Dandelion is Dead by Rosie Storey

Posted on December 1, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A grieving sister finds that hope, silliness, angst, and even love may be possible amid loss in this astonishing first novel.

Rosie Storey’s debut, Dandelion Is Dead: A Novel About Life, is a glittering riot of grief, laughter, missed connections, absurdities, and the joys and pains of life’s many facets. From one unexpected turn to the next, this story will keep readers emotionally engaged and yearning alongside its protagonist.

Poppy Greene is 37 years old and deep in mourning. It has been 231 days since her older sister, Dandelion, died “and, somehow, it was spring again.” Dandelion had been wild, irrepressible, author of all the sisters’ adventures; without her, Poppy (a professional photographer, ever the observer) is unmoored. Going through her sister’s phone, she clicks on a dating app and, on a whim, answers a message from a year-old match. When Jake asks for a date on Dandelion’s 40th birthday, it feels like fate, or magic, or Dandelion’s mischievous hand from beyond the grave. Poppy does not set out with the purposeful intention of impersonating a dead woman (nor of cheating on her longtime boyfriend, Sam), but she finds Jake incredibly magnetic, and soon begins a romantic relationship in her sister’s name. Dandelion Is Dead alternates between Poppy’s close third-person point of view and Jake’s, revealing his own intense attraction to the woman he knows as Dandelion, and his own past traumas. Poppy and Jake are both awkward, ungraceful, and heartfelt in their romance; both commit dishonesties that threaten everything they value.

The aptly named Storey excels at whimsy, delightful comedy, and pathos. Her plot is composed of debilitating losses, madcap adventures, treacheries, secrets, love, and striving. The profound charm and appeal of Poppy and Jake lie in their contradictions. They suffer terrible losses and make poor choices; they are capable of both sweetness and betrayal. The cast is enriched by Poppy and Dandelion’s lifelong friend Jetta (and her loyal husband); the young son Jake is devoted to, and his masterfully nuanced ex-wife; Poppy’s unsympathetic boyfriend; and of course, the mythic Dandelion herself. While its subtitle feels accurate, this debut is also clearly a novel about grief. Poppy learns that if she is going to find a fulfilling life after losing her sister, she must grapple with her own mistakes and those of her loved ones, even those she’s lost. Dandelion Is Dead is a scintillating achievement in emotional range, humor, and wisdom. Poppy Greene thinks she is the less magnetic sister, but no one who meets her will easily forget her.

This review originally ran in the November 7, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 Twisters.

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Yosemite Wildlife: The Wonder of Animal Life in California’s Sierra Nevada by Beth Pratt; photographs by Robb Hirsch

Posted on November 28, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Environmental leader and lifelong Yosemite lover Beth Pratt partners with biologist and wildlife photographer Robb Hirsch to offer Yosemite Wildlife: The Wonder of Animal Life in California’s Sierra Nevada, the first book in 100 years to address this national gem’s diverse animal wildlife. With more than 300 images, Yosemite Wildlife is also rich in Pratt’s accessible prose; this thorough survey of observations and storytelling is designed to update a 1924 publication for the historical record. As a beautifully produced, large-format, glossy presentation, it also exhibits Pratt’s and Hirsch’s expertise and passion for a place that is much more than just its famous geology and dramatic scenery. With plentiful archival records, historical images, and personal stories from park staff and naturalists, it’s an informative document as well as a stunning visual feast.

Conservation success stories and profiles of Yosemite’s human defenders over the years accompany Hirsch’s sumptuous images of the iconic black bear and mule deer, the Sierra green sulphur butterfly, the northwestern pond turtle, raptors and songbirds, dragonflies and butterflies, charismatic predators, shy shrews, quirky herptiles, and more. Exquisite.

This review originally ran in the November 4, 2025 gift issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

Rating: 8 push-ups.

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Maximum Shelf author interview: M.L. Stedman

Posted on November 24, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of A Far-Flung Life, here’s M.L. Stedman: Capturing the Vast Sweep of Events.

