Innholdsfortegnelse for Vol. 121, No. 3, 10/1/24 i Booklist

National Hispanic Heritage Month runs from September 15 to October 15, and the theme this year is Pioneers of Change: Shaping the Future Together. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino website explains: “It’s crucial to make sure that the contributions of the Latino community are showcased, and that Latinas and Latinos have a voice. According to 2020 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, one in every four children in the United States is Hispanic/Latino. A recent study found that Latino history is largely left out in high-school textbooks that are used across the United States, despite the increasing percentage of Latina and Latino students. This also comes at a time when the economic output of American Latinos would rank fifth in the world if the community were an…

General Fiction 1983. By Tom Cox. Oct. 2024. 288p. Unbound, $22.95 (9781800183438). Cox is a writer who seems to follow wherever his whims and interests take him, from fiction (Villager, 2022) to sports writing, and his latest is a wonderful amalgamation of memory and whimsy. Eight-year-old Benji is an incredibly imaginative child in a village just outside Nottinghamshire, living with his two artistically inclined parents in an unusual neighborhood. One neighbor, Colin, makes robots, which contrasts starkly with the belligerent racism of another resident. Benji believes he may be an alien and that extraterrestrials are among his neighbors (which, wonderfully enough, turns out to be true, even when Benji doesn’t believe so any more). In a series of vignettes involving a wide cast of characters over the span of a…

Adult All Friends Are Necessary. By Tomas Moniz. Read by Andrew Joseph Perez. 2024. 7hr. Hachette Audio, DD (9781668639030). Latine author Moniz opens his sophomore title with a birthday: it’s summer 2018 and (half-) Mexican American Efren Flores—who goes by Chino because his mother’s pregnancy was spent in Shenzhen, China—turns 37. To mark the occasion, he’s meeting his BFF-since-college Metal Matt (so called due to his metalhead obsessions) for a naked plunge at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. Chino’s existence is undergoing major reinvention. Not so long ago, he was a happily married biology teacher in Seattle, awaiting his first child. All that contentment imploded when the baby died and Chino fled south. Despite the uncertainty of peripatetic sublets, part-time and temp gigs, and occasional hookups, Chino is blessed with the…

Australia is a world of unexpected wonders. Many of us know of its colorful birds, herds of kangaroo, underwater wonderlands, and frightening spiders. But what do we know of what it’s truly like to live in Australia, from the outback to its bustling cities, from its riverbanks to its coasts? These books are all by Australian authors, and help expose the inner lives and bigger conversations taking place in the country’s cities, small towns, and forests. The books range from a novel about an Aboriginal tribe trying to protect its ancestral land from exploitation to a female-driven mystery surrounding the realities of domestic abuse to the tale of two teen boys being mentored by a surfer with a sketchy personal life. Big Little Lies. By Liane Moriarty. 2014. Putnam/Amy Einhorn.…

Philosophy & Psychology We Will Rest! The Art of Escape. By Tricia Hersey. Nov. 2024. 160p. illus. Little, Brown, $26 (9780316365550). 158.1. Hersey (Rest Is Resistance, 2022) is an activist and performance artist known for founding the Nap Ministry. She encourages people to resist the incessant calls to demonstrate constant productivity in the West, particularly in North America. Her new book continues to explore the ideas, this time in a mixed visual and text format. Short sections prompt the reader to build boundaries and to ask why feelings of guilt and shame follow periods of rest. The poems in this volume also powerfully connect the experiences of millions of Black Americans to transatlantic slavery as the point of origin for the ongoing fixation on productivity. Hersey urges readers to learn…

The most memorable cookbooks and food writing from thelast year honor tradition and memory, celebrate the labor of love that is cooking, and inspire readers to get into the kitchen themselves. Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories. By Anne Byrn. 2024. Harper Celebrate, $44.99 (9780785291336). Byrn captures the towering culinary culture of the U.S. South with recipes, anecdotes, engaging prose, and passion readers will feel, while profiling giants like Edna Lewis and Bill Neal along the way. Cook like Your Ancestors: An Illustrated Guide to Intuitive Cooking with Recipes from around the World. By Mariah-Rose Marie. Illus. by the author. 2023. Silver Sprocket, $29.99 (9798886200300). In this inviting cookbook filled with warm illustrations and comics panels, Marie works to demystify intuitive cooking with approachable vegan…

Excellent works by Latin American women writers have been surreptitiously finding their way onto library shelves. With intriguing titles and curious covers that mask the profundity inside, these books will thrill intrepid readers who welcome discomfort, messiness, and having their tapetes movidos (their cores shaken) by challenging literature that ventures outside the zone of tidy endings. Born of trauma, feminicide, and marginalization, they bravely push the boundaries of narrative discourse to lay bare dark emotions and situations rife with monsters and ghosts ethereal and corporeal. National Hispanic Heritage Month, Halloween, and El Día de los Muertos provide the perfect impetus for shivery and mind-altering reads. Clean. By Alia Trabucco Zerán. Tr. by Sophie Hughes. 2024. Riverhead, $30 (9780593850510). An uncomfortable, fascinating, lovely, and affecting novel narrated by the maid of…

