Tabla de contenidos para Booklist, Vol. 120, No. 17, 5/1/24 en Booklist

It’s National Library Week as I write this, and Booklist’s appreciation of and gratitude to library workers was on full display at the recent Public Library Association conference in Columbus, Ohio. Many of you may be Public Library Association members. If you attended the conference and/or received the latest issue of Public Libraries Magazine, you’ve most likely seen the March issue of Booklist Reader. We shared it to remind library workers and PLA members that Booklist Reader is an amazing new product, available in print and online, a publication that greatly benefits library patrons and readers’ advisory librarians. Another plus to keep in mind is that subscription dollars help ALA advocate for library workers and libraries. I was in my local library this past weekend. The April Booklist Reader was…

The Assassin of Venice. By Alyssa Palombo. June 2024. 320p. Crooked Lane, $29.99 (9781639107872); e-book (9781639107889). Valentina Riccardi is a much-sought-after courtesan providing conversation, companionship, and sex to men in the upper echelon of Venetian society. Valentina is also an assassin. Because of her access to these men, she is uniquely positioned to cause them harm. Approached years ago by Ambrogio Malatesta of the Council of Ten to provide intelligence, she is eventually assigned to assassinate Venice’s enemies. She gladly does it, as she is a passionate supporter of her adopted home. Valentina was born Maria Angelina, daughter of a prosperous and pious Roman family. Forced to flee Rome, she will do anything to keep her new home of Venice safe. But the dying words of one of her targets…

Older Readers Attached at the Hip. By Christine Riccio. May 2024. 400p. St. Martin’s/Wednesday, $21 (9781250760098); e-book, $11.99 (9781250760104). Gr. 10–12. Orie Lennox doesn’t make a lot of choices. A recent college grad, she’s content living with her parents and working with her influencer older sister, Lark, on sponsored AcroYoga videos. She even likes the high-school sweethearts story she has with her boyfriend more than she actually likes him. When Lark calls her out for her passivity, Orie sends off an impromptu application to her favorite reality show, Survivor. She’s stunned when she’s actually selected, but that’s only the first surprise: she’s on an experimental, relationship-driven version of the show that forces contestants to choose among love, friendship, and money. Her first day, she finds herself literally attached, via cable,…

Dark Parts of the Universe. By Samuel Miller. 2024. HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen, $19.99 (9780063160484). Gr. 9–12. At age five, Willie Eckles briefly died. Ten years later and searching for the reason in his life, an eerie app leads him to a murder mystery and revelations about his small town’s racist history. Final Word. By Janet Sumner Johnson. 2023. Pixel+Ink, $18.99 (9781645951964). Gr. 4–7. Desperate for money, 13-year-old Gordon and his genius twin, Hope, enter a spelling competition hosted by a family of dictionary magnates to whom they may have ties. The family matriarch manipulates players from beyond the grave. Invisible Son. By Kim Johnson. 2023. Random, $18.99 (9780593482100). Gr. 9–12. Set against the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, this propulsive thriller follows Andre, home after two months in juvenile…

Adult Audio The Book of Doors. By Gareth Brown. Read by Miranda Raison. 2024. 13hr. HarperAudio, DD (9780063324015). Brown’s debut is a contemporary speculative fiction novel that focuses on Cassie, a New York City bookseller who comes into possession of a magical book that allows her to turn any door into any other door; she can, for example, make her apartment door open onto a street in Venice. Cassie and her roommate have a lot of fun with this ability, and also admirably avoid the “main character must keep new power a secret” trope. Little does Cassie know that there are other special books out there that grant extraordinary powers, as well as people who will do anything to get them. Reader Raison delivers the story well, using a wide…

