Misery’s Wife by Joan Tierney

Posted on July 17, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Misery’s Wife is a lovely, off-kilter fable about family, sisterhood, love, transformation, and humans’ relationship with the rest of the world. It uses repetition and sets of threes in ways that feel familiar to a fairy tale tradition. I think I was expecting something referencing Persephone or Eurydice, but it turns out that Tierney here recasts a Portuguese folktale, with foods, names and language from that culture. I was unfamiliar but still found it all accessible and enjoyable.

We first meet the parents of three sisters. Agueda and Jaco have three girls, and during each pregnancy, Jaco goes on a mini-quest to ease his beloved wife’s discomforts, and each time, this results in the newborn daughter’s allegiance: Adelina is a child of the night and the sea; Borboleta is a child of the day and the sky; and Dores is a child of the wind and rain, “and Misery itself will bend to kiss her feet.” They grow respectively into a young woman who adores all things strange; one who admires and exudes beauty; and one who is mild-tempered and shy, given to daydreams. In a single day, Adelina elopes with the King of the Ocean. Borboleta runs away with the King of the Sky. And Dores declines the offer of the King of Misery, but he abducts her anyway.

Years pass. Agueda and Jaco mourn their three lost daughters. But lo (the book surprises us), there is a fourth, younger sister, a child of luck and fortune. “There was also the mistaken belief, in those early years, that Elixane was in fact a son rather than daughter… these things happen, and are remedied easily enough once the child themself can put voice to the truth.” As Elixane grows into a young woman, she receives three mysterious messages, one from sea, one from sky, and then a final message from the queen of Misery. “She asks that you find her and save her from her king.” As she prepares for this quest, Elixane meets Luck, who has (naturally) followed her all her life; he is accompanied by his sister, Jinx. Off and on, the pair will accompany her as she meets with each sister in turn, and endeavors to rescue Dores from Misery, as well as lifting a curse and generally improving circumstances in the kingdoms of sea and sky, and that of land and humans as well. Misery’s Wife is set in a future world badly damaged by anthropogenic climate change, which, like Elixane’s identity as a trans woman, is treated only glancingly.

I liked this story, although the stretches set in the kingdom of Misery were sometimes hard to read. I liked the representations of the love and devotion of family, of sisters and of friends, as well as the loving marriages (“When you marry someone, you marry their battles, too”), contrasted to Misery’s abuse (“Dores’s skin was pockmarked with bruises… The cat looked at the bruises and then looked at her eyes and said, ‘This is how it starts'”). I found the folk formula – repetitions in threes, quests and codes and riddles – soothing in its familiarity, which did not prevent plot twists. And I loved the decidedly happy ending. By that conclusion, I’d say that despite some comforting framing, Tierney has given us a surprising, thought-provoking fable that I will not soon forget.

Rating: 7 roosters.

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Take Me With You by Catherine Ryan Hyde (audio)

Posted on July 13, 2026 by pagesofjulia

I’m pretty blown away by this one, which seems to have hit me just exactly right.

We begin in scene, and put together details as we find them. A man named August is living, with his little dog Woody, in his RV where it is parked at a car repair shop; he wanted very badly to make it to Yellowstone this summer, but the cost of these repairs may make that impossible. He waits and worries. The mechanic, Wes, wonders if they might make a deal. His two young sons play with August’s dog. The two men talk. Wes is about to go into jail for a 90-day sentence and has no one to watch his boys. He suggests that Yellowstone may still be possible: he’ll do the repair gratis if August will take his sons away for the summer. This is a crazy idea on its face, of course. August is a stranger to Wes. But off we go.

August is a high school science teacher, and a recovering alcoholic, grieving the loss of his nineteen-year-old son almost two years previous. It doesn’t take much to put together that August will be moved by two slightly damaged, very sweet young boys (it’s not like August’s son was ever twelve or seven years old, August’s gruff AA sponsor points out with dry sarcasm), or that the boys, twelve-year-old Seth and seven-year-old Henry, are in need of a patient, stable father figure. Wes, it turns out, is an alcoholic.

August wondered if his job would be different if kids looked up at him with eager faces. And if even these two kids would have been the slightest bit eager for a science lesson if they had been in school. Maybe the school was the problem, August thought. Maybe everybody wants a science lesson if they’re sitting in the middle of one of the greatest geothermal wonders of the world. Maybe we’ve removed all the relevance from the information we teach kids so they have no idea why they should care. Maybe it’s not the kids’ fault. Maybe we made the first mistake. “I’ll start with geysers,” he said.

The odd threesome (foursome, with Woody, who has much to offer) have a pretty great summer together, although punctuated by the challenges of August’s grieving and the boys’ pain. When Wes has gone to jail before, they entered a county facility, and Henry hasn’t spoken since. He speaks, very little, but does eventually speak, to August. The bond is delicate but undeniable. But he’ll have to take them home again.

Take Me With You is gorgeous, wise, funny, heartbreaking, and a lovely evocation of natural beauty in several of our national parks, and of the pain and joy of making connections across grief and trauma. We meet a few indelible characters along the way (and the AA community looks awfully good in this context, really), but mostly it revolves around August, Seth, and Henry, with Wes coming in for the occasional hard edge. There are no villains and no real heroes, although August’s impact on these two young lives is significant.

Everybody is a good person and a bad person at the same time. The only real variation is in the balance.