M.L. Stedman was born and raised in Western Australia and now lives in London. The Light Between Oceans was her first novel. Her second, A Far-Flung Life (Scribner, March 3, 2026), examines tragedy, memory, loss, secrets, and the power of love in a family saga set against the vast, stark landscape of a Western Australia sheep station.

Where does the germ of such an expansive plot begin?

M.L. Stedman
(photo: Johnnie Pakington)

It’s different for everyone. I don’t plan what I write–it just sort of turns up, from an image in my mind’s eye, or a random thought. Setting is always crucial for me, too, and Western Australia is a natural place for my stories to arise. I’m drawn to intractable problems, which, because they have no “right” answer, force us to examine our underlying values: as with The Light Between Oceans, there are knotty ones at the centre of this book.

I wrote the story over a very, very long time, and it just sort of grew and took shape organically over years. Characters turned up bit by bit, out of nowhere: they might be prompted by seeing a face, or hearing a phrase, or sometimes, they just materialised when I started to imagine a scene. The process is quite mysterious to me.

How was the process or experience of this novel different for you from your first?

The biggest difference was the time it took–I wrote my first book in about three years or so. It was harder to find uninterrupted space to write once The Light Between Oceans was published. As to what’s changed–I’d say the whole world. From that point of view, it was a great luxury to spend so much time in the remote imaginary setting I’d created, where e-mails and smartphones didn’t exist, “far from the madding crowd.”

Do you have any organizational tricks, for plot or timeline, for example?

When it comes to writing, I’m both organised, and not organised. I’m organised in that I set aside time for it–being at your desk increases the chances of actually writing something. I’m not one of those writers (whom I envy), who can say “I’ve got a spare hour between festival events, so I’ll write a few pages of my novel.” I need long, uninterrupted stretches.

I think it’s important to find out how you write best, and do that: if you’re a planner, plan. If (like me) you’re not, and story turns up as your fingers hit the keyboard, don’t fret about the lack of a plan. I don’t write in chronological order. Often, scenes aren’t remotely linked, and then, with time, like mushrooms underground, little connections form by themselves and suddenly things fit together. It’s risky, of course–you have to be prepared to discard strands that turn out to be dead ends. But in discarding, and discovering what the story is not, you narrow down what the story is. For me, the trick is to stay, to wait, and to trust.

Is “forgetment,” for “the opposite of a memory,” your own coinage?

The concept of “forgetment” is foundational to the book. Anyone who spends a long time thinking and writing about memory will probably eventually notice that there’s a word for things we remember (“memory”), but not one for things we forget. I came up with the word “forgetment,” but didn’t investigate beyond its absence in the Oxford dictionary. When I finally did Google it years later, it turned out–not surprisingly–that other people had thought of that word too.

I’m fascinated by how the “known now” becomes the “lost past.” In the book, there’s a reference to Sleeping Beauty, in which a whole castle disappears from memory. The fact that we accept that story so readily bespeaks how familiar we are with the process of “un-knowing.”

I’m also interested in the role of forgetting in forgiving (there’s a reason we say “forgive and forget”). Humans have been outsourcing memory since they first drew on cave walls. Writing supercharged this, and lately, technology has increased it exponentially, so that the most trivial things are now indelibly recorded and subject to instant recall, without context. Does this mean as a society we’re losing the ability to forget, or at least, as individuals, to choose what is remembered about our lives? If every fault or grudge or transgression remains fresh in our minds, does it diminish our ability to forgive?

Was the close third-person perspective, shifting between characters, always the plan, or did you play with a few points of view?

Writing in the third person comes most naturally to me. That said, I also think about the characters in the first person, seeing the world through their eyes. I’m very conscious of how characters see themselves and each other, and, in A Far-flung Life, how the omniscient narrator sees them all. We switch between the characters living their lives minute to minute, struggling through peril to an unknown future, and the omniscient narrator, who reminds us of the vast sweep of events in that timeless, imperturbable landscape. I find that “eternal” perspective reassuring, comforting.

What was the role of research in this novel?

