Innholdsfortegnelse for Vol. 119, No. 9/10, 1/1/23 and 1/15/23 i Booklist

We at Booklist wish you all the best for the new year and as 2023 begins, we’re thrilled to share this double issue focused on readers’ advisory and filled with recommendations that will motivate library workers, inspire invigorated displays, and spark the imaginations of patrons and readers. Look for the Spotlight on Readers’ Advisory banner on content like Series Starters, reading recommendations from Carnegie Medal finalists, High-Demand Read-alikes, and so much more. I’m also excited about the four, yes four!, Trade Secrets columns in this issue: “Working Toward an Inclusive and Intersectional Readers’ Advisory,” by Sara MartÍnez (p.27); “How to Use Book Awards to Help Readers Find Books They’ll Love,” by Stephen Sposato (p.15); “Listener’s Advisory,” by Heather Booth (p.87); and “Leveraging Community to Support the Freedom to Read,” by…

Immersions in Nature Fathoms: The World in the Whale. By Rebecca Giggs. 2020. Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. By Mary Roach. 2021. How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures. By Sabrina Imbler. 2022. Lessons from Plants. By Beronda L. Montgomery. 2021. Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World. By Emma Marris. 2021. The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves. By Alexandra Horowitz. 2022.…

The art of connecting readers with books they’ll enjoy is as challenging as it is rewarding. Book awards can be a helpful and time-saving tool in this wonderful field of matchmaking, but with so many awards available, it’s important to develop some strategies to harness their potential. Awards are a natural fit for readers’ advisory methods that don’t involve direct interviews. Displays are an easy technique to spark excitement. Post lists of current finalists, which are likely checked out with holds lists, and gather past winners for display. Handouts listing past selections can also promote interest, especially for book clubs looking for successful group reads. Awards are a natural fit for library websites, particularly catalogs, where readers can explore past nominations and easily check availability and place holds. Libraries can…

Time’s Undoing explores the personal repercussions of racism and racist violence in two timeframes in Birmingham, Alabama, the present and the Jim Crow era, weaving them together with a Detroit-based journalist’s quest and a bit of otherworldly guidance. The novels below cover similar ground from equally compelling perspectives.Bombingham. By Anthony Grooms. 2001. One World, $17 (9780345452931). As a group of Black soldiers treks across a rice field during the Vietnam War, banter about home triggers memories for Walter Burke of growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, which was dubbed “Bombingham” for the infamous Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing and other acts of terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan. Into the Go-Slow. By Bridgett M. Davis. 2014. Feminist, paper, $16.95 (9781558618640). Recent college graduate Angie Mackenzie is working as a sales-clerk in…

High-profile authors and award-winners are all over this list of spring 2023 releases that are on our radar. —Sarah Hunter Elf Dog and Owl Head. By M. T. Anderson. Illus. by Junyi Wu. Candlewick, $18.99 (9781536222814). Gr. 3–6. Apr. A boy discovers a fantastical world thanks to a mysterious dog he meets in the forest in this illustrated novel from National Book Award–winning Anderson. The Headmaster’s List. By Melissa de la Cruz. Roaring Brook, $18.99 (9781250827388). Gr. 9–12. Feb. Best-selling de la Cruz offers a tense thriller about high-achieving prep-school teens embroiled in a mystery surrounding a fatal car crash. How to Write a Poem. By Kwame Alexander and Deanna Nikaido. Illus. by Melissa Sweet. HarperCollins/Quill Tree, $18.99 (9780063060906). PreS–Gr. 3. Apr. Following their winsome collaboration How to Read a…

As the new year begins and new reading resolutions are made, add audiobooks to your list to help bridge the gap between personal knowledge and patron need! Despite our best efforts, audiobook listeners still face stigma. “People frequently feel condescended to when they talk about liking or preferring to listen to books,” librarian Daisy Dyrdahl-Robert reminds us. “There are also a lot of folks who don’t give audio a chance because they feel like they wouldn’t be ‘really reading.’ Frankly, that’s nonsense. Oral traditions have existed for much longer than novels. As long as people are enjoying their books, the medium doesn’t matter.” As the audio format expands into our easy-access digital environment with vibrant full-cast presentations, celebrity narrators, and titles only available as audios, we are still chipping away…

