready for the rest of what seems to be a fast-paced little series. Cheers to plucky girls!


Rating: 7 tankards of lemonade.

Enchantment by Riikka Pulkkinen, transl. by Tabatha Leggett

A singular girl stars in this unusual novel of identity and mysterious death.

Riikka Pulkkinen (True) challenges readers to form their own impressions with Enchantment, a striking novel about girlhood, perception, and death.

“The sun is setting and they’re at the beach. The sky is soft mallow and bronze. It’s the last summer of their youth.” Pulkkinen, in an atmospheric translation from the Finnish by Tabatha Leggett, emphasizes this cinematic view. The next scene, almost a year later, is a forensic autopsy. Philippa Laakso, age 17, has been found dead in the courtyard of her apartment complex.

Philippa is the center of this novel; all gazes are directed toward her. Observations come in various formats: interview notes by police investigators, flashbacks, and descriptions of videos recorded by Philippa on her treasured Olympus PEN camera, a gift from her mother on her 13th birthday. Chapters take the close-third-person perspective of various characters, rarely including Philippa herself. She adopted several personae, beginning with “little experiments in selfhood; facial expressions, gestures, hair flicks, kisses blown to the lens, the camera, whose naive but fearless eye devoured stories without judgement.” Sometimes she co-created her online aliases with her longtime best friend, Saga, dark hair to Philippa’s fair, the other side of Philippa’s coin: “Two girls. Girl and girl. Me and me.”

Philippa is a perfect enigma to those left behind. These include a compassionate, poetic forensic pathologist, who “has always believed that the deceased have a right to carry the truth with them”; an elderly neighbor, a widower, whom Philippa befriended; a woman who appears in Philippa’s videos, screaming in rage; the older men she met via dating apps; the boy she dated seriously and recently broke up with; Saga, her friend and double; and Philippa’s mother, from whom “the girl had learned the art of being a matryoshka. Beneath one layer was always another layer–happy, funny, strange.”

Philippa has given the world many versions. She is a fantasy, a friend, a tormentor, an innocent, a vixen, a hero, a villain. “This girl is rarely considered wise, more rarely still intelligent. She can’t possibly be profound because she’s laughing in her pictures, pointing her chin downwards, like a child. She can’t possibly be reflective, not while she still treats these affects of hers as accessories.”

One of Enchantment‘s central concerns is the question of perspective, of what is possible to know about a person. Pulkkinen’s dreamy novel delves into the line between truth and fiction, storytelling and self-creation. Philippa invented herself, and in the aftermath of her life, police investigate the question of her death, as everyone investigates how to view her and how to remember her. She has “become a dream, gossip, stories,” and readers are left to parse the enchantment that remains.


This review originally ran in the June 29, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.


Rating: 7 cars.

Paradise Pawn by Meg Richardson

Fourteen-year-old Jackie wrestles with puberty, class, and friendship in this quirky, moving first novel.

Meg Richardson’s first novel, Paradise Pawn, tackles a poignant coming-of-age in a colorful community. Jackie and her best friend, Kayla, have grown up side by side, working with their fathers in a pawn shop in Cherry Beach, Fla. They are adept at sales, bargaining, and assessing customer psychology. The challenges of growing up, however, prove more daunting.

The girls have always been inseparable, but now, at 14, their differences begin to make themselves apparent. Kayla has two parents and two younger brothers; Jackie has only ever had her dad. Kayla is maturing more quickly, physically and otherwise, and Jackie fears being left behind; Kayla embraces or at least accepts change, whereas Jackie wishes she could freeze them both in time (preferably at age 10). The complications of being a 14-year-old girl are myriad: bodies, periods, shaving, sex, evolving friendships, new schools.

Class differences are becoming increasingly obvious, too. Jackie and Kayla handle large amounts of money for other people; they see the wealthy employ drivers and nannies, who in turn pawn jewelry and tools to get from paycheck to paycheck. Poised to start high school, the girls plan to attend the exclusive St. Bridget’s, for which Jackie’s dad will take out a loan against his truck. When Kayla’s scholarship doesn’t come through, the girls hatch a plan. Paradise Pawn, which has been their home base all their lives, will either prove their salvation or their downfall.

For all her naivete, Jackie is compassionate and wise to the ways of humans. Her first-person narration is perfectly rendered. “They aren’t really Christmas shopping. They are paying for us to listen to them talk about their sister in Georgia, their wife in Cuba, or their boyfriend in Texas…. They are paying for a funny kind of hope that in thirty days, when their next payment is due, they will be rich.” At the cusp of girlhood, Jackie is pulled in all directions: her body is going haywire, she loves her father but can’t help snapping at him, and her devotion to her lifelong best friend will lead her to reckless ends. She knows how to service and sell diamonds, chainsaws, and cars, and how to judge when a customer is lying, but not how to force her relationships into the shapes she wishes them to take.

Richardson expertly portrays a Florida beach community in which the very rich live alongside the struggling, under stifling heat and a relentless pressure to appear cool and beautiful. Paradise Pawn captures the sweetness of female friendships and familial love, the pain of change and growth, and the absolute yearning of youth. This debut novel is funny, heartbreaking, and unforgettable.


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


Rating: 7 bubbles.

The Jewelled Moth by Katherine Woodfine

This sequel to The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow begins by introducing a new family of characters: first we meet Mei Lim, the daughter of a Chinese immigrant father and an English mother. She and her family live in the Chinatown section of Limehouse in London’s East End: her two parents, her older brother and younger twin brothers, and until recently, her grandfather, now deceased. We learn early of the Lims’ concern for the missing Moonbeam Diamond, a storied piece of Chinese and family history.

From here, the novel continues in the same satisfying vein as Sparrow, starring our foursome – Sophie, Lil, Billy, and Joe – but especially our two plucky heroines. All four are employed at Sinclair’s, with Joe in particular marveling at his good fortune to have escaped the Baron’s gang and found a legal and relatively comfortable lifestyle. It’s debutante season (and brief excerpts from a manual on those social mores punctuate this text, as a similar etiquette book did the last), and it is a fashionable, wealthy, privileged, not to say spoiled, young debutante who approaches Sophie and Lil with a case. A precious jewelled moth brooch, a gift from a very eligible suitor to Miss Veronice Whiteley, has been stolen. At its center: the famous Moonbeam Diamond.

Sophie and Lil, and their male counterparts and assistants and admirers Billy and Joe, are slowly joined by a few high-society friends and the Lims in chasing down the moth and the diamond, ferreting out the true identity of the intimidating Baron, and righting all the wrongs – including, hopefully, ensuring their own safety. Incidentally, Sophie finds a photograph of her late parents that calls some of her own history into question, and thereby sets us up neatly for book three.

I continue to find these books fun, engrossing, and easy to read. I look forward to more.


Rating: 7 dumplings.

Nymph by Sofia Montrone

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.

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

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.