The Republican senator from Alaska offers a candid reflection on her toughest decisions and biggest electoral battles in her debut memoir. Murkowski charts her unique senatorial career, from her hesitant entry in 2002, appointed by her governor father (“people don’t believe me when I say I didn’t want an appointment”), through her historic 2010 write-in victory. Though her independent-mindedness had already been well-established as a member of the Alaska legislature (she was a pro-choice Republican), Murkowski traces her developing position in the Senate—“so often in the middle, standing up to the extremes”— through some of her most contentious votes, including against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and in opposition to calling witnesses during Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial. However, the memoir is most illuminating when Murkowski reflects on her commitment to addressing the distinctive needs of Alaskans, particularly destitute rural Native communities, and on the “cultural chasm” between Alaska and Washington, including the latter’s shockingly overt misogyny and “bubble of affluence” in which elites are insulated from “the poverty of the city’s majority people of color.” Murkowski pegs the widening division between left and right as only offering “rhetoric” and “failure,” an argument strengthened by her own mea culpa over her embrace of divisiveness as a young senator, when she “call[ed] every environmentalist an extremist.” As a warning against the hazards of partisanship, this feels notably sincere. (June)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

This atmospheric standalone from Blackwell (The Paris Showroom) offers supernatural mystery fans a hearty helping of murder, ghosts, and doomed love at a long-abandoned hotel overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Southern California’s gothic Hotel Seabrink was built by the fabulously wealthy T. Jefferson Goffin during Hollywood’s golden age as a destination for such screen legends as Clark Gable and Judy Garland. Now, it’s a rundown landmark on the brink of renovation. Photographer and architect Aubrey Spencer takes a trip to immortalize the building before it’s updated and is surprised to run into well-known YouTuber Dimitri Petroff, who’s there to do research for his upcoming Netflix series about abandoned buildings. There’s instant chemistry between the two—until Dimitri turns up dead the next morning. Aubrey then notices a ghostly presence in one of her photographs and calls in her friend, Nikki, to help determine if something paranormal is at play. Soon, the pair learns that Dimitri’s death parallels a still unsolved murder at the hotel involving Goffin. After a captivating setup, Blackwell weighs things down with a few too many subplots, but she pulls it all together in the end. It’s an agreeably spooky ride. Agent: Jim McCarthy, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (July)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Historian Leavitt tracks the experiences of seven Ukrainian families in her harrowing debut account of the war’s first year. They include Maria, a 20-something mother whose soldier husband Leonid was taken prisoner by the Russians; Tania and Viktor, pig farmers whose village was occupied by Russian troops who looted houses and menaced Ukrainian loyalists; and Yulia and her husband Oleg, who fled the Donbas region for Kramatorsk, where Yulia lost a leg to a Russian missile attack on a train station. (Interspersed throughout are episodes from the Gogol-esque narrative of documentary filmmaker Volodymyr and his effort in 1989 to exhume and repatriate the body of Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Stus from a Russian gulag.) These are intimate, human-scale stories of anguished survival: people live in cellars for weeks while bombs shake the earth; scrabble for water, firewood, and cell-phone reception after the grid collapses; seethe with anger at neighbors now collaborating with Russian occupiers; tensely calculate whether the danger is serious enough to abandon their homes; and weep for dead loved ones. Leavitt’s evocative prose conveys these heartbreaking scenes in unsparing detail. (“Then came a powerful explosion, like the sound of a whip multiplied by a hundred thousand.... Yulia pushed herself to a sitting position.... On the ground next to her were her broken bones.”) It’s a searing rendition of Ukrainians’ suffering. (May)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Filmmakers Loudenberg and Wholey debut with a thorough if salacious account of the marriage between actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard and the vitriolic online response and lawsuits that followed their divorce. Depp and Heard met in 2008 during casting for the Depp-produced film The Rum Diary. Soon he was buying her lavish gifts, including a replica of the film’s beach bar. The couple married in 2015, and their relationship was filled with substance use, verbal abuse, and physical altercations that resulted in Heard filing for divorce and a restraining order. Though their divorce was settled quickly in 2016, two subsequent trials brought notoriety: a 2018 libel suit in England after The Sun published an article calling Depp a “wife beater,” and an American jury trial, televised live in 2022, in which both parties sued each other for defamation. Loudenberg and Wholey incorporate rigorous research, but their analysis of the wider societal implications can get overwhelmed by tawdry details, which undermines their stated objective to “complicate simplistic narratives and convenient assumptions that have come to surround” the case. Readers may well wind up feeling complicit in the “celebrity industrial complex” the book is meant to impugn. (June)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this adorable romp from Hayward (The Memory Book, written as Rowan Coleman), a woman learns valuable life lessons from man’s best friend. For Genie’s 30th birthday, her fortune-telling grandmother offers to grant a single wish. Nonbeliever Genie doesn’t take this present seriously. Instead, she tipsily wishes that her golden retriever, Rory, were human so their chats and cuddles would be less one-sided and her family would stop worrying about her being lonely. The next morning, a shaggy-haired blond guy is asleep in the dog bed and Genie knows instantly that she’s made a big mistake, especially given how unhappy Rory is to be a human. Genie seeks help turning Rory back from her best friend and next-door neighbor, Miles, despite Rory’s fear of Miles’s “murder cat.” Rory knows right away that Miles’s and Genie’s scents go well together, but Hayward still manages to draw out the will-they-won’t-they between these clueless humans. In the meantime, there’s fun to be had watching exuberant Rory help Genie rediscover her carefree side and sense of play. Dog lovers will be especially charmed. (July)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