Plan for these new audio titles in Spanish appearing through the first half of 2023. All information is current as of the time of publication, and all items are available for libraries to purchase as digital downloads unless otherwise noted.—Abeje Schnake and Heather Booth Adult Los cinco elementos / The Five Elements. By Dondi Dahlin. Translated by Juan Carlos Ruíz. PRHA Audio Libros (9780593678688). Philosophy. Feb. Comienza con la oración / Start with Prayer. By Max Lucado. Grupo Nelson (9781400239948). Religion. Mar. Cosas que nunca dejamos atrás / Things We Never Got Over. By Lucy Score. BookaVivo. Romance. Jan. Disciplina con amor / Discipline with Love. By Rosa Barocio. BookaVivo. Parenting. Spring. Eternas palabras / Forever Words. By Johnny Cash. Translated by Andrés Catalán. PRHA Audio Libros (9780593678497). Poetry. Jan.…

Journalism & Publishing How to Promote Your Own Book: A Practical Guide to Publicizing Your Own Title. By Jan Yager. Feb. 2023. 288p. Square One, paper, $17.95 (9780757004742); e-book (9780757054747). 002.068. Yager brings her extensive experience to this comprehensive guide to book promotion. A coach, speaker, and author of more than 50 books in many different disciplines, Yager writes clearly and authoritatively, providing sound advice. The material is targeted to all authors, whether indie/self-published, hybrid, or traditionally published, including aspiring authors. Yager explains what these different types of publishing entail then moves on to promotion, defining print, broadcast, and internet media. Next, there is a treasure trove of promo opportunities, including blogs, podcasts, events, and much more. The information on library signings is particularly helpful, as Yager is accurate and…

Like Maggie Smith’s memoir about the end of her marriage, You Could Make ThisPlace Beautiful, these books move through love and loss, alchemizing art from pain and offering readers intimate and breathtaking narrative companionship. 100 Poems to Break Your Heart. By Edward Hirsch. 2021. Ecco, $28 (9780544931886). For all those who seek solace in poetry and its assurance that one is not alone in facing heartbreak and loss, Hirsch’s darkly illuminating anthology includes work from Gwendolyn Brooks, Nazim Hikmet, Garret Hongo, Patricia Smith, Mary Oliver, and many others. Coventry. By Rachel Cusk. 2019. Picador, $17 (9781250619587). Exploring narratives found in literature as well as those we create in relationships, homemaking, and parenting, novelist Cusk pulls apart the stories we tell to reflect on the mess underneath in this essay collection.…

KateMorton is known for writing about deeply held family secrets—usually centered around a once-fabulous house—and for using parallel narratives, a technique that tells two different stories, in two different time lines, in alternating chapters. In Homecoming (2023), she juggles south Australia in 1959, when a young family is discovered dead and a baby disappeared, with 2018, when the grand-niece of the victims learns of the crime. Here are a few books that use parallel narratives to reveal family secrets and lost connections. Bellewether. By Susanna Kearsley. 2018. Sourcebooks/Landmark, $16.99 (9781492637134). A woman who becomes curator of a museum on Long Island is unprepared for the ghost that haunts it. Meanwhile, a woman in the mid-eighteenth century reluctantly falls in love with a French Canadian lieutenant stationed at her house in…

Tess Sharpe’s latest endeavor has all the trappings of a quintessential romance. Longtime rivals, brought together by circumstance, are forced into close quarters. Attraction manifests as irritation and tense encounters. Best friends, who see the truth all along, can’t stay out of it. The slow burn lasts years. There really is, truly, only one bed (twice!). There’s no mystery in where Penny, a frighteningly organized, has-a-plan-for-everything, former whitewater rafter with immense tragedy in her past, and Tate, a single-minded star swimmer who’s allergic to showing emotion, will end up: it’s right there in the title. They’re going to kiss. They’re going to figure it all out. The joy of the book, as it is with most romances, is in the how. And Sharpe uses the seemingly simple structure of this…