Research is one of my favourite aspects of writing. For this book, I travelled a lot within Western Australia, read a lot, listened a lot: to people; to the sound of the wind in the trees and the night creatures of the Australian bush; above all, to the deep silence that envelopes the far-flung places I describe. I spent a long time in archives, exploring records that left my fingers covered in the red dust that filled the pages. I was incredibly fortunate to speak to pastoralists (like “ranchers” in the U.S.) and geologists and other people of the generation in which Australia “rode on the sheep’s back,” who recounted their stories and guided my research. I studied rocks and sheep (I even had a brief taste of shearing a wether, under very close supervision!). I visited various stations, sometimes hitching a ride on small aircraft visiting remote places, or delivering supplies to a station cut off by floods.

I must pay tribute to librarians and archivists, the unsung heroes keeping “forgetment” at bay. In this era of austerity and automation, I fear these quiet champions of knowledge are an endangered species. But computers could never replace their wisdom and enthusiasm.

What might you work on next?

Ha! If I knew, I might even tell you. But the ink is barely dry on this book. Once it makes its way out into the world, I’ll look forward to retreating to my imagination again, following up a few little threads of ideas, to see what they want to grow into.

This interview originally ran on October 30, 2025 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: A Far-Flung Life by M.L. Stedman

Posted on November 21, 2025 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 October 30, 2025.

M.L. Stedman (The Light Between Oceans) awes and transports readers with the astonishing A Far-flung Life, a sweeping family drama spanning the latter half of the 20th century. Layers of tragedy and compelling, nuanced characters are set against a vast, indifferent landscape in Western Australia.

The MacBride family has run a sizable sheep station for generations, with quiet success, in a dispersed but close-knit community whose respect they have earned. “The MacBrides had the touch, it was said: sensible but shrewd, careful but not mean.” The novel opens with landscape, scenery, and color: red earth, blue sky, dust-green vegetation, the “straight vermilion line” of a road through sparse trees. Against this backdrop, three MacBride men travel “like unpacked Russian dolls” in a Bedford pickup truck across the expanse of their sheep station, “nearly a million arid acres.” Phil drives, accompanied by his sons, Warren and Matt, and a trailer full of sheep. It is fitting that the reader meets this landscape before its human inhabitants; Stedman will consistently reinforce that contrast. It is early 1958, and the date, January 10, will reverberate through the MacBride family history for years to come.

Phil MacBride has known since his feet could reach the pedals not to swerve to avoid a kangaroo. But under the January sun, he makes a fateful error. Back at their homestead, hours later, Phil’s wife, Lorna, and daughter, Rose, open their door to two policemen, from whom they learn of lives both ended and hanging in the balance. The consequences of the crash that opens Stedman’s masterful novel will tumble and tangle MacBride lives for generations. Amid unspeakable tragedy and threads of hope, a note of whimsy cuts through: also introduced in this opening chapter is the outright oddity of a fully rigged pearling lugger. The subject of legend, the boat abides in its own structure, known as “Monty’s shed,” for the late Montgomery MacBride, Phil’s uncle, who won the vessel in a bet but never got to sail it. The MacBrides maintain the tradition of oiling its timbers, keeping spiders and termites at bay, and placing a beer in its bow every year on Monty’s birthday. Matt MacBride–thrown from the truck on that January day–as a younger son, was destined not to inherit the sheep station but to make his own way in a larger world. He had longstanding goals and dreams springing from Monty’s boat. Now everything has changed; but the pearling lugger remains in its shed, storing potential.

A Far-flung Life follows the remaining MacBrides as they continue to scrape life and livelihood out of a hardscrabble home with fragile concepts of morality and honor, and the power of love. They weather births and death, secrets, and scandals both experienced and kept hidden. Throughout every loss and recovery, their fate remains tied up with the land: “Our lives come and go like these gold-rush towns. We arrive, we grow, we thrive, then we’re gone. Then the forgetting happens, and once-solid foundations are barely traces in the earth, from unguessable lives. Whole communities and the ties that bound them are blown away with the dust.” Stedman excels at description of both landscape and the human experience, and alternates applying this close attention to the events in her characters’ lives and to the larger world in which they live. “In the end, we’re all looking for a place to ride out the storm of life. Among all these husks of houses and fossils of trees, we are like hermit crabs, borrowing a shelter for a time, and moving on.”