Casino Royale. By Ian Fleming. Read by Richard Armitage. 2024. 5hr. HarperAudio, DD (9780063298538). The new audio recording of the iconic James Bond (aka 007) starts with a bang as listeners enter the world of gambling, politics, and espionage. Set in post-WWII France, the plethora of accents and languages (French, Russian, American, British) and the French countryside are brought to life by Armitage’s vocal styling. Bond, at the beginning of his career, is sent to a French resort for a high-stakes baccarat game with the goal of bankrupting a Soviet spy. Through the twists, treachery, and explosions, Armitage’s lyrical reading highlights the classic cadence, detailed descriptions of minutiae, and meticulous pacing of a Fleming novel. The dramatic, suspense-filled tone of the “secret agent” story perfectly blends with the 1950s-era intrigue…

A bumper crop of recent picture books about community gardens can grow your collection of green stories while nurturing a fruitful sense of shared investment across generations of readers. For those readers easing into beginning chapter books on the theme, consider Biscuit and Friends Visit the Community Garden (2022), Bo and the Community Garden (2023), and Sadiq and the Community Garden (2022). Goodnight, Veggies. By Diana Murray. Illus. by Zacharia OHora. 2020. Clarion. PreS–Gr. 2. The potatoes have closed their eyes, the cabbages are nodding their heads, and one little worm tosses and turns his way through a community garden toward a good night’s sleep in a rhyming tale that can turn picky eaters into vegetable enthusiasts. Green Green: A Community Gardening Story. By Marie Lamba and Baldev Lamba. Illus. by…

Philosophy & Psychology If You Live to 100, You Might as Well Be Happy: Essays on Ordinary Joy. By Rhee Kun Hoo. Tr. by Suphil Lee Park. May 2024. 208p. Sterling/Union Square, $22.99 (9781454954422). 158.1. As he nears his nineties, Rhee Kun Hoo reflects on his life and the search for happiness. The author, who was a psychiatrist and teacher in South Korea for many years, faces aging with clear eyes and a sense of humor. No one enjoys added ailments, slowing down, or watching their kids try to take over the parenting role. But advancing age does come with positives, including stepping away from daily pressures and having a better perspective on life. Rhee urges readers to make amends, forgive past slights, and get closer to family. It’s not…

Blood on Their Hands: Murder, Corruption, and the Fall of the Murdaugh Dynasty. By Mandy Matney and Carolyn Murnick. 2023. Morrow, $28.99 (9780063269217). South Carolina journalist Matney relates all she endured in the process of reporting on the Murdaugh family murders since 2019, including sexism, harassment, condescension, and the loss of a platform at her local paper. A Death in Malta: An Assassination and a Family’s Quest for Justice. By Paul Caruana Galizia. 2023. Riverhead, $29 (9780593543733). Galizia combines memoir, true crime, and history as he details the unsolved murder of his investigative journalist mother along with Malta’s complicated past. This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial. By Helen Garner. 2023. Pantheon, $27 (9780553387438). Garner was in the courtroom for the weeks-long trial of Robert Farquharson, who…

After That Night. By Karin Slaughter. 2023. Morrow, $32 (9780063157781). A series of unsolved rapes forces the GBI’s Dr. Sara Linton and Will Trent to confront their painful pasts—Sara, a rape she survived years ago, and Will, the aunt who abandoned him as a child—in a story full of gritty investigative detail. All the Sinners Bleed. By S. A. Cosby. 2023. Flatiron, $27.99 (9781250831910). With pitch-perfect dialogue and moral complexity, Cosby presents the tale of a small Virginia town’s first Black sheriff, who searches for the truth behind the tragic shooting of a popular teacher by a student. Bright Young Women. By Jessica Knoll. 2023. Scribner/Marysue Rucci, $27.99 (9781501153228). Two young women have their lives upended by a Ted Bundy–esque serial killer in the 1970s in this blistering novel rife…

Older Readers The Unboxing of a Black Girl. By Angela Shanté. May 2024. 160p. Page Street, $18.99 (9798890039538). Gr. 9–12. 305.896. Shanté’s poetic memoir highlights lessons from the author’s lived experiences through a variety of text formats and sociocultural talking points. Shanté dissects the intersectionality of growing up as a Black girl in New York City, explaining the influence of the women in her life, the gender roles assigned to her at birth, and the things she learned from her own corner of the Bronx. Poems often include footnotes referencing and recommending music, movies, and books by Black artists, as well as hints to the meanings behind the stanzas, explicitly stating the racist ideologies that exist throughout our culture. The author’s story is split into the boxes that Black women…

