Book of the Day Roundup: March 10-14, 2025
The Gorgon’s Fury
Tales of Newel and Doren: A Fablehaven Adventure
Brandon Mull
Shadow Mountain Publishing
Hardcover $17.99 (192pp)
978-1-63993-379-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Brandon Mull’s exciting fantasy novel The Gorgon’s Fury, adventurers work to save a magical kingdom.
Newel and Doren are satyr cousins who are determined to win the annual Satyr Games. In addition to their competitive foes Barrett and Hoff, they face a fierce enemy in a gorgon roaming Fablehaven who petrifies all who meet her gaze. Newel and Doren travel from their haven in Connecticut to the Florida marshlands and the ocean to learn how to defeat the gorgon.
Fablehaven’s mythological inhabitants include dryads, fairies, golem, ogres, and trolls, set within fantastical setting: “the leaves of the overarching trees filtered the sunlight onto a few dappled patches. A silver fairy played among some irises blossoming nearby.” But the world also includes modern elements like smartphones and the internet. Indeed, in this daring coming-of-age narrative, Newel and Doren talk and act like normal teenagers. They show a propensity for human technology and mortal amenities even as they worry about losing their sense of satyr identity. Their desire to be honest and responsible on their mission and to protect their homeland results in depth.
Moving with urgency through the cousins’ suspenseful explorations, the chapters build on each other well. Black-and-white line drawings complement the story’s action, as with images of characters playing clobber ball and evading goblins’ arrows. Each chapter introduces new characters who share clues to usher Newel and Doren along on their quest. While a binding thread between the boys and a bog hag remains unresolved, it introduces a possible follow-up escapade with the satyr cousins. An eleven-page reading guide promotes further discussions of themes like maturity and rivalry.
A magical quest with themes of responsibility and accountability, The Gorgon’s Fury is an engrossing fantasy novel in which satyrs hope to save their home.
KATY KEFFER (February 17, 2025)
Moving Day
Teri Roche Drobnick
Jennifer Black Reinhardt, illustrator
Margaret Ferguson Books
Hardcover $18.99 (40pp)
978-0-8234-5259-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Inspired by a true story, this whimsical watercolor picture book uses an unlikely vessel to guide children through the anxiety of moving. After sitting in the same spot for over a hundred years, a gray Victorian house does not want to move; nevertheless, it picks up its twin carpet bags and steps onto the wide flatbed trailer. Despite a difficult journey, the home learns that belonging is not about where you are, but about who you are with.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (February 17, 2025)
Baby Blue
Bim Eriksson
Fantagraphics
Softcover $29.99 (264pp)
979-887500041-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
A woman struggles in a fascist state that mandates intrusive treatment for anyone who differs from the norm in the startling graphic novel Baby Blue.
Betty works at a coffee shop until her world is turned upside down by witnessing a suicide. When she’s seen crying after the incident, she’s reported as a deviant. She is forced to endure a government-run psychiatric examination.
During an intravenous treatment intended to keep her docile, Betty meets Berina, a fellow patient. Betty changes her name to Baby and is introduced to a secret group of deviants that conducts attacks on the government. Baby and Berina develop feelings for each other, and when Baby is taken again by government authorities, a rescue operation is launched. Baby finds peace with herself in her new role as part of the resistance.
In the book’s futuristic setting, social norms are regulated via harsh punishments toward the noncompliant. The book’s block illustrations and monochrome color scheme enhance its sense of unease and paranoia. People wear masks to protect their identities—Berina, for example, goes about her days in a rabbit mask, complete with long, floppy ears. It’s a striking visual metaphor as the characters hide from society; when Berina reveals her face to Baby, it’s a meaningful moment.
Baby Blue is a hopeful graphic novel about fighting social compulsions to conform and finding strength in one’s own identity.
PETER DABBENE (February 17, 2025)
Flirting with Glowsticks
Haylee Manda Reynolds
Leschenault Press
Softcover (148pp)
978-1-923020-67-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Haylee Manda Reynolds’s poignant coming-of-age novel Flirting with Glowsticks, a bisexual teenager struggles to find love in a period of transience.
Chloe wants to belong in the places her parents move her to, including Connecticut and Blue Rock, Virginia. She has a crush on her gay best friend, Ezra, and dates some of the same boys as her friend Alex. Later, Chloe dates Fenix, whose abuse leads her to support her father’s decision to take a new job in Virginia Beach. There, Chloe’s father has an affair that changes Chloe’s living situation. Chloe dates Rory and, later, Savannah, the latter of whom also dates an older man. In her mid-twenties, she negotiates marriage and her changing relationships with her parents.
The juxtaposition of Chloe’s and her parents’ struggles in their relationships conveys the perennial challenges of love across different life stages. The fractured nature of Chloe’s life is also seen in the book’s structure—its sections are separated according to Chloe’s age and location. Around her, people study astrology and dance to Lady Gaga, fleshing out her LGBTQ+ communities with cultural details: “I [mapped] out the sky of the night I was born—the position of the sun, moon, and planets; the constellations … Who am I? I’d asked, and it told me.” Fenix’s mistreatment of Chloe also strikes realistic, if devastating, notes.
Chloe’s narration is intimate and resonant, though her reasons for choosing her spouse defy understanding. She doesn’t consider how her relationships balance, or don’t balance, with the rest of her life, which remains hazy. Still, Flirting with Glowsticks is a meaningful bildungsroman whose unrooted heroine seeks romantic and platonic love with people of multiple genders.
MARJORIE JENSEN (February 17, 2025)
One Level Down
Mary G. Thompson
Tachyon Publications
Softcover $16.95 (196pp)
978-1-61696-430-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Mary G. Thompson’s empathetic novel One Level Down, a woman forced into a child’s body fights to escape her father’s simulation.
Escaping Earth’s overcrowding and irreparable environmental damage, colonists encounter disease epidemics on Bella Inizio, an otherwise paradisiacal planet. They upload themselves to a simulated version of the world where death is not part of the program. A corrupt corporation takes advantage of their vulnerability in exchange for mining rights on Bella Inizio; they allow the simulator, “Daddy,” to delete colonists who challenge him at his whim.
Ella—a simulation of Daddy’s lost daughter—narrates her fifty-plus-year entrapment in a five-year-old’s body in the simulated version of Bella Inizio. Desperate to escape, she plots to enlist the company’s technician, who uploads himself from the unsimulated “real” world every sixty years to fix coding errors. Burdened by half a century with Daddy, Ella’s unreserved introspection is awash with exhaustive considerations of existence and selfhood; about disappearing simulated elements, she wonders, “What I want to know is, will they [the technician] bring back the same birds, or will they create new birds? Are the birds that disappeared somewhere else?”
Encountering a world of misused science fiction cornerstones (artificial intelligence, distant space travel, manipulated physics), Ella insists on her personhood and freedom. Samantha, Ella’s stepmother, is deleted for challenging Daddy, yet her persistence in Ella’s memory evokes rebellious strength, which is described as akin to how ghosts and poltergeists helped human predecessors cope with death. And Ella pities Daddy, recognizing that his decision to re-create her, though relegating her to permanent existence as a five-year-old, is his twisted way of grieving his original daughter’s death.
A determined woman rebels against her infantilization in the philosophical dystopian novel One Level Down.
ISABELLA ZHOU (February 17, 2025)
Kathy Young
