This lyrical testament to the power of Black community in Philadelphia and beyond combines finely wrought essays by activist and educator Rogers (How We Stay Free), vibrant snapshots from photographer Karim Brown, and quotes from Black visionaries past and present. The title is drawn from a song of the same name by Philly rapper PnB Rock, who was shot and killed during a robbery in 2022; Rogers notes that the song “encapsulates the tantamount grief and unresolved trauma of generation(s) of Black Philadelphia youth besieged by intracommunal violence, the pervasive effects of organized abandonment, and the overall climate of anti-Black racism.” He invites readers to embrace that grief while reaching for healing, hope, and joy. Brown, whose luminous slice-of-life images of Black Philadelphia are interspersed throughout, offers his own short essay on how “becoming relatively conscious of my Blackness and its relationship with the greater context of the world... shoved me into using the camera to articulate the contradictions... joy, and sorrow” of “the everyday existence of Black folk.” Rogers’s words and Brown’s images are arranged in conversation with excerpts from luminaries like Toni Morrison and Nina Simone and contemporary thinkers like Saidiya Hartman, Kiese Laymon, and Hanif Abdurraqib. The result is a radiant vision of a hopeful Black present and future. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

This inconsistent anthology from English literature scholar Cohen (After the End of History) invites readers to “engage with a wider range of ideas about the current moment’s frenzy of hostility to books.” Some of the essays deliver unique points of view. Emily Drabinski, the first openly LGBTQ+ president of the American Library Association, describes the hateful political attacks against her and her organization during her tenure. Annie’s Foundation board member Emily Harris shares how her organization, which advocates for students’ right to read, was founded by ordinary parents pushing back against conservative group Moms for Liberty. New York City teacher Annie Abrams illustrates how Bill Gates’s philanthropic efforts to promote Common Core standards led to a “broad turn away from liberal education” and incentivized teaching short passages rather than complete literary works. But other contributions strike off notes. Novelist Lydia Millet bemoans her books never having been banned, suggesting an appearance on a banned books list is a badge of honor or a sales tactic. Georgia Tech professor Aaron Santesso takes a similar tack but with 18th-century literature, his academic specialty. Chronicle of Higher Education columnist Leonard Cassuto critiques “absolutist stances” on both sides of the political spectrum. With contributions ranging from eye-opening to exasperating, this doesn’t always rise to the occasion. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