Black Star. By Kwame Alexander. Little, Brown, $17.99 (9780316442596). Gr. 6–9. Sept. Alexander continues the saga started in The Door of No Return in this follow-up centered on Kofi’s granddaughter, Charley, who’s determined to play baseball but runs into trouble in her segregated town. Compound Fracture. By Andrew Joseph White. Peachtree Teen, $19.99 (9781682636121). Gr. 9–12. In a town tortured by a generations-old blood feud, Miles is determined to reveal the sheriff’s instrumental role in the violence. But how far will he have to go to do it? Death at Morning House. By Maureen Johnson. HarperTeen, $19.99 (9780063255951). Gr. 9–12. Aug. In this stand-alone from the author of the blockbuster Truly Devious series, Marlowe is stuck on an island giving tours of a historic mansion—but the mansion’s secrets become an…

I’ve always loved reading thrillers—it’s the genre I enjoy most. With all my to-do lists and professional and personal responsibilities, it takes a lot for a book to grab me and keep my focus until the end. Thrillers drop me right into a scenario where the stakes could not be higher. It’s danger breathing down your neck for most of the book; it’s life or death. Naturally, as an author, I enjoy writing thrillers the most as well. There’s something about the emotional immediacy that makes me connect with my characters before I’ve even written them. I feel their baggage, anticipate their fears. It allows me to create people who feel whole and realized… people who have entire lives that I can then place against the ledge—right where they’re about…

Trailblazers of all kinds define this list of not-to-be missed fall memoirs, novels, and histories, including a book about librarian spies. The Accomplice. By Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson and Aaron Philip Clark. Amistad, $27.99 (9780063312906). Sep. In his fiction debut, rapper and entrepreneur Jackson, with mystery author Clark, introduces Nia Turner, the first Black female Texas Ranger, on the hunt for a mastermind criminal who’s messing with the wrong family, the ultra-wealthy Duchamps. The Blue Hour. By Paula Hawkins. Mariner, $30 (9780063396524). Oct. This time around, the author of The Girl on the Train portrays an artist living on an isolated Scottish island in the decades after her husband’s mysterious disappearance. Order several billion copies! Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II.…

General Fiction América del Norte. By Nicolás Medina Mora. May 2024. 480p. Soho, $27 (9781641295642). The breezy, buoyant debut by Mexican journalist Medina Mora weaves together hundreds of years of Mexican history and culture with the frequently satiric story of young writer and narrator Sebastian Arteaga y Salazar (who shares some similarities with the author). In 2017, Sebastian is attempting to continue his ten-year stay in the U.S. despite the current president’s attacks on immigration. He also struggles to write a book, deals with his clueless under-graduate students at an Iowa university, copes with an on-and-off romance with an American woman (who has had a series of lovers from Latin America), and visits his friends and cancer-stricken mother in Mexico City. The heir of a powerful family of Austro-Hungarian immigrants…

Blizzard. By Marie Vingtras. Tr. by Jeffrey Zuckerman. 2024. Overlook, $26 (9781419765902). A complex mix of characters, all harboring great secrets, converges in Alaska’s bleak wilderness in this suspenseful, spare, and heart-wrenching novel that builds to a stunning conclusion. A Disappearance in Fiji. By Nilima Rao. 2023. Soho, $25.95 (9781641294294). Recently demoted Indian Police Sergeant Akal Singh looks for a young missing woman in this absorbing mystery, a scathing indictment of the cruelties inflicted on indentured servants from India working on Fijian sugar plantations in the 1910s. Edge of the Grave. By Robbie Morrison. 2023. Bantam, $18 (9780593723319). Morrison, who honed his exceptional storytelling in graphic novels, offers a gritty novel of 1930s Glasgow and the nascent police gang-fighting special-crimes unit told with well-timed comic relief, craftily layered plotting, and…