Michael Leali, an educator and author, published his first novel, The Civil War of Amos Abernathy, this past June. It’s a multilayered cliffhanger for middle graders, set within an unabashed celebration of individuality. Thirteen-year-old Amos volunteers at the Chickaree County Historical Park as a nineteenth-century historical reenactor. Along with recreating Civil War battle scenes and making drip candles, Amos wants to include stories of his people: the LGBTQ+ community. And his best friend, Chloe, who is African American, wants increased representation for unnamed enslaved people and other marginalized communities. Their mutual friend Ben wants to get involved, too, until suddenly he seems to just vanish. Who knew rewriting history would be so hard? The story is told through simultaneously developing plot lines. In one, events unfold in real time; another…

The Fortunes of Jaded Women. By Carolyn Huynh. Read by Vyvy Nguyen. 2022. 9.5hr. Simon & Schuster Audio, DD (9781797140544). Once upon a time in Vietnam, Oanh Duong chose love, causing her descendants—who could only be women—to be perpetually cursed. Of course, “there was nothing wrong with having Vietnamese daughters. It was how the world treated them that turned it into a curse.” Generations later, mostly in southern California, sisters, mothers, daughters, cousins are all estranged, but a powerful psychic predicts “a pregnancy, a death, a wedding,” events which might transform their mutigenerational misfortunes. Huynh’s debut—Good Morning America’s September 2022 Book Club pick—is culturally and linguistically matched with Vietnamese American actor Nguyen, who energetically ciphers a cast so vast that the print title opens with an orange (as in the…

Brittany Pressley has been crafting characters since her first play at the age of five. After a brief “retirement” during her teen years, she returned to New York City for college and graduated with big dreams. “I bought a bunch of gear to start a small recording business; in truth, my goal was just to break even on all the gear! Since I had this experience acting, I thought I could try to do some voice-over work as well. The more voice-over jobs I did, the more I loved it and wanted to pursue it full time.” In 2022, Pressley’s voice was featured in numerous starred audiobooks across a wide range of ages and genres. We talked with 2022’s Voice of Choice narrator about this diversity of content, character creation,…

Indian Shoes. By Cynthia Leitich Smith. Read by Shaun Taylor-Corbett. 2022. 1hr. HarperCollins/Heartdrum, DD (9780063279490). Gr. 3–6. Ray Halfmoon, a Native American boy (Cherokee and Seminole), lives with his grandfather in Chicago. Six interconnected stories from this chapter book, first published in 2002, recount life in Chicago and Oklahoma, emphasizing the strong link between Ray and his grandfather. Shaun Taylor-Corbett (Blackfeet), fast becoming a go-to voice in narrating titles focusing on the lives of Native American characters, delivers the text in a clear, well-paced voice. Grampa Halfmoon’s voice is lower in pitch and Taylor-Corbett presents him with good humor. Ray and Grampa Halfmoon are an excellent addition to diverse literature in this recording of the 2021 reissue on Smith’s (Muscogee [Creek]) Heartdrum imprint, which was created in conjunction with We…

With NASA preparing for new missions to the moon and Mars and private entrepreneurs contemplating similar endeavors, the possibility of human colonies on other planets feels more possible than ever before. The titles below explore what those colonies might look like, both in fiction and in science-based nonfiction. There’s more interplanetary drama on the way with The Strange, a novel by Nathan Ballingrud due out in March and reviewed in this issue on p.48. Artemis. By Andy Weir. 2017. Ballantine. The author of The Martian (2014) applies his science savvy to this exciting heist story, which finds Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara attempting a daring caper against the striking backdrop of a vividly conjured lunar colony. The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny beyond Earth. By Michio Kaku.…

It may be the beginning of a new year, but our friends in publishing are already looking toward the summer, with spine-tingling thrillers, an eye-opening memoir, and a few beach reads, not to mention provocative historical, contemporary, and near-future fiction. —Susan Maguire All the Sinners Bleed. By S. A. Cosby. Flatiron, $27.99 (9781250831910). June. Titus Crown, the first Black sheriff in his small southern town, is on the trail of a young Black man who killed a beloved teacher who was harboring secrets in the latest from best-selling, award-winning Cosby. Beware the Woman. By Megan Abbott. Putnam, $27 (9780593084939). May. Best-seller Abbott presents a newly married woman and her husband who travel to visit his father on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where they are greeted with hospitality until a health scare…

