When the Columbus family goes on vacation a toy named Dino Boy falls out of the car at the last minute without anyone noticing. Dino Boy who’s shaped like a small white-skinned and blond-haired child dressed in a green dinosaur costume refuses to stay home so he embarks on a trip of his own through each of the 50 U.S. states to try to catch up to the Columbuses. His journey begins in his home state of California where he explores landmarks from Hollywood to the Golden Gate Bridge. He soon gives up and moves on to Oregon (“He rode up north on his family’s tail / From Crater Lake to the Oregon Trail”) and the other Pacific Coast states before looping around to the West the Midwest and eventually the rest of the country. Each state he visits receives its own dedicated page in the book including an illustrated state map a smaller map indicating its location within the U.S. and fun facts like the state’s nickname flag and capital. Occasionally friends like Hamburger Hippo and Tina the Ballerina accompany him for a leg of the journey but in the end it takes a return all the way home to California for Dino Boy to find what he’s looking for. In this sequel to Shampanier’s first book Lost and Found (2022) the hero demonstrates persistence and resourcefulness to an audience who ideally has an interest in geography. The book’s mentions of famous landmarks may leave readers with questions for further research as will the financial logistics of Dino Boy’s travels which stretch credibility. Pavón’s bright and dynamic art highlights a single location per page alongside detailed inset maps and better demonstrate all of what each state has to offer.

In this series opener that was originally self-published in 2020 mermaids who are described as light-skinned start learning mer-magic in middle school. Lavender-haired sixth grader Brynn Finley can hardly wait to join the ranks of the sea guardians. But her new school presents challenges Brynn hadn’t anticipated: traveling by speed-current without her parents getting lost in the halls between classes and not being able to conjure as quickly as her peers. Luckily Brynn has a community that’s there to support her—if only she could bring herself to ask for help. A series of poorly thought-out decisions leads Brynn to showdowns with classic underwater villains—a sea witch with lustrous skin (“like the inside of an abalone shell”) selkies (who have “dark faces”) and an evil green-scaled dagon or fish person—during which she finally learns the importance of honest communication. Nothing about the treatment of Brynn’s life lessons is subtle. Troubling incidents such as Brynn’s trading her pet turtle for a dark magic talisman unfold against a backdrop of familiar imagery like kelp forests and friendly helpful dolphins and the dialogue often feels flat. The book works hard to reinforce widely accepted values such as the importance of effective collaboration and being good environmental stewards.

At Spero School a punishing facility to which 17-year-old Scott Theriault was shipped out by his mother and stepfather flimsy behavioral modification methods and open bullying make life miserable for residents. Scott’s death is ruled accidental—he had been drinking before falling into a local river—but his imprisoned father is sure that foul play not alcohol was responsible. From behind bars he hires private eye Parker to investigate; long haunted by the murder of his daughter Jennifer (who has remained an active afterlife presence for him) Parker is especially sensitive to crimes against children. Meanwhile an evil club of wealthy men with ties to Spero has reconvened to play “the Game” which has them abduct carefully targeted women whom they rape kill and discard. Then there’s the unexplained targeting of Parker’s best friend Louis by hidden forces a mystery that Parker asks a medium Sabine Drew to solve by making contact with the dead. Her report: “I’ve never before come into contact with a congregation of the dead bound together with hostile purpose not like this one." Though Parker is offstage as much as on there is no drop of interest when the focus is on other characters. The suspense is rather contained—there are no real edge-of-your-seat moments. But Connolly’s subtle handling of the supernatural element is one of the book’s distinguishing qualities. So is its occasional humor. Told that Sabine is training to be a psychotherapist one character asks “For the living or the dead?”

Lavery a former voice of the “Dear Prudence” advice column at Slate continues to share keen insights into the human psyche in a touching—and often hilarious—portrait of a woman heading into her 60s without the support and companionship of the nine best friends she’s lost to death or misunderstandings (more than one of these) over the years. At 57 Barbara is a twice-divorced mother of one son (with whom she has a contentious relationship) and works in an upscale food market in Brooklyn. She’s been confronted recently with a list of relationship-based grievances compiled by a purported friend which launches her into protracted musings over why she hasn’t really had a best friend since the death of her last one more than 15 years prior. (Startlingly in the years leading up to her death from cancer that woman removed Barbara from the “casserole list” of friends providing her with meals and comfort.) Mining her memories for clues about what went wrong Barbara sets out to find a new BFF. Peppered with acerbic observations about the vagaries of others her unfiltered narrative covers issues ranging from whether a potential younger new friend is age-appropriate to how to deal with the information that the widower of the friend who dismissed her years ago is now remarrying. The resolution of Barbara’s quest for connection is not linear but readers are treated to her thoughts about religion neighbors aging and cooking. (The assembly directions for a double-crusted bitter greens pie called erbazzone seem impossible to ignore.) Barbara’s prickly personality illuminates Lavery’s exploration of who is worthy of our love and attention and why friendship is so often a zero-sum game.

