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 author interview: Kelly Anderson

Posted on May 4, 2026 by pagesofjulia

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

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

Where did this story begin, for you?

portrait of Kelly Anderson (photo credit: Nicola Toon)

Kelly Anderson
(photo: Nicola Toon)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are writing and research separate processes?

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

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

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

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

Where do you find magic in medical work?

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

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

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

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

What are you working on next?

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

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

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Maximum Shelf: The Wild Beneath by Kelly Anderson

Posted on May 1, 2026 by pagesofjulia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 8 oysters.

Come back Monday for my interview with Anderson.

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Son of Nobody by Yann Martel

Posted on April 27, 2026 by pagesofjulia

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

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

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

This review originally ran in the April 3, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 8 chameleons.

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It’s Hard to Be an Animal by Robert Isaacs

Posted on April 24, 2026 by pagesofjulia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 7 windows repaired.

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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 Pillagers’ Guide to Arctic Pianos by Kendra Langford Shaw

Posted on April 3, 2026 by pagesofjulia

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 8 pips.

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Mrs. Shim Is a Killer by Kang Jiyoung, trans. by Paige Morris

Posted on March 6, 2026 by pagesofjulia

In this bloody but cheerful novel, a middle-aged widow and mother of two becomes a contract killer to support her family, reinventing herself along the way.

Kang Jiyoung’s Mrs. Shim Is a Killer is a kaleidoscopic novel of murder-for-hire, crisscrossing loyalties, self-determination, and dark humor. In Paige Morris’s translation from the Korean, Kang’s matter-of-fact prose reveals a sly, absurdist wit. This playfully murderous thriller is not soon forgotten.

In the first chapter, readers meet Mrs. Shim. A 51-year-old widow, she supports a family of three; her son is of university age, her daughter just younger. Since the death of her husband five years ago, she has struggled to provide for her family by working in a butcher’s shop, relying on her knife skills to eke out a living while dutifully preparing kimchi, soybean soup, and other staples at home. When she loses her job, she is desperate for other work–not easy for an ajumma, or middle-aged woman, to find. At the Smile Private Detective Agency, however, she meets a boss impressed by her use of a knife. “I’d like you to become a killer,” the man says matter-of-factly, and Mrs. Shim finds she is in no position to turn down the gold bar he offers. Reluctant at first but driven by her need to provide for her children, she becomes Smile’s best killer yet, causing surprised rumors to circulate about the knife-wielding ajumma.

Mrs. Shim Is a Killer shifts perspective to follow one character and then another, from a long list of players in Mrs. Shim’s story. Aside from the title character, chapter titles refer to them by epithet: The Boss, The Shaman, The Confidant, The Daughter. Intrigue unfolds in this series of puzzle pieces, which provides varying angles on events where killers and amateurs off killers, bosses, and more. Because not all of these character spotlights take place in the same timeline, old secrets also come to light, and present-day rivals may reveal more nuanced relationships in the past. In final standoff scenes, characters are set against one another in unexpected arrangements and, through it all, readers root for Mrs. Shim, a reluctant but determined assassin.

Kang (The Shop for Killers) plays off expectations about mothers, lovers, and cultural norms to her reader’s constant surprise. With a complexly twisting plot, disarming characters, and a deceptive sense of humor, Mrs. Shim Is a Killer breaks genre boundaries in a surprisingly hopeful package. Bloody but cheerful, this unusual tale is entertaining and strangely cozy.

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

Rating: 7 fishcakes.

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