With this twisty series opener, Vincent (Living Dead Girl) lays the groundwork for a complicated mixture of fantasy, romance, and mystery. Alchemist prodigy Amber Fallbrook awakes one morning to discover she’s lost the last two years of memories, including everything to do with her time as a student in the prestigious and demanding Alchemary of Aethermere. With the dreaded third year Trials fast approaching, she must somehow reconstruct her education and skills from scratch. If she refuses to participate, she’ll be expelled; if she fails, she risks her life. Her only allies are brothers Wilder and Desmond Gregory, her childhood friends, but she’s uncertain how deep her relationship with either of them now runs, or if they can be trusted. As Amber desperately attempts to cram two years of work into six weeks, she also investigates the cause of her amnesia, which may be tied to the Alchemary’s mysterious history. The plot sometimes feels overloaded as Amber is emotionally torn between two very different brothers, swept up by the Alchemary’s secrets, and driven to reclaim what she’s lost, but Vincent does a good job of balancing these elements and crafting subtle tension. While the larger worldbuilding remains murky and answers, when they come, are delivered in somewhat unsatisfying infodumps, the attention to atmospheric detail and alchemical intricacies makes this memorable. Readers will be eager for more. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Patterson (Cross and Sampson) teams up with Oscar winner Davis (Finding Me) for a legal thriller that’s stronger on characterization than plot. Alabama circuit judge Mary Stone, well-known for offering free breakfasts at her home in the small town of Union Springs, finds herself in a tough spot as her reelection campaign approaches. She’s been assigned the trial of Dr. Bria Gaines, who is charged with intentionally performing an illegal abortion after terminating the pregnancy of 13-year-old Nova Jones. Under state law, the act is a felony, and a conviction could send the doctor to prison for the rest of her life. The case attracts attention from people on both sides of the abortion debate, including Union Springs’ local pastor as well as Alabama governor Bert Lamar. After the state attorney general asks Judge Stone to recuse herself in favor of a more experienced jurist, tensions escalate further, and someone intimately involved with the case is murdered. Though Judge Stone proves a memorable, fiercely independent lead, and the authors deserve credit for tackling a hot-button issue, contrivances abound and the narrative ends with a whimper. Despite glimmers of promise, this never quite gels. Agent: Deneen Howell, Williams & Connolly. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Pataki, author of Finding Margaret Fuller, reimagines the life of famed Gibson Girl Evelyn Nesbit (1884–1967) in this winning tale of how a woman’s beauty transforms her life. When Evelyn is a teen, her widowed mother struggles to make ends meet for her and her younger brother, Kit. Hoping for better opportunities, they move from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, where Evelyn and her mother land jobs at Wanamaker’s department store. Outside the store one day, an artist asks Evelyn to model for her, which leads to similar gigs and eventually a chance to work as an artist’s model in New York City. There, in 1901, Evelyn becomes a chorus girl on Broadway, where she garners the attention of Stanley Pierce, a wealthy and much older architect who pays for Evelyn and her mother’s hotel suite, while Kit remains at boarding school in Pennsylvania. When Stanley becomes sexually abusive, Evelyn fears she won’t be able to maintain her and her mother’s new lifestyle if she leaves him. Then she meets Pittsburgh millionaire Hal Thorne, who turns out to have demons of his own, and the story builds to a shocking confrontation between Hal and Stanley. Pataki expertly highlights how Evelyn’s naivete is shattered, leading her to rely only on herself to overcome physical and psychological trauma. Historical fiction fans will be riveted. Agent: Lacy Lynch, House of Story. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Huisman follows The Book of Mother with a mostly spellbinding but occasionally stultifying autofiction about her paternal lineage. It begins in the early days of Covid-19, after the unnamed narrator and her family have left Brooklyn for a cottage Upstate. They then move to France to be closer to her dying father, Denis. The narrator originally left France for New York at 19. Now, in her 40s, she attempts to make sense of her history by sifting through memories of her father, a colorful academic and womanizer. Many of Denis’s own memories revolve around his father, Georges, founder of the Cannes film festival and once director-general of the Beaux-Arts administration of the Third Republic, whose titles were stripped due to antisemitism in the 1940s. After Denis dies in early 2021, the narrator contacts her half brother, Bruno, as well as Béatrice, a graduate student who wrote about Georges for her dissertation, to learn more about Georges and his mistress Choute. Later sections on Georges’s life lack the punch of the novel’s first half, in which Huisman brilliantly toggles through time, often structuring her narrative as a direct address to Denis (“You fall asleep mid-sentence. I enjoy watching you at rest”). Despite its flaws, this offers an enthralling view into a family’s mysteries. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Mehta (Beyond Chrismukkah), an associate professor of gender studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, traces in this fascinating account the convergence of contraception and the American religious left. In the 1950s, she writes, Cold War–era family values inspired a coalition of liberal Protestants and Jewish clergy to advocate for contraception, viewing it as a means of shoring up God-honoring marriages in which couples could enjoy sex and parent intentionally. As the diaphragm became a central part of the cultural conversation, some New York City clergy united with doctors to advocate for its availability in city hospitals—a measure that passed, though it was only available to married women. The 1970s saw contraception become aligned with women’s liberation, however, and after the Supreme Court ruled that single women could also be prescribed birth control, the religious left receded from the conversation and the right’s resistance soldified. The author robustly unpacks how the fight for contraception’s availability was often far from a “tale of feminist victory,” while teasing out the complex beliefs and histories motivating elements of the religious left, including those who didn’t support contraception (parts of the Black church, for example, saw it as a possible means of controlling the Black population). It’s an enlightening examination of the tangled intersection of faith, choice, and health in America. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this appealing but underwhelming proposal, geoscientist Hazen (Symphony in C) and astrobiologist Wong present a new law for understanding the universe. While the second law of thermodynamics states that the disorder of a closed system always increases over time, the authors posit that order increases as well. A new law, they contend, should be established to account for how “remarkable states of intricate organization” emerge over time, like how humans have created art and science and birds sing in patterns. They christen their discovery “the law of increasing functional information” and assert that it “describes the generation of order in a world of decay.” Hazen and Wong apply this law to language and music; advances in technology and scientific knowledge; and nonliving systems, including atoms, stars, minerals, and molecules. For example, they note how atoms, the building blocks of matter, emerged in stages after the big bang and how artificial intelligence has evolved to solve crossword puzzles, answer math questions, and hold conversations. According to the authors, their theory could help offer new strategies for tackling “unruly evolving systems” like the climate and cancer cells. Unfortunately, while they assert that any natural law should be able to explain and predict natural phenomena, they struggle to demonstrate this with their own law. It’s a provocative idea, but readers are unlikely to be convinced. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

In this gut-wrenching work of intergenerational dialogue, Nimura (We Hereby Refuse) braids passages from her late father’s unpublished memoir of growing up in California’s Tule Lake Japanese-American concentration camp during WWII with her own reflections on the text. When Nimura’s father, Taku, was 10 years old and packing for camp in 1942, his family was instructed to burn all of their photos and anything they owned with Japanese writing on it. In his memoir, Taku describes Tule Lake as an unsanitary, demoralizing place whose resourceful residents made crafts and mochi and staged talent shows. His narrative comprises simple, factual descriptions that Nimura notes are short on emotion, in contrast to the expressive man she remembers. Meanwhile, in chapters spanning from 2010 to 2022, Nimura offers her own memories of Taku, who died in 1984 when she was 10; details revisiting his manuscript as an adult; and recounts her pilgrimage from Tacoma, Wash., to Tule Lake. The back-and-forth structure works beautifully, with added poignancy coming from her acknowledgment that “the United States government has begun new waves of mass detention and mass incarceration” under President Donald Trump. It’s a memorable duet. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink

Stephens’s middling debut and duology launch sets classic urban fantasy tropes against the backdrop of a contemporary New Orleans teeming with the supernatural. Seraphine “Phine” Barreau has spent a decade hiding from the magical world when she wakes to a magical shock signaling that she has been chosen to succeed her mother as the Prime, most powerful of all witchkin. Her inheriting this position breaks the mold, as the role traditionally alternates between the heads of the two witchkin magical Houses. This, combined with Phine’s special ability as a Syphon, one capable of draining people’s essence or stealing their powers, makes many in the magical world mistrustful of her. But with a mysterious magical blight threatening witchkin, Phine must rebuild relationships with New Orleans’s supernatural communities—encompassing shape-shifters, vampires, and Sidhe—while reestablishing a connection with her older sister, Josephine, the family’s golden child. Not much feels fresh, and the narrative struggles to balance personal and world-altering stakes. Stephens sets up some powerful alliances for Phine and lays the groundwork for a climactic confrontation in the second volume, but readers may be left unsure whether the route there will be enough to hold their interest. (Apr.)

Reviewed on 03/06/2026 | Details & Permalink