With a conversational, dishy tone, Heather Gay describes her inability to keep up with the requirements of a good Mormon woman—she’s too loud, too driven, too horny—and offers readers the inside scoop on both the church’s rituals and The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. Bad Mormon will appeal to readers who like a light touch on serious issues, memoirs from women who can’t help themselves, and gossipy reality television.Bamboozled by Jesus: How God Tricked Me into the Life of My Dreams. By Yvonne Orji. 2021. Hachette, $26 (9781546012672). Orji blames Jesus for her success in Hollywood, and in her first memoir, she dissects biblical stories for a fresh and straightforward interpretation. Readers who like Gay’s cheeky approach to religion will appreciate Orji’s testament of faith. Drinking and Tweeting and…

General Fiction Big Swiss. By Jen Beagin. Feb. 2023. 336p. Scribner, $27 (9781982153083). Living in a crumbling and purposely bee-infested eighteenth-century manse, Greta Work works as a transcriptionist for a sex therapist called Om and falls a bit in love with a patient she nicknames Big Swiss. Hudson, New York, is small and everyone, apparently, meets with Om, so Greta constantly runs into the embodied voices she already knows so intimately. It’s inevitable that, at the dog park with her beloved Piñon one day, Greta hears and then meets Big Swiss, who’s married, actually named Flavia, and even more beautiful than Greta imagined. Beagin (Vacuum in the Dark, 2019) once again drapes her kooky comedic (and carnal) delights over lifelike character studies and sparkling observations; readers who lift the sheet…

Throughout my career, I have been lucky to dedicate a substantial chunk of my work to Readers’ Advisory. As the author of a guide to Latino readers’ advisory (Latino Literature: A Guide to Reading Interests), I felt confident about my RA skills and secure in my dedication to inclusion by prioritizing marginalized groups in my work. There I was, comfortably ensconced in my tiny branch, resting on my laurels, when an African American patron came in asking why we didn’t have a copy of Sunny Hostin’s latest title. I’m ashamed to say my first reaction was, wait, who? My staff gave him the “we can order a copy for you” drill. He was not satisfied as he was trying to make the point about the lack of books of interest…

Older Readers The Bones of Birka: Unraveling the Mystery of a Female Viking Warrior. By C. M. Surrisi. Mar. 2023. 208p. illus. Chicago Review, $19.99 (9781641607063). Gr. 6–9. 948. In 1878, entomologist Hjalmar Stolpe discovered the grave of an Iron Age mummy in Birka, Sweden, which he called grave Bj 581. The grave also contained two horse mummies and weapons, so he assumed Bj 581 was a male Viking warrior. But in the years since Stolpe’s find, DNA revealed that the body was actually female. This flew in the face of widely held assumptions about gender identity and sex and caused a firestorm of criticism that continues today. To illuminate how it’s possible that Bj 581 might have been a female warrior, Surrisi describes Viking history and society. The latter…

A new Brian Selznick illustrated novel is always cause for celebration, and the A forthcoming Big Tree, inspired in part by Steven Spielberg, lives up to the hype, appropriately infused with the scope, adventure, and emotional resonance of a classic animated film. It tells the story of Louise and her brother Merwin, two sycamore seeds who, after being blown away from their mother tree, must find a way to survive in the wide, prehistoric world. See our review (adjacent), and while you (and patrons) wait—although no one does what Selznick does—curb your appetite with these novels that explore similar settings and themes and nonfiction titles that give the back-ground knowledge to better appreciate Selznick’s forthcoming epic. Can You Hear the Trees Talking? Discovering the Hidden Life of the Forest. By…

Ms. Angela Reid, affectionately known as the Purple Lady, is a retired educator and booklover in my community. On weekends, you can find her distributing free books at community events in underserved areas. I have worked with her and I’m constantly amazed at her energy level. When you think of advocating for the freedom to read, does someone like the Purple Lady come to mind? If instead you immediately visualize a person shouting and holding a picket sign, or someone posting on social media and debating online, you’re not wrong. But I believe that in-person, community-based, grassroots initiatives can energize us, bring about change, and be even more impactful. Working with outside organizations like Reid’s, we are able to hand out books that students might not be able to check…