As the MacBrides carry on after the crash, their lives will continue to call upon big themes, including inexorability and change, innocence, and the handling of painful truths. Stedman generally employs a shifting close third-person perspective, allowing her reader to see through one character’s eyes and then another’s, finding out at different points what they know. This careful reveal not only of events, but of various characters’ knowledge of events, is central to the complexity of the MacBrides’ secrets. Another significant theme is the tension between memory and forgetting. One young character, in asking questions that his elders can’t or won’t answer, coins a term, “forgetment,” for what is forgotten–“the opposite of a memory.” This concept recurs throughout a plot that revolves around what its protagonists can’t remember and what they wish they didn’t.

Like the heartrending The Light Between Oceans, the MacBrides’ story interrogates ideas of right and wrong in specific and complicated cases, and the experience of humans writ small against a vast landscape. “This land has seen improbable things: the evolution of marsupials and monotremes; of flightless birds and animals that fly. It’s seen continents split and islands arise. It’s seen oceans turn to desert and desert turn to glaciers. And it’s watched people drag their little lives across its surface, flat and unforgiving.” By the end of this epic and wrenching family saga, readers will care deeply about lives that are “destined to join the vast ocean of human forgetments.” Heartbreaking and painfully beautiful, A Far-flung Life will haunt and comfort long past its final page.

Rating: 8 goannas.

Come back Monday for my interview with Stedman.

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Cape Fever by Nadia Davids

Posted on November 17, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A lonely colonial woman offers to write letters to the fiancé of her maid and the two become disturbingly intertwined in this evocative gothic tale of race, class, and spirits.

“I come highly recommended to Mrs. Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read.” South African novelist Nadia Davids’s twisting gothic drama Cape Fever, her U.S. debut, opens by highlighting narrator Soraya’s ability to read, which she keeps from her employer. Soraya goes to work for the settler Mrs. Hattingh in 1920: hired as a combined cleaner and cook, the younger woman understands that the elder is not as wealthy as she wishes to appear. In the colonial city in which Mrs. Hattingh reigns over a large, lonely home, Soraya’s close-knit, loving family lives in the nearby Muslim quarter; Soraya is permitted by her employer to visit only rarely. Her father is an artist in religious calligraphy, creating beautiful works of prayer and devotion. The word “proclaim,” he instructs her, is “also read, recite. You see? For us, to read, to recite, is one,” and “The person is a pen. The person is paper.” Soraya’s fiancé, Nour, is an accomplished scholar who works on a farm while saving for teachers’ college.

There are moments in which Soraya feels something like fellowship with her employer, when she intuits that “every woman, rich or poor, madam or maid, dreams of escape.” But working for and living with Mrs. Hattingh, under power structures bigger than the individual, is deeply unpleasant. “She’s never understood the scale of what she wants and asks for.” Soraya retreats, in her small room, into the stories and characters that have come to her all her life: the Gray Women, as she terms the spirits that she alone can see; a seawoman with ink for blood; a woman who makes a baby out of soap. She finds Mrs. Hattingh’s house is teeming with spirits.

Mrs. Hattingh introduces a new comfort and stressor when she offers to write to Nour on Soraya’s behalf. As one woman takes the voice of the other–and intercepts the correspondence that arrives in return–their identities blur in disturbing ways. Soraya holds what she can of her own life in private and cherishes her visits to her family’s home, until even these are forbidden. In the increasingly claustrophobic manor, the tension between the two women builds, resulting in complex layers of psychological intrigue amid themes of class, race, love, grief, and haunting. In Soraya’s compelling voice, Davids blends mysticism, quiet power and resistance, and pain born of a long stretch of history in this unsettling tale of suspense. Cape Fever is beautiful, discomfiting, and moving.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the October 28, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 pickled lemons.

