“There may be no creature on the earth that has captured the human imagination more deeply than the house cat,” writes YouTuber Hannah Shaw, who posts as Kitten Lady, in her introduction to this charming survey of felines in art. The fascination with cats traces back to antiquity, when they were seen as symbols of the divine, and continued through the centuries, with knickknacks like the grinning, wide-eyed Kit-Cat Clock, an “icon of twentieth-century industrial design” created by Earl Arnault to cheer up customers during the Great Depression, and the silly feline meme sensations of the 2010s (think Grumpy Cat). The book ranges far and wide, its juxtapositions sparking unexpected resonances. For example, the cat in a painting by 17th-century Dutch artist Clara Peeters, poised to disrupt a display of fish, has a cocky power similar to the subject of the psychedelic 1980 painting “Big Cat” by American folk artist Nellie Mae Rowe, which appears on the facing page. The editors corral work from a broad selection of artists and countries, and captions provide welcome background, especially for oddities like the feline-shaped swimming pool at Miami’s Fountainebleau Hotel, or the cover of jazz musician Charles Mingus’s cat toilet-training guide. As whimsical and amusing as its subject, this offers plenty for cat people to paw through. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

The emergence of nouvelle cuisine in 1970s France heralded not only a shift in taste but also the rise of the celebrity chef and of cooking as a competitive cultural sport, according to this immersive account from food writer Barr (Ritz and Escoffier). Spurred by the creative freedom of New Wave cinema, early risk-takers like pastry chef Michel Guérard were eager to “cook in a way that made sense of the present.” Other chefs followed suit, leading to the establishment of L’Association de la Grande Cuisine Française, where culinary insurgents gathered to promote nouvelle cuisine and land lucrative sponsorships. The multipronged narrative also follows conservative Le Monde food critic Robert Courtine, who fought back against nouvelle cuisine by highlighting restaurants that offered more traditional menus (which, in an ironic feminist twist, were often helmed by women chefs, leading to women’s rising prominence in the French food world); as well as upstart press agent Yanou Collart, who, grasping that money could be made “at the nexus of press, glamour, and post-1960s French pop culture,” promoted nouvelle cuisine to America. Barr’s raucous account is peppered with food wars (the chefs frequently plagiarized one another’s dishes); dark pasts (Courtine was a Nazi collaborator); and dismal selling out (Collart paved the way for a mediocre French restaurant at Disney’s EPCOT theme park). The result is a savory recreation of a seminal food scene. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

The story of the diaper in America is a “profound” tale of “stratified access to basic human needs,” sociologist Randles (Policing Not Protecting Families) reveals in this illuminating study. She begins with a historical overview of diapering in the U.S.—as women entered the workforce in greater numbers, she notes, disposable diapering became the norm. But families in poverty often can’t afford disposable diapers’ high prices, and assistance programs such as SNAP don’t cover them. Drawing on interviews with financially struggling mothers and leaders of diaper banks, Randles shows that an extensive amount of extra labor, which she calls “diaper work,” must be undertaken by caregivers who can’t afford diapers, including keeping meticulous count of the diapers on hand, tracking funds down to the penny, finding innovative ways to stretch and supplement when supplies run low, making often long treks to diaper banks to fill in the gaps, and skimping on food for oneself to afford diapers. Elsewhere, Randles considers the pros and cons of cloth diapering as an alternative, noting that it often carries stigma for poor families. Randles balances hard facts with empathetic inquiry into the system that keeps people down: “diaper need and diaper despair are neither happenstance nor inevitable,” she writes, but “the result of deliberate... policy choices.” This casts an urgent spotlight on a dire injustice. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

