Sweet Pea by Kit de Waal

Posted on September 14, 2026 by pagesofjulia

A protagonist rich in vulnerability, empathy, and resilience faces sorrows with boundless love in this unforgettable novel of good cooking and built family.

Kit de Waal’s Sweet Pea is a novel about pain, kindness, and forgiveness, experienced through the life of an everywoman West Indian immigrant to England. Its unforgettable protagonist, Paulette, translates loss and insult into caring time and time again.

“Paulette was lucky. She slept in the same bed as her grandmother until she was six years old.” She has no mother, but “barely feels the loss because she… can’t imagine being loved any better than Granny loved her.” When Paulette is 11, she and Granny immigrate to working-class urban England, where, at the novel’s opening, Paulette works as an auxiliary nurse. She is 29 years old and yearning for a family, but her boyfriend, Denton, drags his feet. It is only upon his death in a car crash that she learns he already had a wife and three children of his own.

Awash with grief and betrayal, as even the friends who comfort her simultaneously scorn her naïveté, Paulette struggles through, finally achieving her longed-for pregnancy by way of Denton’s best friend. Garfield is an attentive partner and father, but their relationship is not based on love and does not last. Paulette again soldiers on, this time with the prize and star of her life: her son, Bird. As he grows into a young man, she loves him powerfully, with enough to spill over for friends, lovers, patients, neighbors, and another young boy whose life intertwines with Bird’s, and with Paulette’s, for good.

In prose rich with feeling and detail, de Waal (My Name Is Leon) imbues these events with significance even when they seem mundane. Paulette’s excellent West Indian cooking, the mutual support she shares with a chain-smoking Irish neighbor, the simple comfort she finds in cleaning and the odd cocktail buoy her. She aches for family, connection, belonging, and for her native St. Kitts. “All the English summers in the entire world would never make up for just one day from the childhood she took for granted. Light so white you had to hide under a tree, skies so blue, trees so green, the whole world bright like pirate’s treasure, amber, rubies, sapphires.”

Endlessly tending to others, at work and at home, Paulette builds an unusual family for herself despite all odds. Those she cares for hurt her, but this is perhaps the human condition, and she is rewarded by caring anyway: fumbling, wise, and willing to try again. Sweet Pea is a refreshing novel of compassion and redemption.

This review originally ran in the August 24, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 yellow quilts.

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Advantage Player: A Memoir of Blackjack, Backrooms, and Beginnings by Gina Fiore

Posted on September 11, 2026 by pagesofjulia

In games and in backrooms most readers will never see, one driven woman takes big risks to secure her place at the table in this dynamic, propulsive memoir.


Advantage Player: A Memoir of Blackjack, Backrooms, and Beginnings is an energetic account of false starts, big wins and big losses, challenges and redemptions. Gina Fiore tells her story with momentum and feeling, so readers share the tension of high stakes.

Fiore had a troubled childhood in a troubled Italian American family plagued by poverty and questionable decisions, distanced from extended family. They moved from New York to Reno, Nev., when she was eight. She began gambling at 14 years old, visiting the casinos where her mother dealt blackjack and gambled as well. Amid emotional and economic deprivation, Fiore felt from a young age that traditional careers would not serve her. She trained as a musician but found her world most expanded inside the casino. “Nothing else in my life or especially in school piqued my interest like card counting did…. Now at twenty-two years old, and for no obvious reasons, I believed wholeheartedly that I was somebody who could do whatever she chose. With that mentality of infinite freedom I chose card counting.”

Fiore’s childhood was rocky, and her young adulthood involved a series of personal choices that may be viewed as self-sabotage. But her memoir is at its most riveting when she describes her work and explains the art and the science of advantage play.

Card counting is just the beginning. Fiore educates her readers about blackjack and other casino games, and the differences between card counting, hole carding, edge sorting, and other forms of play that steal the advantage. These methods of removing the house edge are not illegal on their face, but they will get a gambler kicked out, blackballed, and even assaulted; thus, Fiore argues, the theater of advantage play is as important as the count, the card spotted, the edge calculated.

Fiore methodically trained herself from books, from firsthand study, and through mentorships with more experienced players to become one of the best advantage players in the world. She built elite teams of like-minded players and eventually took millions from casinos around the United States and beyond. Fiore’s memoir careens from high highs to low lows on the casino floor and in challenges with friendships, romantic and family relationships, and mental health. Advantage Player is a rocketing adventure and one woman’s story of how to survive and not only make the most of the hands she’s dealt but also how to influence the deal.

This review originally ran in the August 18, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 half circles.

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Black Moon by Stephen Wright

Posted on August 31, 2026 by pagesofjulia

This fiercely imaginative, blood-soaked, starry-eyed, and exuberant epic based on the life of Irish pirate Anne Bonny will capture the dreams and nightmares of any daring reader.

Stephen Wright’s Black Moon is a wild romp of an adventure, lush with blood and debauchery, starring a spectacularly colorful character based on the historical figure of Anne Bonny. Readers will need a strong constitution for the violence and rape that populate these pages, but the heroine and her associates offer plenty of humor, thoughtful philosophy, and transcendence to balance the scales.

Not much is known about Anne Bonny, an Irishwoman turned pirate in the early 1700s. With this inspiration, Wright (Meditations in Green; M31: A Family Romance) invents Amethyst “Meeks” Connell. From early trauma to an orphanage, then a “sewing shop for recalcitrant maids” and a youthful marriage into the minor gentry, Meeks continually reaches to improve her circumstances. When her devoted husband, Georgie, lusts after the latest round of developing war between the major European powers, Meeks plays along. “In a short amount of time she [becomes] considerably adept at fencing,” followed by other forms of combat–it is a feature of Meeks’s character that she is good at most anything she puts her mind to. Georgie decides he must join the war himself and secures himself a commission, and Meeks accompanies him. Within minutes of reaching the battlefield, Meeks makes her first kill and is widowed.

Wright’s swashbuckling, stylish narrative unfolds perfectly naturally as Meeks lives as a soldier and a man (with a short haircut, she simply fails to correct the assumptions of her fellows); marries a woman and is widowed again; and, on the lam, sets sail for Ireland and home. When her ship is boarded by pirates, no reader will be surprised that she joins them. It is at this point that Meeks’s real adventures–and the shining love(s) of her life–begin.

Meeks loves the sky over the ocean at morning, which she judges “the ultimate source of all value.” She loves the lifestyle, the freedom, the riches, the violence, and the friends she makes. At sea, she lives as a woman again; vehement misogyny is common among sailors and pirates, but there are those who honor her skills. The pirate life is for “those who can work like miners, fight like demons, and revel like tosspots,” and Meeks keeps up with the best of them. “There remains, of course, the lingering issue of love.” Black Moon, however bloodthirsty, is also a romantic novel: spirited, atmospheric, raging, and joyful unto its unforgettable end.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the August 13, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 fingers.

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Maximum Shelf author interview: Carter Wilson

Posted on August 28, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Following Monday’s review of When They Find Me, here’s Carter Wilson: Small Casts and Huge Consequences.

Carter Wilson is known for domestic and psychological thrillers, including Final Crossing, The Boy in the Woods, Mister Tender’s Girl, and Tell Me What You Did. He is the creator and host of the podcast Making It Up, and the founder of Unbound Writer, where he works with writers through coaching, retreats, and online classes. Wilson was born in New Mexico, grew up in Los Angeles, and attended Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. He lives with his family in Erie, Colo. His 11th novel, When They Find Me, is a tense, electric thriller featuring random accidents, family bonds, and the legacies of old wounds, set in snowbound rural Colorado. It will be published by Poisoned Pen Press on November 10, 2026.

What’s different about writing your 11th book from your first one?

Carter Wilson
(Elke Hope Photography)

Not much. It gets easier in terms of the physicality of writing, just constructing sentences. My first novel was like hand-to-hand combat. Now, if I know what I’m doing in terms of a scene, it just flows. I produce faster.

The struggles are the beauty. I don’t outline, so I have no idea where the story is going, and so in every book I have the same pain point: Is this any good? Is there an ending here? Does this make sense? But the flip side of that is I get to sit down every day and say, what happens? And I get to find out. I can’t imagine ever not doing that.

Over time, you develop a sense of story that just soaks into your subconscious. I’ll have a sense that nobody’s moving around enough, we need action, or we need an emotional break, or a pause. When you first start out, all you have is the experience of reading other people’s books. Once you write enough, you have a sense of your own cadence and rhythm, and it continuously evolves, and that’s kind of beautiful too. Your voice changes.

Is it difficult to switch between two voices?