Toussaint Batiste doesn’t care much for being addressed by his nickname “Troubleman” or “Trouble” for short. But having just finished a stretch in prison for involuntary manslaughter committed while he was still with the Philadelphia PD Toussaint can’t seem to be anywhere not even in a car belonging to the son of a trusted friend without trouble finding him. The car—or in street parlance “whip”—belongs to Jay-Jay Wei son of John Wei owner of a successful restaurant in the city’s Chinatown district who’s offering Toussaint a job and a place to live in gratitude for having saved him from a protection racket. Jay-Jay’s taking Toussaint to his parents’ house but first he’s stopping to make a bag drop with some unsavory characters who it turns out will kill them both if Toussaint doesn’t take some quick and brutal defensive measures. It’s only the beginning of Toussaint’s harrowing reintroduction to the not-so-brotherly street life in the City of Brotherly Love. Before long Jay-Jay is arrested for murder his distraught father is contemplating taking matters into his own hands with his .22-caliber pistol and Toussaint who only wants to be left alone to make his own preferably peaceable way back into society now finds he must navigate by fair foul and mostly violent means through the city’s Black and Chinese underworlds while dealing with his one-time co-workers in the police department including the sultry Sgt. Natasha Dobbs who seems to hanker being more to him than an inside source. To say the least there’s a whole lot of page-turning stuff packed in this latest thriller from K’wan who in addition to an aptitude for orchestrating and propelling action sequences displays a knack for colorfully droll dialogue and antic set pieces bordering on the surreal. He seems to be channeling Elmore Leonard Walter Mosley and Chester Himes in one rollicking stream.

“Come and take a trip into / the biggest brightest bluest blue. // Where buoys bounce. / Where I am brave. / Where divers dip / below the waves.” At first glance this appears to be a lighthearted swimming story but as readers soon discover it’s much more—a reckoning beneath the sea. As the youngster descends and comes across the ancient ship the setting darkens and history begins to surface: “A deeper dive. / A closer look. / A thousand hands the ocean took. // What happened here? Where did they go? / What were their names? I want to know.” Communing with the spirit of another youngster our protagonist is immersed in the past encountering the souls of the ancestors: “the rhythmic rap of dancing drums; / Asante Bono Fanti tongues.” Both text and art are filled with lush imagery; Minter’s luminous artwork juxtaposes the child against the bright blue ocean and line drawings of the Sankofa bird an Adinkra symbol embraced across the African diaspora that represents the ability to learn lessons from the past while moving forward. Backmatter explaining the Sankofa symbol or the history of slave ships and wrecks would have strengthened the work; young readers will need some grounding from educators or caregivers. Still the narrative offers a moving reflection on remembrance healing and reconciliation.

Aki Kitamura is 27 and a full-time staff member at Pegasus Books. Recently married she’s beautiful hotheaded stubborn and unwilling to back down from her opinions. She landed the coveted job because of her grandfather’s ties to Pegasus Books which doesn’t win her any friends at work. And she doesn’t get along with one of her superiors Riko Nishioka the 40-year-old assistant manager. Riko has spent her entire adult life focused on her job and doing it successfully and while she isn’t opposed to change her focus on meeting what she sees as the needs of the bookstore’s core customers means that she is inflexible in ways that younger employees dislike. She also simply doesn’t like Aki. As two of the few full-time staffers at the bookstore Riko and Aki make an unlikely pair when it comes to trying to save the place from closure when the building is faced with renovations and a potential rent hike. Japanese workplace norms around schedules hierarchy gender age and the status of staff versus contract employees are front and center in this novel which offers a lot of commentary on the behind-the-scenes processes involved in running a bookstore and trying to keep it afloat. A confusingly large cast of characters settles into place as the story progresses but the dry recitations about the mechanics of bookselling are unexpectedly lengthy and the story lacks the vibrancy or gentle coziness of a number of other recent translated works from Japan such as The Heartbeat Library by Laura Imai Messina (2024) or The Passengers on the Hankyu Line by Hiro Arikawa (2025).