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The Gallagher Place by Julie Doar

Posted on November 7, 2025 by pagesofjulia

In this moody debut novel, new and old crimes on her family’s estate in upstate New York force a quietly struggling woman to confront loyalties and conflicts among family and friends.

Julie Doar’s first novel, The Gallagher Place, investigates old and new mysteries within a compelling family drama set in a striking landscape.

Protagonist Marlowe Fisher is an illustrator living on the Upper West Side and a loner, even surrounded by her powerful family and their estate. When she and her two brothers, as adults, discover a body on their property, the case reopens old wounds. Decades earlier, Marlowe’s childhood best friend vanished without a trace. The freshly murdered man and the long-missing teenaged girl do not initially appear linked, but the surrounding community has long harbored suspicions about the wealthy Fishers. Marlowe has always yearned to know what happened to Nora, although that desire presents new conflicts, having come under investigation once again.

The Fishers have always used the Gray House in upstate New York as a weekend and holiday retreat, “a wholesome family sanctuary to escape the crowded city life and the bittersweet pain of growing up too fast. A haven, her father sometimes called it. If that was the case, why did bad things still happen?” And bad things do happen, especially the disappearance of Nora Miller. Marlowe has never had another relationship as meaningful as her friendship with Nora, a local girl and an honorary, if part-time, fourth Fisher sibling, who wished desperately to escape her rural roots. Marlowe feels strongly: “Nothing mattered as much as the two of us.” The loss of Nora has shadowed Marlowe’s life ever since, culminating in a carefully hidden drinking problem.

The recent murder, and accompanying investigation into Nora’s disappearance, is both galvanizing and disturbing. As Marlowe embarks on her own inquiries, more thoroughly than ever before, she not only refreshes old pains but discovers new risks. To search for Nora means to interrogate her own memory, to learn uncomfortable truths about herself and her family, to confront class differences, privilege, and inheritances. This discomfiting process takes place in two timelines, against the backdrop of Dutchess County, N.Y., in the summers of the 1990s (when Nora and Marlowe were teenagers) and in the present winter of 2018. The Fisher property defines Marlowe’s greatest trauma and coming of age; she remains devoted to “the spirit of landscape” that inspires her art. A strong sense of place is central to this chilling novel about old secrets and what one might choose to uncover or keep hidden. The Gallagher Place is dramatically atmospheric, expertly paced, and haunting.

This review originally ran in the October 10, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 gifts.

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Friends and Liars by Kit Frick

Posted on October 27, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Estranged college friends are drawn back to the palatial Italian estate where old secrets are buried and one of them died in this electric tale of friendship, deceit, and suspense.

Friends and Liars by Kit Frick (I Killed Zoe Spanos) sees a foursome of estranged friends reunite at a luxurious private Italian palazzo for an extravagant weeklong vacation to remember their fifth, heiress Clare Monroe. Clare was 21 when she drowned in Lake Como on New Year’s Eve. Now she would be 27.

Luca, Harper, Sirina, and David gather for an itinerary organized (and paid for) by Clare’s family, the famous and secretive Monroes of Hollywood. Luca is foundering in small-town Florida, recently dropped by his sugar daddy for a younger model. Harper has a nearly five-year-old son with her perfect husband, and she’s the only one of the group to have settled down directly after college. Sirina is hard at work building her acting career. And David–Clare’s boyfriend at the time of her death–is enjoying a successful career in directing, with another girlfriend whose father is well-connected. The friends still care for each other, but have been out of touch since that terrible New Year’s Eve. Clare’s tragic death is all bound up with secrets that each of them would rather not confront again–the lies and betrayals that contributed to her demise.

But, for various personal reasons, none is able to resist the invitation to return to the Palazzo Mella for another series of opulent events orchestrated by Clare’s icy Aunt Catherine. Immediately, their uneasiness is intensified by the appearance of taunting “gifts” and notes left for them in the guest quarters. The message is clear: someone knows what happened on that New Year’s Eve and has come for revenge. The old friends must band together and face their own worst behaviors to solve a compound mystery: Who knows what they’ve each done? Who is preying upon their guilt? What really happened that night, and who will pay for it now?