Jeff Cummings’ narration feels pretty spot-on to me, capturing voices like that gruff AA sponsor, troubled Wes, and the timid cartoon mouse of young Henry’s rare words, as well as August’s careful, intentional slowing down to take questions seriously even when it hurts. The novel is contemplative, lovely in its descriptions, and cautious about coming to conclusions. Some of the relationships it describes are impossibly tender. I would love to continue to know these characters, and will be thinking about this book for a long time. It’s been a special journey; I think it’s going to be one of my favorite books this year.

Rating: 9 pictures.

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The Devoted by Catherine Cho

Posted on June 22, 2026 by pagesofjulia

The fast-accelerating plot of Catherine Cho’s first novel follows a young girl shielded from her father’s criminal underworld as she grows into a woman who must fight to chart her own way.

Literary agent Catherine Cho (Inferno) considers family, legacy, and fate in The Devoted, a deft debut novel of subtle questioning with a fast-accelerating plot.

Eunha is raised by her Korean grandmother in a village in Hong Kong, alongside her older brother, Solomon, and a single occasional visitor, a boy named Kai. It is a life of isolation, purportedly for safety’s sake; the children’s father is a Dragon Head, a powerful leader in organized crime. Eunha is aware from a young age of the powerful forces at play around her, causing her father’s absence and her mother’s institutionalization, bending her brother’s fate, and leading her beloved grandmother to yearn for another life for Eunha. In adulthood, Eunha believes she’s found that different path, but marriage to “a man who had never loved me” and a life of proper lunches at the Palm Club with other wives leaves Eunha no less lonely. Then her three-year-old son is abducted, and that shell of a life, too, is upended.

The child is returned to his mother, apparently none the worse, but Eunha learns yet again that her life is not her own. She begins to push in earnest against the powerful men who have always surrounded her: her father and her brother. In the upheaval, she reunites with Kai, now a Dragon Head as well, both the sensitive, magnetic boy she knew in youth and a frighteningly compelling leader. She considers again her brother and their childhood friend: “The way they turned and bent, synchronized. They looked like separate halves, reflected men.” Eunha questions whether she might still find the unencumbered life her grandmother had wanted for her. Can she keep her son safe? Can she choose for herself?

Much of The Devoted unfolds at a contemplative pace, evoking the powerlessness Eunha feels in her own existence. But as she starts to exert her own will, secrets and betrayals reveal themselves one on top of another, and the novel gathers speed into an electric tale of intrigue, many layered and consistently surprising. Cho’s first novel is at once a family saga, a narrative of identity and belonging, a love story, and a tale of suspense. The deceptively quiet package probes class and respectability and whether one can ever escape their upbringing. Eunha’s struggles are softly spoken but pack a wallop.

This review originally ran in the May 26, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 light-up trainers.

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Paradise Pawn by Meg Richardson

Posted on June 12, 2026 by pagesofjulia

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.

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As If by Isabel Waidner

Posted on May 29, 2026 by pagesofjulia

This surreal, unsettling doppelgänger story considers questions of identity, grief, and whether acting may be a route to reality.

As If, Isabel Waidner’s fifth novel, features two lookalike strangers who, after a chance meeting, with no spoken agreement, exchange lives. With notes of Stranger on a Train (minus the murders), their mutual obsession threatens both men’s tenuous, borrowed realities.

In alternating first-person narratives, readers encounter Aubrey Lewis–“former actor whose career has come to nothing…. Husband who lost his wife and subsequently himself”–at the point where Lindsey Korine enters Lewis’s dumpy sublet apartment in central London. Following the losses of both work and wife Laurie (to cancer), Lewis is moldering away, on the cusp of no-showing an audition. Korine follows him home and lets himself in, drawn to their physical sameness. He’s been sleeping rough after walking out on his wife and young child. Cold, he helps himself to two coats off the rack in the apartment. The coats belong not to Lewis but to the sublessor. Both men are marked by absences: of possessions, of self-worth. Discovering that Lewis intends to skip his audition, Korine decides to attend: for moral support, he thinks, and then to stand in. Korine, as Lewis, gets the job. Lewis walks out of the apartment and disappears. Korine, with no background or training, seizes the acting opportunity with surprising zeal. While Lewis is camped under the same bridge that his counterpart once used, Korine’s wife and son happen by. They call him by the other man’s name and take him home.

Korine’s wife, also named Laurie, has recently recovered from cancer treatment. Lewis is enlivened by the chance to care for Korine’s son (he and the late Laurie had wanted maybe one day to have a child). As the story unfolds, in dual narratives, Korine-as-Lewis struggles on the set of a new television show: not only must he play the assigned character (whose name he confuses with that of his abandoned son), but for his colleagues’ benefit, he must play Lewis as well. And Lewis cares for the child (whose name he confuses with a character he was asked to play for television). But the men are so concerned with each other’s lives that they will jeopardize their own.

The twisty plot of As If echoes the television show that made Lewis’s career, in which “one sleuth, A. Smythe… was hired to keep watch on another sleuth, B. Smith, who was in turn hired to keep watch on A. Smythe. Unbeknownst to each other, neither Smythe nor Smith do anything other than observe each other, creating an existential feedback loop.” Both anxiety-ridden, first-person voices emphasize the men’s troubled states of mind, with short, staccato phrasing and abrupt punctuation: “Why not. Where was he.” The effect is an unsettling novel of doubles, failures, missed and second chances: ghostly, cerebral, and unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the April 30, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 clothing choices.

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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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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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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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