A loner is forced to confront her past in this gloomy graphic novel from Late Night with the Devil actor Dastmalchian, drawn by Scaggs (Crosswind). Alix, a college student with a fiercely independent and combative Valkyrie spirit, likes to imagine that she hasn’t needed anybody since being orphaned as a child, when her parents died in a car crash. After saving a stranger from drowning—and discovering he has been following her—she embarks on a quest to uncover his identity. But the closer Alix gets to discovering what the man was after, the closer she gets to facing the pain of her long-held grief and isolation. Her real-world amateur investigation is paired with a parallel dream-realm search, after she falls Narnia-like into a fantasy world populated by characters such as a “shadow queen” and “master builder.” A little girl who looks like a broken, poorly repaired porcelain doll acts as a video game avatar, leading Alix on a symbol-laden quest that may reveal the childhood secrets she prefers suppressed. Dastmalchian’s sometimes hurried script shows flickers of potential as a mystery where the whodunit is more about healing than justice, but the impact is limited by schematic writing and Scaggs’s stiff figures, and the too-easy resolution fails to deliver the intended emotional catharsis. This feels like a pilot that’s not ready for prime time. Agent: Allie Gruensfelder, the Syndicate. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Historian Barnes (American Contact) offers a startling, eye-opening examination of the scope and sweep of blackface minstrelsy in the U.S. in the century following the Civil War. Pushing back against the notion of blackface as a fleeting 19th-century phenomenon, Barnes meticulously traces how after the war, the practice boomed, jumping from professional stages to local venues, with amateur performances routinely staged in and funded by schools, businesses, governments, and fraternal organizations. As Barnes traces the deep entrenchment of minstrelsy in social life during the Jim Crow era—itself so named after a minstrel character—even readers familiar with the topic will be astonished by the extent of the practice’s cultural penetration, and its enduring ties to anti-Black political agendas. For instance, the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks, founded in 1868 and reaching its apex in the 1920s with more than 800,000 members, was started by professional minstrels, who used the Order to “transform minstrel shows from casual entertainment into a fundraising juggernaut,” siphoning profits to segregationist politicians. Other illuminating avenues of inquiry include the Works Progress Administration’s support of blackface performances, and blackface performances staged by Japanese American internees during WWII and at FDR’s Warm Springs polio hospital. Painstaking and impressive, it’s a magisterial and disturbing reconsideration of American cultural history. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Curators Barnes and Rolls-Bentley (coauthor of Queer Art: From Canvas to Club, and the Spaces Between) offer an accessible if overly brief introduction to queer art in the 20th and 21st centuries. Spotlighting art that “troubles normative (especially heteronormative and cisgendered) ways of thinking, categorizing or being,” they cover artists who depict themselves as a means of “asserting their visibility on their own terms”; who reconstruct histories of queer life; who portray romantic and platonic queer love; and who use their work to envision new futures that spurn “inherited limits” and allow “queerness [to] thrive by design.” Household names like Keith Haring, Frida Kahlo, and Andy Warhol appear alongside such contemporary artists as Salman Toor. (Entries for each artist provide a representative artwork, brief biography, and list of key works.) The authors conclude with a timeline of queer art history, a short glossary, and suggestions for further reading. There’s plenty of good information to be found here, but the entries exist in a vacuum, sufficiently discussing each artist’s engagement with queer themes but doing relatively little to provide context or encourage interconnected thinking. It’s a useful reference book, with limits. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Psychotherapist Alpert (Be Fearless) turns the world of modern therapy on its head with this provocative challenge to what he sees as a flawed system stoking rising rates of anxiety and depression. Alpert catalogs some of the forces that have shaped today’s mental health crisis, including social media, political divisions, and the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, but assigns most of the blame to a type of ineffectual therapy where clinicians validate patients’ self-diagnosed problems and allow them to engage in endless cycles of venting without helping them grow. This, he writes, fosters a fragile, dependent mindset that harms individual patients while shaping a society that’s generally more selfish, less resilient, and socially disconnected. Good therapy, however, still has the power to help those who need it—by equipping patients with concrete tools, challenging them to grow, and helping them develop the independence needed to ultimately leave therapy. While Alpert sometimes stretches his thesis too far in arguing for how therapy has amplified today’s crisis of polarization, he provides a refreshing and well-reasoned look at the ways the practice falls short of its goals in the paradoxical interest of making patients feel good. This will be of interest to those on both sides of the couch. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Tech journalist Stern debuts with an entertaining exploration of AI’s impact on everyday life. Stern spent a year using as many AI tools as possible, enlisting the technology to monitor her health, provide career advice, plan meals, and travel. The results alternate between hilarious, hopeful, and foreboding. On vacation in Phoenix, Stern, her wife, and their two young children agreed to be chauffeured by self-driving cars wherever they went. On one excursion, the Waymo driving Stern and her seven-year-old son braked sharply and veered within a few feet of a concrete wall, apparently reacting to Stern’s videographer, who was leaning out the window of another car. “It was the only time I’ve ever been genuinely scared in one of these cars,” Stern says. Elsewhere, she reflects on enrolling in a college class, where she quickly learned she could get good grades while putting in minimal effort thanks to ChatGPT, sparking worry about the technology’s impact on critical thinking. Still, Stern acknowledges that without the editing, researching, data processing, and interviewing assistance provided by AI, writing this book would have taken her at least six months longer. Stern’s balanced, clear-eyed assessments and crisp, funny prose (“I was teetering on the edge of the AI-byss”) make this stand out among the growing crowd of books on AI. Illus. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