That’s a real challenge. I don’t do it a lot; most of my books are single point of view, first-person present tense, and this one is a dual POV, with each having more or less equal weight. Having them sound distinct is really tough. I asked Tess Gerritson this same question and she said she considers their economic background. That’s really interesting. In the case of this book, one of the voices is fairly uneducated, young, home-schooled, and I think I was able to adopt a sound from that.

There’s a trap that thriller writers, including myself, get into. First-person present tense is so interior, it’s so immediate, that you can go down a path where you’re inside somebody’s head without them actually doing anything for a long time. It becomes a shortcut to reveal backstory or intention. That’s my first draft. Next draft, I cut a lot of that out–how do I show this in an interesting way? The beauty and the work are all in the editing.

Are there special challenges in writing from darkness?

I usually don’t write from the antagonist’s point of view. Typically it’s the protagonist, and their inference and their filtering of their relationship with the antagonist. I write from a place of their fear, and that allows me to get into their head and imagine, what would I do in this situation? What would I feel? I think the hardest part of writing an antagonist is not sounding cartoony about it, and making sure there is a real reason, even if it’s in their own head, that they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s kind of Villains 101, right? They have to believe in their own story, and it can’t be too outlandish. It has to be based on something where you can say, I could see someone getting to a point where this could happen. Including myself.

I’ve evolved over time. My early books were more horror-leaning. Now it’s like, what if this happened? It doesn’t have to be too crazy to be really scary. If I’m feeling empathy, however that’s defined, the reader will be too. If I get scared, then maybe that will happen to the reader too.

How do you choose the protagonist or narrator of a story?

This draft always had two narrators, but it totally changed in my edits. That second voice changed to a totally different character. It depends on the story. With The Father She Went to Find, I just had this person in my head. For probably six months, I didn’t write anything down, just–who is this person? There are other books that might be inspired by a news article I read, so the character tends to be inspired by the person in that article. The last story, I didn’t know who the person was, I just knew they were really angry. It all depends. I tend to alternate between female and male points of view, so it depends on what I’ve done lately as well.

What are the strengths of the locked-room format?

It scared the hell out of me. I didn’t know where the story was going to go. The entirety of the book takes place over five hours, and about halfway through I was like, do I have enough here? But I’ve always loved small casts and huge consequences, rather than vast global conspiracies. The advantages are that you really get to explore each of these characters in a heightened emotional state. It let me get deeper into their psychology.

What do you feel the images contribute?

There’s multimedia in a lot of my books. I do it to amuse myself. I’m a very visual person, so sometimes I just want to see what a scene looks like. I wanted to see what it looked like as if I was directing this as a movie. I had them hire an artist to sketch this out, as I would a storyboard. There’s not a lot of intentionality about it, but I hope the readers see what they want to see in it. Sometimes you don’t want to reveal too much of how you see it, because you want the reader to put it all together themselves. But that’s the beauty of the storyboard: it’s just really rough.

What are you working on next?

I just turned in my next book, for publication roughly August 2027. I’ll tell you the setup, because it really happened. My mother, who’s in her 80s, about five years ago, handed me this business card. She said, when I die, call this number. What the hell? As it turns out, she’s made all her postmortem arrangements, which is very thoughtful and considerate and beautiful. And I was telling that story to a group of friends and one said, what if you called that number and three black Escalades just whisked up to your house? That’s a story! So, it’s a story about a son who scans this barcode after his mother kills herself unexpectedly, and what it unleashes and how little he actually knew of her at all.

I’m a little afraid, because my mom is very convinced that you write what you know. I’m going to have to really convince her that, beside the setup, this is not you.

This interview originally ran on August 5, 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: When They Find Me by Carter Wilson

Posted on August 24, 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 August 5, 2026.

Carter Wilson’s 11th novel, When They Find Me, is a super-charged thriller about family ties, the legacy of trauma, and the tension between morality and survival. The story opens with an immediate adrenaline hit: “The old man says this is where our target is hiding. Somewhere in this little town. Expanse, Colorado.” A young woman named Riven has just arrived in the cold and snow, traveling in a beat-up old RV with Boone, her brother, and their father, who calls himself Coyote. Boone and Coyote have both killed before, but their task in Expanse is to set up Riven’s first kill. The target is the man Coyote maintains ruined their lives, years ago, when they lived in Idaho–“Back when we were domesticated. Fed on routines. Sleeping in real beds. No blood on our hands, no need for constant vigilance.”