Shortly before her 10-year high school reunion in June 1986 Sara Barlow moves back home to Arlington Virginia to apply for a teaching job at that same high school. A flood of memories washes over her from her brief romance with Devlin Barrie to the still-unsolved murder of classmate Nina Farley. While riding in Devlin’s Camaro back in 1976 the two witnessed the assault of a young woman but failed to call the police. After Nina’s parents reported her missing the next morning Sara assumed the victim they saw was Nina. A further sadness is the death of Sara’s younger sister Suzanne in a car accident at around the same time—another impetus to move home and live with her widowed mother Marian. Three men figure prominently in the story: Sara reunites with the charming Devlin whose wife’s pregnancy does nothing to dampen their mutual flirtation. Another high school beau Henry Truett is now a teacher at the school as well. Popular but sketchy basketball coach Mark Raleigh emerges as the primary target of Sara’s suspicions. While mainly a tale of romantic suspense McCabe’s crisply written story is most successful in charting Sara’s uncomfortable return home as she confronts challenges in the classroom awkward interactions with judgmental faculty members who used to be her teachers and the task of rebuilding her relationship with her mother.

Twenty-year-old Solitude “Soli” Graymind doesn’t seem special but the careful wording of a prophecy makes her exactly who the troubled kingdom needs. She leaves a life of indentured servitude to bear the burden of a magical amulet that belongs to the goddess Artemisen who’s trapped in a crystal tomb and communicates with Soli as the young woman goes on a journey to rescue her. Along the way Soli battles depression as well as the machinations of evil goddess Corvynne’s henchmen. The author sets up a world where princes are orphaned magic is alternately reviled and revered goddesses clash and a mere mortal struggling with mental illness must save the day. The book is at its best a straightforward quest adventure; the depiction of Soli’s internal battles is a bit heavy-handed but her fight against her illness—and against the stigma that her society places upon it—will appeal to readers who have similar struggles or know others who do. The tale also features romantic elements and they aren’t presented as a slow burn; indeed Soli and a prince fall in love and begin a physical relationship quite quickly. Refreshingly the prince comes with his own emotional baggage and reservations and lovers of romantasy will enjoy the pairing. Classic fantasy fans will connect with the worldbuilding which features exciting magical creatures intriguing locations and determined evildoers. The narrative only gets halfway through Soli’s quest to free the goddess in this installment and the pitfalls that she and other heroes face come across as a touch simplistic at times with few surprises and villains tend to announce themselves. Hopefully more exciting twists await readers in an upcoming sequel.

The Belleport women’s chat group serves as an effective Greek chorus not only commenting on events but subtly offering hints to attentive readers about revelations to come. Many of those events and revelations revolve around Alan and Vivian Anderson a Midwestern couple who relocated from Chicago to Belleport four years earlier just as Covid-19 hit. Creative director of the successful ad agency he co-owns 50-ish Alan is used to winning international awards and giant accounts like John Deere. Driven by equally grand but more domestic ambitions Vivian has set out to rebrand herself as a New England socialite despite her humble working-class background. She has scheduled the building of an expensive swimming pool and more importantly has positioned herself to enter the fastidiously cutthroat competition for admission to Belleport’s exclusive women’s social club the Queen Annes. Inevitably Alan and Vivian find themselves at cross purposes. Alan loses the $14000000 U.S. Dairy account when a farmer named Daniel Ellery meant to represent an ordinary dairy farmer at Alan’s big pitch instead proclaims that the world needs less milk less advertising less excess all-around. Initially despondent Alan begins to agree with Daniel. He dons a flowing white shirt stops wearing shoes and moves into the abandoned playhouse in the backyard. Vivian believes her dreams are being thwarted by Alan but also by her daughters. Fifteen-year-old Bailey’s “kinesthetic learning style” is unacceptable at Greenwich’s best private school and 12-year-old Sunny can talk to animals a bizarre twist within a generally realistic novel. The tone proves confusing. Alan Vivian and the insufferable Queen Anne matriarchs are initially drawn in harsh cartoonish strokes but Maum then pulls back on the snark ultimately asking readers to empathize with the clueless privileged residents of Belleport.