In this vivid and prescient 1922 novel from Swiss author Ramuz (Great Fear on the Mountain), rapid climate change brings about societal breakdown. The days seem like they will last forever during one particularly hot August. Then news arrives that Earth is on a collision course with the sun. Thermostats strain in once bucolic countries where it soon becomes too hot to sleep, heavy traffic makes escape from the cities impossible, and bathers get burned beyond recognition. Soon the electricity fails and city squares empty out, villages split into small republics, and looting runs rampant (“Everything is ours; everything is allowed,” Ramuz writes in fluidly shifting first-person plural narration). In the small impressions and vignettes that make up the novel, a boy and girl on a desperate sojourn encounter survivors lurking in the woods, children parent themselves now that adults have ceased to bother, and a desperate office worker takes up arms. Near the end, a lone pilot, one of the last human survivors, finds himself grounded in a wasteland, where beauty is fleeting and disintegration a certainty. The crisp translation enhances the stark imagery and uncanny foresight. This is striking. (July)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | 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

When she was six, Justice Kasric watched her blue-eyed merchant father play chess with the Faerie King. Now 15, Justice believes the event was merely a dream. She spends her days yearning for adventure, watching from the sidelines while her 16-year-old sister Faith, as slender and golden-haired as Justice but not as curious, becomes the toast of Victorian London society. One night, however, their father shatters their comfortable lifestyles when he forces the family—Justice, Faith, their younger brother Henry, and their constantly medicated, distant mother—into a locked carriage that takes them to a shadowy mansion. Justice’s discovery that the Faerie have invaded the human world and are targeting her family gains further urgency when she learns that her parents are on opposite sides of the conflict. Together, the Kasric siblings—including older brothers Benedict and Joshua—must find a way to save their family. While characters lack depth at times, and insufficient historical details don’t fully evoke the Victorian setting, Klaver’s (the Supernatural Case Files of Sherlock Holmes series) rich, lyrical descriptions augment the fantastical source material in this engaging series starter. Ages 13–up. Agent: Lucienne Diver, the Knight Agency. (May)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink

Nine years before this novel begins, eight-year-old best friends Esme Randal and Kayla Price snuck out of their cabin at Camp Pine Lake in Texas. They swore never to discuss the terrible events that followed, but when the girls, now 17, return to the camp as counselors-in-training from their hometown of Lewisburg, Pa., that proves easier said than done. Someone begins sabotaging camp activities, and ominous—and increasingly public—threats appear, referencing that fateful summer. The only other person who knows Esme and Kayla’s secret is a local girl named Lillian Campbell, whom they left to fend for herself that night in the woods. They’re loath to voice their suspicions of revenge lest they get in trouble or look bad in front of hunky fellow counselors Jake and Olly, but as events escalate, they realize they may not have a choice. Narrating from Esme’s increasingly apprehensive first-person perspective, Preston (The Twin) pays homage to classic summer camp slasher films. The underdeveloped, predominantly white cast relies heavily on stereotype, and the clichéd tormenter’s motive feels unearned, but horror fans will likely appreciate this paranoia-fueled tale’s gruesome, shocking close. Ages 12–up. Agent: Jon Elek, United Agents. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 05/07/2021 | Details & Permalink