These 10 terrific series tell the stories behind the inspiration, manufacturing, and marketing of popular products and everyday objects. Amazing Inventions (Lerner; 4 titles) Gr. 3–7. These graphic-novel presentations of the evolution of pop-culture items, such as smartphones and video games, utilize colorful depictions of inventors, programmers, engineers, and other skilled individuals in action, as well as technological innovations and design changes used to create and improve our modern conveniences. Behind the Brand (Bellwether/Blastoff! Discovery; 14 titles) Gr. 3–8. Visually appealing high/low readers with large, sleek photos and infographics share the history of such popular brands as TikTok, Sega, and Coca-Cola. In addition to an overview of the brand’s products, earnings, headquarters, and founder, each book balances revenues with charitable efforts. Big Sports Brands (ABDO/SportsZone; 6 titles) Gr. 3–8. The…

Older Readers All the Truth I Can Stand. By Mason Stokes. Nov. 2024. 256p. Astra/Calkins Creek, $18.99 (9781662680885). Gr. 9–12. Author Stokes says that his novel is best thought of as speculative historical fiction. The historical aspect is the Matthew Shepard story. In 1998, Shepard, then 21 and gay, was brutally beaten and left to die tied to a fence post in a Wyoming field. The novel incorporates many of the real-life facts of Shepard’s life and death. The speculative aspect involves the creation of a 17-year-old boy, Ash, who meets and falls in love with Shane, the Matthew Shepard character. Another fictional character, Jenna, an aspiring journalist, introduces the two, and Ash is elated when Shane returns his feelings. However, the more he knows about Shane, the more Ash…

A 75-year-old “new” memoir is just one of the books we can’t wait to get our hands on in the first months of 2025. Read on! Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. By Imani Perry. Ecco, $28.99 (9780062977397). Jan. National Book Award–winner Perry meditates on the color blue and its relationship to Blackness, culture, art, craft, and more. The Bones beneath My Skin. By TJ Klune. Tor, $29.99 (9781250890436). Feb. Three unlikely characters converge in a remote Oregon cabin in this stand-alone fantasy from the author of The House in the Cerulean Sea. Dare I Say It: Everything I Wish I’d Known about Menopause. By Naomi Watts. Crown, $29 (9780593729038). Jan. Actress Watts opens up about her menopause journey, which began in her mid-thirties,…

Older Readers Civic Minded: What Everyone Should Know about the U.S. Government. By Jeff Fleischer. Oct. 2024. 312p. Lerner/Zest, paper, $19.99 (9798765611500); lib. ed., $39.99 (9798765611494). Gr. 7–12. 320.473. Since the publication of his 2016 Votes of Confidence (updated and revised in 2020), Fleischer has been asked about the concepts included here by students and educators. Many of those questions, originally asked by students, are answered in this concise, informative, and accessible text that takes 45 different topics related to the U.S. government and breaks them down into brief chapters. In part, the book is founded in the realization of how much misinformation has been spread by adults in the last few years, and Fleischer hopes to provide basic, understandable information so that readers can have “intelligent, informed conversations.” With…

Business is booming in series nonfiction for young readers—books on business, that is. Publishers understand their audience, focusing on publishing works about the products and brands with the most kid and teen appeal. Their variety of approaches to industry startups, technological advances, product promotion, and behind-the-scenes takes on business are sure to guarantee satisfaction. That Aha Moment Some publishers recognize that everyday products started with an inspiring thought and subsequent invention. Bearport’s Brilliant People, Big Ideas series, for early elementary readers, themes each volume by a category of invention, from food to transportation. Arranging information in chronological order, each book uses a bright layout with short, easy-to-read, chunked text that describes a problem to be solved, the inventor’s creation, and its importance today. Inventors by Mistake (2024) is the most…

All the Blues in the Sky. By Renée Watson. Bloomsbury, $17.99 (9781547605897). Gr. 5–8. Feb. Watson, New York Times best-seller and multi-award-winning author of thoughtful, adeptly written, and lyrical books, here offers a story about a 13-year-old girl’s experience with deep grief. Good Golden Sun. By Brendan Wenzel. Illus. by the author. Little, Brown, $18.99 (9780316512633). PreS–Gr. 3. Feb. The popular author/illustrator behind They All Saw a Cat and others takes a more global approach in this lyrical picture book celebrating the sun. Radiant. By Vaunda Micheaux Nelson. Dutton, $18.99 (9780593855782). Gr. 5–8. Jan. Award-winning Nelson returns to middle-grade fiction after decades away with this story about a Black girl searching for her “shine” in a predominantly white community in 1963. The Snips: A Bad Buzz Day. By Raúl the…

The Golden Compass. By Philip Pullman. Read by Ruth Wilson. 2024. 12hr. Listening Library, DD (9780593950487). Gr. 7–12. This new audio edition of the His Dark Materials trilogy-starter is narrated in a manner befitting the sweeping nature of the story. It should please listeners new to the tale and those who grew up with it and sustain an abiding love for Pullman’s modern classic. Wilson, who plays Mrs. Coulter in the recent BBC series based on the books, has a classic English accent and a resonant voice that seems endlessly flexible. She lifts her tone for Lyra, elongates words in a deep voice for the sinister Master, takes on a tense and urging whisper for the dæmon Pantalaimon, and becomes haughty with an upper-crust inflection as Lord Asriel. In a…