Friends and Liars achieves a delicious balance of emotional complication, layered deceptions, and consummate psychological drama. Lush with the accoutrements of affluence and charged with the machinations of aspiring creatives, the lavish setting near Bellagio distills to a locked-room mystery. The surviving Monroes, a few family friends, Clare’s four ride-or-die college buddies and their two plus-ones, as well as the household staff, make for colorful suspects in a plot with rising stakes. Heart-racing suspense, compelling characters and relationships, and great danger add up to a highly satisfying puzzle of a novel, which saves surprises for its final pages.

This review originally ran in the October 3, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 Paper Planes.

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Haven’t Killed in Years by Amy K. Green

Posted on October 24, 2025 by pagesofjulia

The long-hidden daughter of a serial killer is caught up in a new wave of crimes in this clever, absorbing, constantly surprising novel about finding one’s own way.

Amy K. Green (The Prized Girl) presents a twisting puzzle of a thriller with Haven’t Killed in Years, starring a young woman whose hidden past resurfaces in bizarre, gruesome, and often funny ways.

“On the day my mother was released from prison I stubbed my toe four times…. It was a statistical anomaly and, in hindsight, a warning that bad things were coming my way.” In this way, readers meet Gwen Tanner, who has a boring office job, an unremarkable one-bedroom apartment, and no serious relationships. From the outside she appears to be “your standard almost-too-basic law-abiding woman approaching thirty. On the inside? Eh, not so much.” Gwen was born Marin Haggerty. When she was nine, her father was convicted on eight counts of first-degree murder (eight being just the ones they could pin on him) and both parents went to prison (her mother for aiding and abetting). Marin became Gwen and disappeared from the public eye. She has spent the past two decades building a resolutely ordinary life, hoping to avoid the fate her father intended for her: to be just like him. Her father had “also had a good job and worn nice clothes; it was the easiest way to hide in plain sight.”

But now a severed arm turns up on her doorstep, with a note: “Hi, Marin.” Someone knows Gwen’s real story. Her safe, staid lifestyle is disrupted; and more than that, Gwen is offended that someone thinks they can get the better of her. She sets out to investigate, but the clues and the characters just tangle her up further. She meets a tour guide who specializes in her father’s crimes, a group of murder-obsessed young men, and a woman from her own childhood who does not recognize her. These relationships complicate her sterile existence; she mostly accidentally finds herself making friends–who are also suspects. “When you let people into your life, there are so many details. I knew that and I had ignored my own rules anyway.” Is it time for Gwen–Marin–to come into her own as her father’s protégé? Or is she going to surprise herself and set out on her own path?

Just when this unforgettable protagonist thinks she knows who is behind which crimes, new information throws her (and readers) off track. Many scenes spin into comedies of errors, playing on constant subversions of expectations. In Gwen/Marin’s dryly cynical voice, these madcap events hit both tender and comic notes. Despite instances of poignant suffering and a noteworthy serial killer, Haven’t Killed in Years is weirdly, deeply fun.

This review originally ran in the September 29, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 blue drinks.

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The Bookshop Below by Georgia Summers

Posted on October 17, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This dark fantasy about the magic of books and the power of love is both heartrending and inspiring.

Georgia Summers (The City of Stardust) renders an enchanting world of self-sabotage, romance, deadly ink magic, and dearly beloved bookstores in her sophomore novel, The Bookshop Below. London was once full of shops where books and the magic they held could be exchanged for the priceless: self-extracted teeth, a lock of hair, a firstborn child. In contemporary times, the force that imbues books and bookshops with their power, through the particular magical workings of booksellers, is fading. Now Cassandra, a disgraced former bookseller, is drawn back into the life that exiled her, just in time to die along with the world she reveres–or, perhaps, to save it.

She’s been living as Cass Holt for years, getting by (and keeping her hands on the books she loves) in the most ignoble fashion: Cass is a book thief. She is also one of the most talented readers–wielders of the magic within enchanted books; now she sells that gift without scruples to whomever can pay. But Cass once had another name: “Cassandra Fairfax, named after a woman whose words melted into thin air no matter how truthful they were, with the surname of a character in disguise from a novel by a long-dead author. Layers upon layers of insubstantiality.”