A piano prodigy singing gospel tunes in her family’s Motor City church evolves into one of the jazz world’s most innovative (and misunderstood) composers in this thrilling debut reevaluation of Alice Coltrane’s career. Rewriting the record of an artist better known for her marriage to John Coltrane than her innovative compositions, music writer Beta traces how Alice’s musical style mixed her early mastery of gospel and classical music with the hard bop of the 1950s, and took on a world-music flair after she met John in 1963 and became the pianist in his quartet. The Coltranes’ marriage is described as a remarkably spiritual partnership, with their shared fascination with world religions spurring them to draw on ancient Indian and African instrumentation for a loose, atmospheric sound that set them apart from other jazz musicians. After John’s death in 1967, a grieving Alice put out record after record of ethereal compositions, including 1973’s Lord of Lords, and experienced a late-career spiritual metamorphosis, christening herself Swamini Turiyasangitananda and building an ashram outside of Los Angeles. The author scrupulously mines archival materials and interviews to probe the complex web of spiritual and religious influences that shaped Alice’s music, and vividly describes her ebullient live performances and ecstatic worship at her Agoura Hills ashram. It’s a music biography par excellence. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

A feudal village is tested by the arrival of a strange girl in this galvanizing tale from Collette (The Forests). Madelaine arrives in La Foye as a feral orphan and is found by elder Rose and her adopted boy, Bran. It’s decided that Madelaine should be taken in by childless Ambre and her hard-drinking husband, Léon. The peasant villagers have long abided by the rules set by the Ambroisies, masters of the region, and fear the violent heir Ambroisie-Son, who periodically rides into their village and neighboring environs to rape the women and hunt animals. When Madelaine breaks the rules by killing a deer on their masters’ lands, Eugéne recognizes the dangerous spark of rebellion within the strange girl. As harvests grow scant, the merchants increase the costs of goods, causing the peasants to slide deeper into debt to the Ambroisies. When Ambroisie-Son finally sets his gaze on the beautiful Ambre and her twin sister on a fateful day, Madelaine must decide quickly whether she will continue the tradition of submission to the masters or protect her found family, no matter the cost. Collette’s narrative raises weighty questions about the value of resistance and what it takes to shatter a generations-old tolerance of injustice. It’s a triumph. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Singer-songwriter Malin debuts with a gritty chronicle of his artistic coming-of-age. Born to 22-year-old parents in 1967 Queens, Malin recounts a turbulent but loving childhood shaped by music and instability. After his mother took Malin and his sister to live with their grandparents to escape their father’s alcoholic outbursts, Malin channeled his restless energy into punk music, forming the band Heart Attack as a teenager and taking any gig he could land. Encounters with industry figures including Rick Rubin and Little Richard lend color to the account, as do run-ins with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Joe Strummer, and Bob Weir. Though Malin details a hard-partying milieu, he insists he was “too afraid to try drugs,” making him both a participant in and wary observer of late-20th-century New York City hedonism. The narrative is framed by Malin’s survival of a rare spinal stroke in 2023 that sent him to Buenos Aires for stem-cell therapy and arduous rehab—an ordeal that captures the resilience he displays several times throughout the memoir. Malin’s prose style is raw, and he loves a name-drop, but his affectionate portrait of a vanished New York and the community that sustained him will resonate with artistically minded readers. It’s a tuneful self-portrait. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Motherhood has “compelled women to contribute to and transform their societies” since time immemorial, according to this wide-ranging study. Beginning with an 8th or 9th century BCE clay model of a human fetus left by a pregnant woman as an offering to a goddess of childbirth, historian Cleghorn (Unwell Women) shows that women have always thought about and reckoned with motherhood as a profound and fraught state of being. The narrative spans from ancient Greece and Rome, where breastfeeding was so rare among upper-class women that having done so was mentioned on a young mother’s sarcophagus, through the early modern era, where readers encounter Elizabeth Jocelin, a 17th-century British woman who pioneered the “maternal conduct book,” a popular genre in which a mother addressed life advice to her newborn in the event of her death in childbirth. Among Cleghorn’s aims is to explore how society is always debating what is “natural” about motherhood—Are women naturally maternal? Is breastfeeding a natural means of bonding?—as well as spotlight those who pushed back against supposedly “natural” limitations. However, for a book on “radical” mothering, much time is spent describing ways that men have weighed in—readers may not be enthused, for example, to learn yet again about Plato’s notion of the “wandering uterus.” Still, it’s a meticulously comprehensive survey that, at its best, casts fascinating light on mothers’ thoughts on mothering. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