Crystal Shaw has spent pretty much her entire life on camera a performer in her British family’s wildly successful vlog At Home With the Shaws. Raised on a secluded island with younger twin siblings she’s part of the brand her parents have built around “slow clean living” as they turned intimate family moments into curated content. For Crystal this upbringing has been suffocating; she feels less like a member of a family and more like “a character in [their] brand’s story.” Desperate for independence she convinces her parents to let her attend Cradlewell University in London which they agree to as long as she continues to churn out content. Besides experiencing life on her own terms Crystal arrives with a more urgent goal: to dismantle her family’s carefully crafted image and free herself—and her siblings—from the shackles of their media-driven lives. At school Crystal meets fellow journalism student Alyssa Hayes and they quickly become close friends. However Alyssa has a secret: She’s a longtime superfan of the Shaws having followed their channel obsessively for years. Alyssa has frequently fantasized about belonging to the seemingly perfect Shaw family. Now with Crystal threatening to expose its flaws she becomes increasingly determined to preserve the illusion with deadly consequences. The novel’s plot is compelling and consistently engaging though some twists concerning the family’s past feel predictable and underdeveloped. Alyssa occasionally shows flashes of being an intriguing antagonist yet is hampered by flat motivations that may leave readers unsatisfied. The book truly shines in its exploration of fraught family dynamics especially between Crystal and her mother Marjorie offering a thought-provoking look at the ethics of child-centered content creation.

Nabhan is a celebrated biocultural conservationist a lauded ethnobotanist and a noted nature writer. He’s won a MacArthur “genius” grant and has made actionable strides as an activist. Before that though he was a quiet Lebanese American boy on the shores of Lake Michigan who took refuge in his friends—few of whom were human. In an era where neurodivergence was treated as a disability his early preference for the beyond-human world marked him as other. By high school he was barely scraping by; he dropped out to work at a rail yard only to have a beloved art teacher advocate for his early-college acceptance. That catapulted him into a life of activism and science where his unique bright mind could be celebrated. He writes “I set out to memorize the fragrances emanating from the trunks of various kinds of trees and the taste of different roots whose growth aboveground appeared to be superficially the same.” The book traverses “ecotones”—places “rife with ecological edge effects”—with fascination and delight from lush Ecuadorian shorelines to the author’s beloved American Southwest. His enduring love of the desert and other extreme environments is a touchstone throughout; he shows how they can teach us about resilience. The plants are often rendered more vividly than people—here they are complex members of our shared world. The writing shows a complex mind at work with sensitivity and attentiveness to minute details. It meanders between vivid ecosystems making a sort of memoir in plants and places seen. At times it’s engaging and tender; at other times choppy and inconsistent. Yet the vignettes are powerful sharing with us a world rich in flora and fauna one worthy of our time and attention. As he writes “It would be absurd to live without daily protracted immersion in the more-than-human-world.”

This debut book from the Kelce brothers both NFL stars (Jason is retired Travis still plays) draws on a segment from their popular podcast New Heights in which they answer sometimes unhinged questions from fans. “You’re about to read a book that was written by two people who both got kicked out of preschool” Jason writes in the introduction and as if on cue they answer the first question about their favorite middle-school pranks with a lengthy explanation of something called “poop dollar.” Each section takes the form of a transcribed conversation with the brothers and the occasional guest and the results are mixed. Responding to an 18-year-old who asks how to improve at golf their advice is to take lessons and play golf more which while sound is likely something the teenager already considered. Most entertaining are the sections that feature the Kelces bickering such as an argument about how many holes straws have which quickly angers Travis who almost immediately tells his brother a supporter of the two-hole theory: “Shut the fuck up you’re ridiculous. You don’t even believe that you don’t even believe it” They also have a talent for explaining the ins and outs of football to fans unfamiliar with the game though they get a bit stymied when asked to define a down. (“Damn it” Travis says. “This is a hard-ass question.”) The conversations lose a bit of their impact without audio although the brothers’ teasing relationship does shine through and there are some genuinely funny moments as when a flustered Travis responds to a query with “This is a dumb-ass question. What do we wanna…what do we…are we…how are we…yeah.” There’s some humor to be had here but this is mostly a book that’ll appeal to Kelce fans.