Also in Expanse, Annie Wolfe and her 12-year-old daughter, Coral, live away from mainstream society, offline and in hiding. They keep go-bags and weapons at the ready. They’ve equipped their home with a secret underground bunker. They have Harley, “the least ass-kicking dog” Annie has ever known, but she’s good at alerting. Annie fears those who may be hunting them from a past life.

On December 23, as a potentially record-breaking snowstorm descends, Riven enters what she believes to be the house of her intended target. Instead, she finds Annie. This random accident–a simple mistaken address–sets off a chain of events that will change their lives forever.

The odds of these two armed parties stumbling upon each other may seem unlikely, but Expanse is a special place. “No one in this town discusses real names,” and everyone seems to be hiding from something. Riven’s intended victim had hoped to outrun the past that brings Coyote to Colorado. Annie, his neighbor, is on the run from something else: her own old trauma, the loss of her husband, and irrevocable damage to herself and to Coral.

After their initial confrontation, Riven and Annie are joined by Coyote and Boone in Annie’s home, and they settle into their closed, snowbound environment. The three home invaders stand opposed to Annie and her dog, Harley; Coral is hidden away, hopefully in safety. Hours pass. Weapons are aimed, questions asked. The strain increases steadily as both physical and psychological threats multiply. Coyote came for revenge but insists his “pack” stay and seek a twisted “truth.” Truth is a shifting target, however, for these men and women variously hunted or hunting.

Wilson’s two narrators are flawed but sympathetic, with redemption seeming to hover just over the horizon. Riven in particular seems poised on the edge of a major change: “And here I remain, the one with all the power. The power to choose. The power to kill. The choice of being an animal or human.” This will-she-or-won’t-she charge contributes to the general unease.

Alternating chapters are told from the two women’s first-person perspectives and move between the present setting–December in Expanse–and earlier times. In those flashbacks, readers slowly put together the past ordeals of the present-day antagonists. Annie, under a previous name, was married and lived in Miami. After the events leading to her husband’s murder, she barely escaped with Coral to make a new life. “All women have my kind of fury,” she posits. “All that’s needed is the trigger to unleash it.”

Riven, like Coral, witnessed terrible things as a child. Through her eyes, readers watch Coyote’s mental health deteriorate. He commands his children to stop calling him father. He calls his family a pack, says they’re on migration, demands they live by his version of an animal code: survival without sentiment. (As an Easter egg for returning fans, Coyote has named himself after a character in Wilson’s third novel, Revelation.) Coyote is entirely lost in his fantasies, but Riven remains ambivalent, closely watching her beloved brother Boone, wondering if there is any shred left of “the kid who used to sneak me extra food, who still stands a little closer to me when the old man’s voice sharpens. He’s straddling some line I can’t pull him off of. Half in the dark, half reaching for the light.”

The circumscribed setting in a secluded, snowed-in, modest home, and the expansive interior worlds of the various parties, offer a remarkable contrast. Despite spanning only a handful of hours in the present, tightly defined space, When They Find Me journeys to past timelines, memories and fantasies without sacrificing its fast pace. Riven grapples with taking agency in her own life, questioning what she remembers and who she wants to emulate. Annie’s past losses and old enemies remain ever-present for her, as she worries for Coral and avoids the ghosts she’s not ready to face. This chilling novel of suspense is accompanied by occasional pencil-shaded sketches, illustrating scenes. Each holds a hidden element that contributes to the immersive effect and sense of mystery. Taut pressure, high stakes, and compelling characters combine in this unnerving thriller from an experienced writer.

Rating: 7 Christmas songs.

Come back Friday for my interview with Wilson.

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Dear Future Occupants by Keith Stahl

Posted on July 31, 2026 by pagesofjulia

An unusual family navigates small-town Connecticut in 1979 with wacky adventures, conflict, and love in this funny, affecting debut novel.


Keith Stahl’s first novel, Dear Future Occupants, relates the poignant, madcap adventures of a dysfunctional but essentially loving family. In March of 1979, Bud Sommer moves his family back to Greenhill, Conn., having inherited his childhood home, a massive, crumbling 17th-century estate. Bud, a sometimes painter and aspiring restaurateur, has also used his wife Rebecca’s inheritance to purchase a nearby diner. Joining Bud and Rebecca are their middle-school-aged sons, Victor and Wade; their eldest son, Herman, who has spent recent years hitchhiking around the nation; and the family dog, named The Dog. Victor, who has been bullied at school, begins running around with the “lav rat” kids, who smoke in the restrooms. Meanwhile, his little brother, Wade, a piano prodigy, experiences one accidental injury too many and chooses to wrap himself in bubble wrap around the clock. Long-haired Herman likes to wear women’s clothing, to the great distress of his parents. A literal skeleton is discovered in the basement of their dilapidated home, and a local adjunct professor moves in to study it. One absurdity after another plagues this motley household, until it seems that something will have to give.

