When "After the Bloom" opens, Rita Takemitsu is, once again, cruising the streets looking for her mother, Lily. But as time passes with no sign of Lily, a new urgency infuses the old familiarity. Fourth-generation Japanese-Canadian... Read More

“You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept,” explains the Skin Horse in the children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit.... Read More

War is always an agent of change, but never more so than for schoolmates Filip and Galina. It’s World War II, and, to protect Filip from being drafted, Galina agrees to marry him when he turns eighteen. Marina Antropow Cramer’s... Read More

Unlike other people, Zoe Tussler knows that life is perfectible, and she knows this because of Maine. Thus begins David Ebenbach’s "Miss Portland", winner of the 2016 Orison Fiction Prize, a moving paean to becoming the place where you... Read More

For middle-grade readers, Geraldine Mills’s "Gold" is an adventurous postapocalyptic novel about two brothers discovering the world around them—and by extension, their own past. Twin brothers Starn and Esper live in a world covered... Read More

It’s 1952, and Elliot Caprice is a man on the run. He owes people: the mob, the Chicago police department, political operatives in Washington, DC. He’s managed to stay one step ahead of everyone until, one day, the racial taunts are... Read More

This work of creative nonfiction may be among the year’s best pieces of environmental drama so far. Following the journey of a local nonprofit as it fights to save a unique dune ecosystem, it features both true-to-life recounting of... Read More

Boasting a multitude of fun facts, interactive games, and activities, Maggie Li’s The Amazing Dinosaur Detectives: Facts, Myths and Quirks of the Dinosaur World dives into the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods with humor and... Read More