British historian Working focuses on the late 16th and early-17th centuries when “people plants animals and artefacts from the Americas entered English art and literature for the first time.” Artists painted idealized unrealistic New World landscapes playwrights depicted English explorers allying with Indigenous rulers who happily bowed to the splendor of Queen Elizabeth. The English liked to position themselves as benevolent colonizers more interested in trade and settlement than in looting precious metals and enslaving the natives as the greedy Spanish did and Working’s elegantly turned prose brings to vivid life the local results of that trade: London apothecary shops redolent with the scents of sassafras from the Carolinas fashionable ladies in hats made of beaver skins from the Great Lakes region foppish men with long “lovelocks” like those of Indigenous shamans. “Might have” “could have” and “may have” are phrases Working uses a great deal in her effort to give proper credit to the agency of Indigenous people so often neglected in traditional accounts and her proclaimed intent to trace “the tangible imprints that Indigenous people across the Americas made on Tudor and Stuart society through the things Londoners wore consumed and collected” is somewhat at odds with the point she makes (more than once) that in England these objects were stripped of their cultural and spiritual significance. Knowledgeable tributes to the native craftsmanship and belief systems embodied in the artifacts displayed by Renaissance collectors as mere curiosities make clear the extent of that loss and if Working sometimes reaches for her evidence her viewpoint is stimulating. The self-serving English declaration that they sought only “friendly mutually beneficial exchange” was undercut she writes by “their yearning for objects—and increasingly the lands they came from.” English settlements including tobacco and cotton plantations that relied on enslaved labor would prove no less destructive than direct conquest.

Set largely in 2004 and 2005 Hynes’ sensual debut turns on the arrival of 17-year-old Chris Hartley with his parents in Spaulding Maine. Chris’ recent coming out as gay scandalized his barely tolerant father a Methodist minister prompting a move to a new church in a new state. There Chris meets Eben Turner the teenage scion of a family famous for its orchard and the apple that bears its name. What follows echoes a host of familiar LGBTQ+ romance tropes: secret trysts unaccepting parents a defiant happily-ever-after. But the story is elevated by Hynes’ rich prose and well-rendered details about grafting different trees to grow new varieties of apples (hence the novel’s title); fine art (a famous painter commemorated the orchard and Eben’s grandfather) and (especially) religion. Though Chris bristles against his strict parents his interest in religion leads him to explore the likely homosexuality of King James VI (of King James Bible fame) and his passion is echoed by Eben’s own care for the life of the orchard. Religious symbolism abounds from the apple tree to the characters’ very names—Eben and Chris aren’t far from Eden and Christ—and Hynes powerfully disrupts any gentility in the language with unflinching scenes of the brutality of deep-seated homophobia. Braiding chapters alternately narrated by Chris and Eben the book evokes “Brokeback Mountain” Call Me by Your Name and Gilead and if the plot doesn’t quite elevate the novel to the level of those classics it’s a fine debut and a rich portrait of the fierceness and intensity of first love and futile attempts to stand in its way.

This winning first mystery from novelist and memoirist Bloom features an English professor turned private eye with the perfectly hard-boiled name of Dell Chandler and a charming ironic super cool narrative voice to match. She’s hired to investigate an untimely death at Cromwell University a private college in a snooty area of Connecticut: A professor named Oliver Bullfinch was bludgeoned to death in his office with a bust of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Low expectations of the local police lead college president Elizabeth Cutty to hire Dell who can very much use the $500 daily fee. She brings to the task a solid background in lock-picking file-snatching and basic snooping much of it gleaned from old episodes of Law & Order. Fortunately she also knows something about the tenure-mad prestige-hungry and often alcoholic nature of the standard-issue academic as well as their endless backbiting. And she’s no wimp. “I’m built fairly big and very solid. I look best in smooth tailored clothes or in jeans. I look my very best stark naked. In ruffles and florals I look like a pale side of beef with ribbons around it.” As for the naked part we’ll learn more about this once Dell starts lusting after Sgt. Nat Baker a strong silent type on the local force. When someone cuts her brake lines when someone throws a rock through her godfather’s window (he’s a local and was a pal of Bullfinch’s) Dell can tell she’s getting close. Lots of action late-breaking twists and characters plus the emergence of a buried secret in Dell’s own past make the last quarter of the book a bit of a whirlwind with a second highly educated corpse dropping into the mix but Dell Chandler is a cool character and a quick study and her sense of humor never deserts her.