New mothers possess superhuman abilities and sustainable electricity wards off the climate crisis in this clever blend of fantasy and speculative fiction from Tsao (The Majesties), set in an alternate version of Sydney. Despite these seeming advances, protagonist Vivi has been left behind. Plagued by postpartum fatigue, she lacks the powers gained by other mothers in the final stage of labor, called “rebirth,” during which they give birth to their “fetal mother.” The fetal mother then quickly grows to the mother’s size and cannibalizes her, and this new version of the mother holds preternatural strength, energy, and maternal instincts. Vivi was cannibalized but ineffectively, and she’s been diagnosed with “malabsorption.” After her husband gives her a cruel ultimatum—divorce or induced labor, to repeat the rebirth—she leaves him. Vivi, who is ethnically Chinese and immigrated to Australia from her native Indonesia with her family, seeks refuge with her uncle, who helps her train as an electrician, and she becomes a “hobbler,” providing power to those who can’t afford to convert their homes for service by the new grid. There’s a lot going on here, and while the narrative feels cluttered, Tsao cannily uses the fantastical elements to explore a new mother’s anxieties about measuring up to other mothers. It’s worth a look. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Anthropologist Garth (Food in Cuba) offers a piercing ethnographic study of the power dynamics and misunderstandings that plague “food justice” nonprofits operating in Los Angeles’s predominantly Latino South Central neighborhood. Exploring the question of what happens when primarily white, well-off activists decide to solve food-related problems in places they don’t live, she shows that it typically leads to insulting interventions (such as teaching women how to cook unseasoned chicken) and assimilationist assumptions—i.e., that eating healthy means eating like white people. (“[We’re] here to... get them to stop eating things like tortillas... and eat things like Brussels sprouts, kale, broccoli, you know healthy food,” one nonprofit executive director states.) Having spent 12 years embedded in the L.A. activism world, Garth is able to follow individual activists’ journey toward disillusionment—a number of them, like one who begins to perceive her organization as a “revolving door of ‘fancy’ master’s graduates who never stayed long enough to do anything substantive,” eventually decamp for more “grassroots-oriented” movements that they feel are genuinely addressing the root causes of food inequity, like the anti-gentrification and “land justice” movements. This casts a harsh light on the professional nonprofit world and provides a nuanced window into mechanisms of power within lefty activism circles. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

A middle-aged Englishwoman seeks fulfillment while reflecting on her choice not to have children in the insightful if diffuse debut novel from picture book author and illustrator Haworth-Booth (The Last Tree). As the unnamed narrator enters menopause, she revives a childhood obsession: “Horses began to return to my thoughts at the same time that change began to happen in my body.” She answers an ad to become a “sharer” of a white and black horse owned by another woman (the “true mother”), tending to the horse a few days a week. In between caring for the horse, writing children’s books, and attending a residency, she looks after her neighbor’s children, who she refers to as “not-my-daughter” and “also-not-my-daughter.” As the months pass, her relationship with the horse blossoms from a chosen chore to something deeper and more sustaining. Stretches of self-reflection are punctuated by chipper emails from a newsletter author who espouses the wonders of their lifestyle: “What’s your favourite thing to do instead of the school run?” Some readers will find themselves wanting more from the fragmentary narrative, which often leaves thoughts half formed, but Haworth-Booth ably captures early middle-age disquiet and the soothing balm of animal companionship. Fans of Sheila Heti will appreciate this. Agent: Ed Wilson, Johnson & Alcock. (May)

Correction: An earlier version of this review mischaracterized a plot point.

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Former public defender Galvin Almanza debuts with a hard-hitting investigation of problems facing the U.S. criminal justice system. Opening with her own experience as a teen defendant luckily granted a second chance by a compassionate judge whom she positions as an outlier in an overloaded, unequal system, the author goes on to methodically survey the justice system’s flaws, including understaffing that overwhelms both prosecutors and defenders, false confessions elicited by police interrogations, inaccurate forensic science, and judicial bias (which can be as mundane as “a judge’s favorite sports team los[ing]” leading to “harsher sentences”). Drawing on stories of former clients, she emphasizes that “the process is so bad that everyone gets punished” regardless of whether they’re guilty, like one client wrongfully accused of “an elaborate insurance scheme” after getting a date wrong when her car was stolen, resulting in years of court dates and a job suspension. At times, the ineptitude Galvin Almanza exposes is mind-bogglingly disconcerting, as when she recalls having to wear loud bangle bracelets in order to ensure that a notoriously distracted judge paid attention. The latter half covers possible solutions, including a successful program in Denver that sends out “behavioral health clinicians and paramedics” rather than police to handle certain cases. This trenchant and surprisingly hopeful explainer outlines not only how the system is broken but how to fix it. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink

Music casts listeners into reveries that can bring people together, according to this tepid treatise. Margulis (On Repeat), director of Princeton University’s Music Cognition Lab, argues that music reliably provokes daydreams about memories or imagined scenarios with astonishingly specific themes that are commonly shared among listeners. For example, when she asked students who had never heard Richard Wagner’s prelude to his opera Die Walküre to document their thoughts while listening to it, many of them wrote about pirates on stormy seas, as befits Wagner’s menacing, minor-key string passages. These collective daydreams, she writes, depend on context—humans attach deep emotional significance to music heard in high school and as infants—and on culture. (While American undergrads associate atonal classical music with horror movies, Dong tribesmen in China tend to call to mind happy outdoor excursions.) The communal nature of musical daydreams makes music a social glue, Margulis contends: national anthems unite countries, and talking about shared musical memories can help build a close-knit office culture. Margulis explores many curious examples—the musicality of baby talk, the impact of music on LSD trips—but offers few truly novel conclusions. The result is a mostly unsurprising take on what it means to be immersed in music. Photos. (May)

Reviewed on 04/17/2026 | Details & Permalink