To call Days Without End “Blood Meridian lite” might sound dismissive, but it’s not. (In fact, for many readers, it might be just right.) You can’t get any darker than Cormac McCarthy’s Western hellscape, and while Barry’s novel encounters much of the same arbitrary mass slaughter as it makes its own way around the 19th-century West, it also …
Those of us who loved the quirkily indomitable spirit of Ishida’s first picture book, Little Kunoichi the Ninja Girl, will be glad to see Little Kunoichi return in a supporting role in the story of her best pal’s search for an animal pal, Chibi Samurai Wants a Pet. Filled with asides both goofy and educational …
It’s all well and good until a baby arrives after decades of longing, strangers slowly weave themselves into the mix, and one seemingly perfect family starts to slowly unravel. Sometimes you just gotta scorch the earth and start over. If you start reading this book at noon, you’ll finish by midnight. If you start at …
This Is How We Do It is not the first book to show kids how other kids around the world live, but it’s a particularly thoughtful and appealing approach. Using photographs and descriptions sent to him by seven real families in seven countries (Japan, Peru, Iran, Russia, India, Italy, and Uganda), Lamothe has drawn everyday aspects …
First of all, Arbitrary Stupid Goal is not about football. (It’s just a funny cover.) It is, ostensibly, about the general store Tamara Shopsin’s parents ran in Greenwich Village, which they turned into a diner so they could keep making rent, and which became a small, secret legend. But it’s really about the old, weird Village, …
Dear Cyborgs is a tiny book; in your hand it’s almost lighter than air. And the writing has an airy lightness to it to: not funny-light, but nimble and light on its feet, even as it deals with such weighty matters as how to maintain an activist life in the face of oppression and failure. Grounded …
We live in salmon country, right? That’s what we tell ourselves, and in many ways it’s still true, but it’s a complicated, conflicted business now, with hatcheries, dams, $56 Copper River entrees, and, yes, millions of wild salmon still wriggling their way up Northwest streams and rivers to spawn. Cook is a superb guide to …
Russia is back on the front pages and I just finished two books that are must-reads for anyone who wants to get a clearer idea of just what in the world we’re up against. Read together, they give a timely recap of the past few decades and a bracing close-up of the current state of …
Phinney Books’ Audiobook of the Week I am learning: a comedian reading their own audiobook is a good way to go. (Eddie Izzard next?) But W. Kamau Bell is not your average comedian, and his Awkward Thoughts is not your average comedian’s book. There’s not a punch line in every paragraph; sometimes there isn’t one on …
Kids’ Book of the Week The Book of Mistakes by Corinna Luyken As with so many of the best stories, this one begins with a mistake: specifically, an errant splotch on an otherwise perfect illustration. While this mistake easily evolves into a feature within Luyken’s developing pen-and-ink drawings, the mistakes just keep coming. And they keep turning into …
