FICTION
*Flournoy (The Turner House) follows a group of close friends, all Black women, through their 20s and 30s as they withstand grief, motherhood, relationship difficulties, and professional successes and setbacks in New York and Los Angeles. The women have very different personalities and end up in various places. Desiree deals with the death of her beloved grandfather and a related estrangement with her sister Danielle. January is troubled by existential questions about motherhood and a marriage that doesn't make her happy. Nakia, a chef, learns hard lessons about success, inside and outside the kitchen, while librarian Monique makes a career pivot, dedicating all her efforts to becoming an online influencer. Flournoy juggles the character development well, creating relatably flawed women. She also expertly conveys the power of lifelong friendships that can feel closer even than familial bonds. Their friendship comforts and fortifies the women as they navigate the perilous, thorny, messy wilderness of modern adulthood. VERDICT Flournoy is a talented writer, and this will be a good book club pick for fans of Brit Bennett, Terry McMillan, and Jacqueline Woodson.
—Leah Shepherd ©2025 Library Journal
by Rabih Alameddine
*Alameddine's (Comforting Myths: Concerning the Political in Art) newest novel does not unfold chronologically but instead works its way forward in time and then backward again, spanning decades and set mostly between Lebanon and the United States. These shifts add personal context to world events, with particular attention paid to the impact of the 1975–90 Lebanese Civil War. Despite the historical and political setting, the story is ultimately a personal one—dealing with the life of one man, Raja, as he navigates his relationship to his mother, his family, his country, and his sexuality. Some passages are difficult, with painful glimpses of homophobia, war, and other traumas. Still, Raja and the other characters are so humorous and the tone is so glib that the book remains readable and deeply human. Alameddine is probably best known for his 2014 novel An Unnecessary Woman, which won the Arab American Book Award, and his PEN/Faulkner Award-winning 2022 novel The Wrong End of the Telescope. His newest novel measures up to those lauded works. VERDICT: Readers will be grateful for this funny and touching book dealing with the complexities of family, sexuality, life, and death.
—Alice Kallman, ©2025 Library Journal.
The Maiden and Her Monster by Maddie Martinez
* DEBUT In this dark-fantasy retelling of Jewish folklore, Malka's village is caught between the grinding rock of the Ozmini Church and the hard place of the evil forest that surrounds her home. The Church has scapegoated Malka's people, and her mother has been falsely accused of murder. Malka's only choice is to brave the dangerous woods that are killing her people, slay the monster at its heart, and bring its corpse to the tithe collectors. In a place where Malka only expected to find death, she instead meets a creature whose entire purpose is to save her people and who may also be the love of her life. Death might yet find her, unless she can call upon the magic she fears. This sapphic romantasy narrates Malka's coming of age and into power while also telling a tale about corrupt men and desperate empires determined to fight the rising tide of change, enfolding it in the monstrous arms of a creature that everyone has been taught to fear. VERDICT In Martinez's debut, the writing is beautiful, and the story is fantastic. Highly recommended for readers who love the work of Naomi Novik, Katherine Arden, Natasha Siegel, and Allison Saft.
—Marlene Harris ©2025 Library Journal.
NONFICTION
Replaceable You by Mary RoachReturning to biomedicine as her topic, Roach (Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law) guides readers through the technologies—past, present, and future—of how original limbs, organs, and other body tissues can be replaced when missing, damaged, or otherwise less than perfect. Covering the body from head to toe, each chapter illuminates both the wonders and limitations of anatomical replacement and regeneration, whether through the clumsy attempts of the past, current medical and engineering solutions, or promising applications just starting to be explored. Through interviewing doctors, patients, and researchers on the front lines of the fields of transplantation, artificial organs, and prosthetics, and shadowing them while they work or attend conventions, Roach serves as a stand-in for a naive but inquisitive public. She uses her access, opportunity, and general lack of squeamishness or shame to ask questions with her characteristic empathy and clarity and shares her experiences in witty and engaging prose laden with amusing footnotes. A treat for Roach admirers, this book also serves as an excellent introduction to her body of work. VERDICT: This approachable and humorous explainer will delight the scientifically curious while removing stigma, fear, or embarrassment around biomedical adaptive technologies and body enhancements.
—Wade Lee-Smith ©2025 LJExpress
* Keller (paleontology and geology, Princeton Univ.; Mass Extinctions, Volcanism, and Impacts) recounts her decades-long fight to prove that an asteroid strike did not lead to the fifth mass extinction. After being raised in poverty on a farm in Switzerland, Keller moved to San Francisco to study, ultimately earning her PhD from Stanford. Skeptical that an asteroid was responsible for the fifth mass extinction, she began to study the question and concluded that the asteroid widely held to have caused the mass die-off hit Earth 200,000 years before species, although declining, disappeared. She goes on to share her hypothesis that it was volcanic eruptions, specifically Deccan volcanism on the Indian subcontinent, that was the cause of the mass extinction. Her argument was vilified by scientists supporting the asteroid strike theory, but Keller collaborated with colleagues across disciplines, and here she presents their meticulous research in an accessible way, sharing their exciting lab and fieldwork. VERDICT: A fascinating look at the process of researching scientific questions and the power of entrenched theory; Keller was often belittled and blocked from sharing her discoveries. She perseveres in this compelling tale, of interest to readers who enjoy books about scientific study, mass extinction theories, and the work and struggles of women scientists.
—Sue O'Brien ©2025 Library Journal
Every Screen on the Planet: The War Over TikTok
by Emily Baker-White
Inside the creation and survival strategies of the controversial social media app. In concept, TikTok shouldn’t be controversial at all. It’s designed to deliver short, generally upbeat video content algorithmically aligned to users’ interests. But it’s been entangled in politics practically from the start, as Baker-White’s well-researched book explains. Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yiming founded ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company in 2012, and the app itself in 2016; in a few short years it became an international phenomenon—unusual for a Chinese social media company. Because Chinese companies operate at the pleasure of the Chinese Communist Party, TikTok has been subject to questions about whether U.S. user data is fed to the CCP. An internal effort to partition U.S. user data, called Project Texas, has proved imperfect at best; Baker-White, a technology reporter at Forbes, depicts an anonymous source’s realization that the company was riddled with security holes, and the author herself found evidence that she was surveilled by the company while reporting on it. Those issues prompted congressional intervention, which the company’s U.S. leadership tried to wriggle out of via lobbying and efforts at tighter restrictions. But its main strategy has been to appease Donald Trump, who despite ordering a ban on the app in 2020, has facilitated its survival to spite Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a perceived enemy, and because he sees the company as willing to pay his administration “key money” (i.e., funding for pet projects). It’s no way to govern, but it keeps the app alive in the U.S. Baker-White, who broke numerous stories around Project Texas and Trump’s self-dealing around the app, delivers a thorough accounting of the story; those looking for a narrative as vibrant as what the app serves will have to look elsewhere. But its seriousness is an asset, and an object lesson of what happens when international security becomes a casual plaything. Smart and sober business reporting.
Copyright Kirkus 2025 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.