Summers’s enchanting fantasy opens with Cassandra in great danger, called to return, reluctantly, to the bookshop where she was raised, trained, and then banished by her mentor, Chiron. She was once his protégé, destined to become an owner one day. Now, just as suddenly, she finds herself reinstated, struggling to rehabilitate Chiron’s decayed shop “and all its finicky, unpredictable moods.” She is in over her head, wrestling with her considerable guilt over past crimes against bookshops, against the underground river that powers the bookshop systems in ways Cassandra has yet to understand, and against Chiron himself. She is in danger from enemies who know about her deeds as Cass Holt, and whatever is threatening the bookshops. Cassandra must manage a bookseller she feels lucky to hire, a wonderfully capable woman named Byron; a handsome, magnetic rival named Lowell Sharpe; and the duty she feels to solve the mysteries of what happened to Chiron and why the magic bookshops are disappearing. Cassandra is not sure she wants to be here at all, let alone on the hook for saving everything she knows from destruction. But she feels she owes a debt. She finds she cares about people she never expected to. And she uncovers an enormous secret about her own origins that upends the stakes entirely.

The Bookshop Below offers a delicious combination of shadowy, sinister magic, wistful romance, propulsive action, and the utter reverence one holds for the right book. Summers excels at transporting her readers to a dreamy otherworld where anything is possible.

This review originally ran in the September 26, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 mugs that say “I slay comma splices.”

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The White Hot by Quiara Alegría Hudes

Posted on October 10, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Delightful, unpredictable, and often harrowing, this mother-daughter tale of growing and learning will keep any reader riveted.

With The White Hot, Quiara Alegría Hudes (My Broken Language; Pulitzer Prize-winner for the play Water by the Spoonful) offers an expansive, surprising coming-of-age story about both a mother and a daughter. The novel opens on Noelle’s 18th birthday, when she receives an envelope. “It wasn’t the handwriting that dinged memory’s bell so much as the pen’s feral indentations.” Since she was 10, when her mother disappeared, Noelle has lived with her father, stepmother, and two half-brothers in New Jersey. Readers have just met the teenager when the voice shifts. “Dear Noelle… I am not going to send this,” the letter begins. What at first masquerades as an interlude quickly takes over the book. Breathlessly, alongside Noelle, readers take in April Soto’s story.

“That awful day began with your classroom art show.” At age 26, April is weary. Her 10-year-old daughter is precocious, an artistic and academic genius, and disturbingly observant of her mother’s shortcomings. Their household comprises four generations of Soto women: Abuela Omara (who emigrated from Puerto Rico), Mamá Suset, April, and Noelle, “not a speck of dust–or man–in sight.” April is undone by her child’s gimlet eye, her own unrealized potential, her lack of options, and daily drudgery, and in the wake of a scene at the dinner table, she simply walks away from their Philadelphia home.

What follows is an epic and astonishing journey of self-discovery. April muses on the influence of Hermann Hesse, Charles Mingus, sex as revelation, violences witnessed and perpetrated; she undertakes a wilderness trek (profoundly unprepared in sandals and sequins), and experiences painful, blissful realizations via blisters and hunger. She tells her child she knows her leaving was a betrayal, but hopes she has also offered choice. By book’s end, the briefest return to Noelle’s own 20s presents a full-circle perspective of the parallels in these two lives, and the significant differences.

April’s narrative is astounding and vibrant. In her best and worst moments, she describes being cracked open, experiencing epiphanies: “She felt an un-looming, a separation into threads, some of which rose and drifted through nearby windows whose unseen inhabitants shimmered inside her, too.” These, as well as the mundane, yield stunning, lightning-bolt prose: “Within this deluge, the frog and the oak, the tuba and congregants were not discrete phenomena but native to each other, and I to them. That I of all creatures should be tapped for a glimpse? A bewilderment.” The White Hot is wide-ranging, thought-provoking, tender, and raw–unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the September 23, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 olives.

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