The Sommers experiment with church, rehab, open mic nights, therapy, and a new business scheme that involves hiding buds of high-grade marijuana in boiled liver, thyme, and wheat-germ sandwiches. Stahl’s narrative shifts perspectives: Bud and Victor tell their first-person stories in alternating chapters, interspersed with Herman’s ventures in creative writing, which include short stories, poetry, and satirical news articles. Wade and Rebecca, as well as other colorful characters like Bud’s beautiful young waitress, Cassandra, and Victor’s school ally, Strom Luger, remain observed rather than observers. Stahl’s background in poetry colors his detail-rich descriptions of such zany episodes as family Wiffle ball tournaments, their visit from Child Protective Services, and Bud’s imaginative game of gruesome food-service deaths. The personalities of Stahl’s outlandish characters engender often surprising humor.

Against the backdrop of conservative small-town Connecticut in 1979, the Sommers grapple with concepts of family, sexual identity, counterculture, and drug and alcohol use. With pathos, humor, compassion, and great energy, this novel offers a moving examination of the meaning and acceptability of Herman’s cross-dressing and the value of family–in general and in this sweet, troubled individual case. The title of Dear Future Occupants refers to the marks left on the Sommer home; its story is arguably about the tension between conformity and authenticity in the Sommers’ impact on a larger world. The result is preposterous, exuberant, and tender.

This review originally ran in the July 6, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 Easter eggs.

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Enchantment by Riikka Pulkkinen, trans. by Tabatha Leggett

Posted on July 20, 2026 by pagesofjulia

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.

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The Art of Charming a Changeling by Sylvie Cathrall

Posted on July 6, 2026 by pagesofjulia

A plucky art conservator must travel into Fairy lands to save her job and a dreamy Fairy imprisoned in a painting.

The Art of Charming a Changeling is an endearing, enthralling fantasy-romance by Sylvie Cathrall, whose imagination takes readers through Folk and Fairy lands, into a painting, and back again.

Florrie Hyverfell loves her work as an art conservator. It’s people she finds challenging. Constantly arranging her face, rehearsing conversations ahead of time, seeking out comforting textures, and managing her interactions with the world exhaust her. She feels fortunate to be employed by Prince Ardant at the Commonplace Palace Museum, where she cares for his extensive collection. He even shares her passion for Fairy paintings, which have become embarrassingly outmoded. The painting he cares the most about is The Resolute Portrait of Vibrant Lord Vernal Mauve Among the Ruins; but to her dismay, Florrie quickly determines it has been replaced by a Fairy forgery. Worse, the counterfeit painting is holding hostage a changeling, a minuscule, near-perfect copy version of Lord Vernal Mauve, who asks that she call him Vern.

Florrie feels a little overwhelmed. According to the Conservators’ Code (which she has memorized), “one must only introduce the mere possibility of a counterfeit after acquiring at least five forms of incontrovertible evidence.” To save her job, and to help Vern escape from the beautiful but closed world of his painting, Florrie is compelled to find the original stolen painting. To do so, she must travel into Fairy lands, where Folk seldom travel. Meanwhile, there is the utter allure and magnetism of Vern, and does he have tiny, impossibly adorable dimples?

Cathrall (A Letter to the Luminous Deep) invites readers into a curious world in which Folk and Fairies have parted ways, with Folk generally preferring simpler technologies (rejecting levitating carts because “nothing feels so real as a wheel”) and eschewing Fairies and their overly embellished art. Finding herself attracted to Vern presents another layer of difficulty to a woman who frequently struggles to find her way. But Florrie is stronger than some might think.

The Art of Charming a Changeling offers an absorbing foray into an imaginative setting populated by art-focused princes, haughty collectors and conservators at odds with one another, fanciful Fairies, and the occasional predatory duck. It contains a sweet and cozy romance, a woman’s journey of self-actualization within a society that undervalues her, and a whimsical fantasy of changeling art. It also features a quest, for those seeking adventure. This first in a planned series will leave all sorts of readers hungry for more.

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

Rating: 7 seed-loaves.

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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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