Williams author of C.C. Pyle’s Amazing Foot Race (2007) specializes in oddball niche historical events that are often less amusing the closer they are examined. Our warming planet is breaking heat records but many that remain unbroken date from 1936 a year whose meteorological quirks often attracted more attention than Hitler. The book opens in January which turned out to be among the coldest in history but quickly moves on to an unnaturally warm spring and hellish summer. Beaches were packed and Williams writes of the era’s legal standards of indecency: Men were ticketed for exposing their upper bodies and families routinely slept on porches and lawns and in cars public parks and movie theaters. Air conditioners (invented in 1902) remained too expensive for Depression-era households. A unit that could cool a room cost $400 (more than $9000 today) and weighed roughly 600 pounds. Williams summarizes what little scientists knew of Earth’s temperature cycles and the state of cooling technology but mostly he delivers 65 chronological chapters of what reporters documented: victim after victim suffering and often dying during hot weather. Readers will encounter a steady stream of vivid usually heartrending anecdotes. Victims grew sick and often collapsed; some crashed their cars fell off roofs and killed themselves (and occasionally others). Zoo animals escaped as did monkeys—they were popular pets at the time. The author writes “If you were a police officer in 1936 pursuing a monkey was practically part of the job description.”

Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016) The Dutch House (2019) and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time romantic secrets and step-relationships again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband Jonathan notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne]” as she told Jonathan decades ago a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that though Daphne doesn’t recognize him Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie left the family early; her current stepfather Lucas Ekker lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books Positivity! Positively Positive! The Positivity Workbook! Positive Every Day! ad infinitum. The man in the museum Eddie Triplett was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing and once Daphne realizes who he is she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister Leda a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you but I’m not’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about’ Leda said.”

Perfect for readers who enjoy a good workplace drama as well as those who love old movies Bock’s latest is set in the New York offices of a cable network called the Cinema Channel. In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center marketing director Amy Greene and her husband Jack also a TV executive have moved to a suburb of Washington D.C. though they don’t agree on which one of them this move was actually for. She now commutes to work on Amtrak and the reader accompanies her on these journeys through captivating frame-by-frame narration taking us from Union Station to Penn Station evoking the experience of train travel in every detail. “Tickets! Tickets?” calls a conductor and even those punctuation marks seem perfectly rendered. But just as Amy launches into this taxing plan two things happen to up the ante: Jack has a heart attack and her “office husband” top dog Owen Orski belatedly lets her in on an already signed deal to sell the network requiring her to move back to New York immediately if she wants to stay involved. Owen and Amy enjoy matching people to the classic movie characters they most resemble inviting a parade of glamorous old stars through the pages. One of them is John Garfield here representing Andy Gato an entertainment news reporter with whom Amy has a romantically charged relationship. As her brother her adult son his girlfriend and her in-laws all converge on the Silver Spring rental to care for Jack in her absence then as Jack is rushed into surgery the profoundly loyal Amy is ever more caught between her competing loyalties. The very close third-person narration mimics the experience of ordinary consciousness with real-world ratiocination constantly interrupted by sensory input cravings daydreams and—unexpectedly—an ongoing conversation with Amy’s late parents.

Arden best known for her Winternight Trilogy here turns from medieval Russia to Europe during the same period. Anne of Brittany—a real person—is 19 when the novel begins in the late 15th century a sovereign duchess whose father the duke has been dead since she was a child. Described as “small and glossy as a cat in a dairy” she’s desperately trying to avoid marrying Charles VIII the king of France which would mean the dissolution of her country. She conceives a plan to conduct a unicorn hunt in the ancient haunted forest of Broceliande thinking she will be able to secretly arrange a proxy wedding to Maximilien of Austria heir to the Holy Roman Empire. While there she encounters not only an actual unicorn but an evil enchanter who has designs on her kingdom. With the unlikely aid of the chivalrous (and undeniably attractive) Louis of Orleans who has been sent by Charles’ sister Marguerite to betray Anne as well as Anne’s spunky younger sister Isabeau; a clever peasant girl Elesbed; and a cat named Butter Anne works feverishly to protect her people from sinister forces both political and supernatural. Arden takes her time immersing the reader in this thoroughly and intricately imagined world where historical figures bump up against an enigmatic korriganed queen at least one monstrous sea-dragon a herd of undead “anaon” and a whole Breton city that has been trapped in time. This is an alternate history in which the admirable Anne freed from the confines of textbooks gets to ask the question “Shall we not write our own story?” Here love and duty reach an understanding and courtly romance makes friends with a steamier variety of physical contact. Fans of jousts spells dark magic and brave women will find plenty of each here.