This eye-opening account from Ghanaian podcaster Sekyiamah (The Sex Lives of African Women) posits that traditional African rituals can offer women and queer people new ways of thinking about their bodies and pleasure. Noting that African women’s sexuality is often seen as “sinful” or “selfish,” mostly due to the legacy of European colonial influence, Sekyiamah argues in favor of sankofa, or “revisiting the past to retrieve the good in our history.” Roaming the continent to participate in ceremonies related to sex and sexuality, she learns how to best gyrate her hips with a traditional Tanzanian sex educator and explores the eroticism of Senegalese waist beads (“an essential tool in the Senegalese woman’s sexual armory”). She also treats with respect controversial customs like labia pulling, undergone by girls ages 8 to 14, finding radical potential in the practice—“I’m not aware of any other traditions where little girls are encouraged to become intimate with their genitalia and urged to enjoy personal touch”—and observes ways in which African spiritualities sometimes embrace queerness. Rather than uncritically embracing the traditions she spotlights, the author reflects on how they can be updated and reworked through a feminist lens, though the book’s latter half, geared toward offering advice, feels a bit dull after such an invigorating travelogue. Nevertheless, readers will find this a paradigm-shifting road map to sexual reclamation. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/20/2026 | Details & Permalink

Mount Shasta, Calif., high school senior Izumi Tanaka is a normal 18-year-old American girl: she enjoys baking, watching Real Housewives, and dressing like “Lululemon’s sloppy sister.” But Japanese American Izzy, conceived during a one-night stand in her mother Hanako’s final year at Harvard, has never known the identity of her father. So when she and her best friend find a letter in Hanako’s bedroom, the duo jump at the chance to ferret out Izzy’s dad’s true identity—only to find out he’s the Crown Prince of Japan. Desperate to know her father, Izzy agrees to spend the summer in his home country. But press surveillance, pressure to quickly learn the language and etiquette, and an unexpected romance make her time in Tokyo more fraught than she imagined. Add in a medley of cousins and an upcoming wedding, and Izzy is in for an unforgettable summer. Abrupt switches from Izzy’s perspective to lyrical descriptions of Japan may disrupt readers’ enjoyment, but a snarky voice plus interspersed text conversations and tabloid coverage keep the pages turning in Jean’s (Empress of All Seasons) fun, frothy, and often heartfelt duology starter. Ages 12–up. Agent: Erin Harris, Folio Literary Management. (May)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink

Kelkar’s (Bindu’s Bindis) novel features Oceanview Academy middle schooler Sonali, whose stoicism contrasts with her love of Bollywood movies’ melodrama. Stuck in a Los Angeles home with constantly arguing parents and her sensitive nine-year-old brother Ronak, Gujarati American Sonali, 11, tries to make sense of her world through the Hindi movies she’s seen all her life. Ever since an earnest public attempt five years ago to stop her parents’ fighting led to widespread embarrassment in front of family, Sonali has resolved to hide her emotions and do her best to ignore her parents’ arguments. But her efforts prove futile when her parents decide to try the “nesting” method of separation, where they take turns living in the house with Sonali and Ronak. The contemporary narrative takes an entertaining fabulist turn as Sonali’s life begins to transform into a Bollywood movie, with everything she feels and thinks made apparent through her “Bollywooditis.” Sonali’s first-person perspective is sympathetic as she navigates friendship and family drama, and Kelkar successfully infuses a resonant narrative with “filmi magic,” offering a tale with universal appeal through an engaging cultural lens. Ages 8–12. Agent: Kathleen Rushall, Andrea Brown Literary. (May)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink