NCBR review of In a Few Minutes Before Later by Brenda Hillman

Wesleyan University Press

In a form and idiom all her own, Brenda Hillman speaks to the long, ongoing now of our anthropocentric era, what's always happening "a few minutes before later." Against ecological devastation and callous political crises, our ever-present sense of high alert, Hillman performs the poetic trick of slowing down time, of dilating moments and allowing multiple presences (people of all persuasions, animals near at hand, human detritus and accomplishment) onto the page for readerly consideration. In her eleventh full-length volume, Hillman shows herself once again a poet of acute care, radical openness, and persistent invention (collaged photographs adding to her forms of witness). Bringing together experimental, disruptive syntax and punctuation (",,,,,,") and humor ("i thought i saw a man bent over / but it was a road sign") Hillman's voice is both mournful and resistant as she refuses to accept that there are no alternatives to our current climate.

—Keith Ekiss, NCBR Poetry Committee

NCBR review of Illustrated Black History: Honoring the Iconic and the Unseen by George McCalman

HarperOne

Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Debut Author, McCalman's Illustrated Black History is more than a book about 145 famous and little-known Black pioneers—from James Baldwin, to Colin Kaepernick, to Aretha Franklin, to Guion Stewart Bluford, astronaut. This is a Cultural Artifact. As McCalman says, these individuals have "sacrificed their lives or livelihoods or forfeited their homes and sanctuaries" to define the cultural landscape of the United States throughout its four-hundred-year history. In addition to the original portraits and short essays celebrating Black Americans and their achievements, the book is framed by five powerful essays by award-winning contributors, on their personal explorations of the power and the pain of Black History. The book was created from a completely Black perspective, with McCalman acting as the writer, artist, and designer, alongside an all-Black team. The goal for this project was to create a space for Black communion in the mostly white, literary culture, which is, according to McCalman, "really tone-deaf about cultural nuances," and to show how Black people are a "dazzling constellation of contributions to this country."

NCBR review of Martian: The Saint of Loneliness by James Cagney

Nomadic Press

Martian: The Saint of Loneliness is a poetry collection that hooks us from the beginning, using mixed forms and engaging an emotional range that leaps from the specific to the eternal. There is so much artfulness here with zero pretense. James Cagney's poems are honest—sometimes painfully honest, and other times infused with the humor of telling it straight. Cagney's velocity and variety as an artist is an arrow to the heart. This is where poetry is going—into the hands of the truth tellers. Reading Martian is being in company with a dear friend—one who doesn't mind telling you how it is, but won't preach or judge. There's an invitation to think, to make connections, to collectively weep over loss and galvanize in solidarity. The poems move and sing, dart and explode. They don't leave you behind; you're invited. A friend recently asked, "How do we use art to transform what we know and ignite what can be?" One answer is, check out James Cagney.

NCBR review of Of Mineral by Tiff Dressen

Nightboat Books

The poems in Of Mineral pay homage to wonder: of the natural world, of rapture, of the gifts of paying close attention. The language is spare and considered, directing the reader to notice and examine, to linger in the poems' breathing open spaces. Dressen adheres to the vocabulary of science—a constraint that somehow flips the poems into the minute and personal.

Of Mineral talks of the essential: the sea, the body, darkness, the city, how the vastness of the universe overpowers. From "A Letter in May: from Portola, San Francisco": "This city is a labyrinth // I walk / in my invasive/species body // wherefrom the shadows / that are forms fall // where people forget you in time." In "Dark Sky Preserves," Dressen enmeshes the elusive dark night sky with the beloved, "Because I wanted to learn how / to look at the sky / again // I chose from among / your voices / constellations // nuclear / magic / numbers" in effect, aligning the immensities of nature and devotion. With spare language, double-meaning, and repurposed text, they talk about our desire to own, and the better option: to care for, "because we could treat / the darkness as / property // Because I wanted to feel the air / visible breath / eternal ice // in a cyclone you said // I sing over you / while you sleep.".

NCBR review of Customs: Poems by Solmaz Sharif

Graywolf Press

With her second book Customs, Iranian-American poet Solmaz Sharif revisits themes and concerns from her earlier volume Look, a finalist for the National Book Award. Like an INS agent greeting newcomers to this country, the title tells us much: we are approaching a liminal moment, when what we thought was true and natural—our family connections, our political and social beliefs, even our name—is suddenly called into question. Anger is often the result, along with the "frugal musicality" of depression, a concept the poet borrows from philosopher Julia Kristeva. And indeed, there is a fugal as well as a frugal musicality to this book, as words and ideas are pondered, recycled, re-ordered and transformed in the laborious search for meaning and comfort. The long concluding sequence "An Otherwise," offers an almost epic exploration of the struggle of the colonized with her colonizer. Here, in the Great Satan, she walks "the wide hallways / of a great endowment." Here, she tells us, "my school of resentment commenced." Language is her weapon. And like abused and oppressed women in her various homelands, she resolves to carry on the fight: "I wipe clean my blade / I tap at the door // I pass through there so that.…" The poem ends without ending, signaling to the reader that the fight continues beyond the book and into the life of the poet and her world.

NCBR review of Open Pit by Jose Antonio Villarán

Counterpath Press

History, poetry, social protest, Jose Antonio Villarán's Open Pit is a chronicle of the destruction of Morococha, a small community in the Peruvian Andes. When the mountain is sold to a Chinese mining company (the mountain is a trove of copper, molybdenum and silver), the people are forced to re-locate and leave their homes. Although Villarán does not use the term "sacrifice zone," it describes so much of what he has seen in Peru, so much of what passes for development in what used to be called the "Third World." Framed as a drama whose actors are human (the people, the government, the writer) and non-human (capital, the pit itself, and what he calls "the extra-human"), he gives voice to all the contending forces in this social and environmental tragedy, a tragedy so distant, so commonplace as to be almost ignored. It is the people's voice we hear saying, "so it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive," and again, "as I always say / even dead I'll keep fighting." It's risky giving voice to the dead and marginalized but Villarán succeeds in giving his readers a work that is both moving and morally urgent.

NCBR review of As She Appears by Shelley Wong

YesYes Books

Intimate and intricate, the poems in Shelley Wong's debut collection As She Appears track the aftermath of an eleven-year relationship as Wong steps out onto Fire Island "in a floating year." In poems that alternate between grief and joyful perception, Wong discloses to the reader her sense of finding oneself and one's desires renewed by loss. As with any person, these poems live by their instincts for survival and pleasure, their resolute sense of claiming identity against the forces that would oppose her. "Farewell, romantic / sacrifice: / I choose myself." Many of the poems center on navigating public spaces as a queer Asian American woman and finding solace and sustenance in the broader gay community. "My people / are rising. We are the new names, / the ones we have always known." As She Appears is a wide-ranging collection full of defiance, mourning, invention, and celebration.

NCBR review of If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

MCD

The characters in this strong debut collection move through a world that constantly endeavors to reduce them, and they go about their buffeting lives with heart. Their stories fling open the world of racism and pull the reader inside. Racism deep and broad and faceted—nuanced in ways that drive apart characters who together might have stood a chance. In the end, this series of standalone stories—each thoroughly engaging in itself—forms a mosaic of the life of one young nonwhite man in twenty-first-century America.

NCBR review of Forbidden City by Vanessa Hua

Ballantine Books

Forbidden City draws the reader into its spectacularly detailed and immersive world to tell a largely unknown story: that of the women of China's Cultural Revolution. Through protagonist Mei Xiang, who leaves the poverty of her village to become a dancer for Party elites and then Chairman Mao's mistress, Hua brings to light the buried history of these women and girls, recruited to serve their nation in what they believed to be the highest calling, who find their lives repurposed or erased to suit the political machinations in which they are caught up. A wrenching reveal manages to seem both unexpected and yet inevitable. This novel shows Hua to be a master of her craft at the height of her powers.

NCBR review of Divine Madness by Lynne Kaufman

Tailwinds Press

This elliptical novel, narrated by the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, tells the story of her love for, marriage to, and divorce from, the poet Robert Lowell. Spanning nearly three decades, it's set in the lively milieu of New York City's literati during the second half of the twentieth century. Kaufman handles language with the devotion of a poet and plot with the skill of a storyteller. She walks the tightrope of fiction about real people with panache. And the ending manages, despite the fact that it's already taken place, to be a perfect surprise.

NCBR review of What We Fed to the Manticore by Lynne Talia Lakshmi Kolluri

Tin House

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri's collection of nine lush, lyrical stories told from the viewpoints of animals wild, domesticated, and in between is at once achingly beautiful and sharply incisive. Both the animals and the settings vary widely—a polar bear and fox seeking solace in each other for their loneliness and the end of their world in the arctic, a donkey painted as a zebra in a bombed zoo in Gaza, a loyal hound charged with protecting near-extinct rhinos in a Kenya game reserve. Themes of loneliness, consolation, and fierce loyalty thread through these shimmering tales that fully immerse the reader in their richly imagined worlds.

NCBR review of Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley

Knopf

Nightcrawling is spoken by Kiara, a black girl in East Oakland, three months from her eighteenth birthday, her voice visceral, slangy, full of feeling. She and her older brother Marcus live in an apartment complex, Regal-Hi, and their landlord is raising the rent. When Marcus is unable to help with the money, desperate to avoid eviction, Kiara takes to the streets, and on one of those nights, she gets picked up by a cop and becomes sexually exploited by a group of Oakland policemen. That explodes when one of the officers commits suicide and there's a climactic investigation and a grand jury. This gripping novel lives in its radiant language and a vivid cast of characters, among them Kiara, herself, her deep friend Alé, Trevor, a nine-year-old basketball whiz who Kiara takes under her wing, Kiara's strange, witchy mother, and so many more, including Camila, a regal, ethereal, big money, trans black prostitute. It's a compassionate, deeply imagined book of the human spirit struggling for life against the pressure of poverty and neglect.

NCBR review of Spy Daughter, Queer Girl: In Search of Truth and Acceptance in a Family of Secrets by Leslie Absher

Latah Press

The Cold War that blossomed after the end of World War II engendered secrets on both sides of the "Iron Curtain." Journalist Leslie Absher explores two of the biggest secrets from that era in her suspenseful memoir that is part spy story, part global thriller, and part family melodrama. The author herself is the "Queer Girl" referred to in the book's title. Leslie Absher kept her sexuality and gender under wraps, lest she be shamed and ostracized. In the acknowledgements, she thanks the "lesbian tribe" that helped her come out of the closet. Clearly, it took the author's own gumption and the support of friends and lovers to write this memoir. The other body of secrets involve her father's clandestine operations around the globe. Leslie Absher's father, Mike, was a longtime spy for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The author calls him "Dad." She learns that Mike Absher operated under the radar in global hot spots, including Vietnam, the Caribbean during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Greece, where colonels established a dictatorship that ruled with help from the U.S. Dad's secrets were "state sanctioned." Daughter spied on father for years, searched for the elusive truth, opted for candor, not secrets, and settled for "acceptance." Dad went to his grave with his secrets. Leslie Absher reveals hers in this book.

NCBR review of How to Read Now: Essays by Elaine Castillo

Viking

The front jacket features the image of an old-fashioned anarchist bomb. The eight essays in How to Read Now are indeed explosive. Castillo dismantles contemporary American pieties about ethnicity, class and gender. Inspired by the ideas and values of Toni Morrison and John Berger, she offers trenchant critiques of the work of Homer, Jane Austen, J. K. Rowling, and Joan Didion. She also honors the films of Hong Kong director and screenwriter Wong Kar-wai and the Taiwanese actor Chang Chen. Castillo suggests that we might read fewer books than we do, dive more deeply into texts, and become more aware of the connections between literature and power. A Filipina author of the novel, America Is Not in the Heart, she draws on her own experiences and calls for the "decolonization of reading" and the demystifications that surround "the writer." A tour de force meant for the age of Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo Movement, Castillo's book includes an annotated bibliography with insightful mini essays about George Eliot, Victor Hugo, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and an acknowledgement of the decisive role that her mother and father played by teaching her how to read beyond the scope of a book. Deeply personal as well as profoundly political, How to Read Now reconstructs even as it deconstructs.

NCBR review of The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Doubleday

Born in Bogotá, Colombia, and now a resident of the Bay Area, Ingrid Rojas Conteras explains, near the end of her potent memoir, that "magical realism was just realism to us." The "us" includes her grandparents, mother and father, her sister Ximena and extended family. Eschewing linear storytelling, the author moves forward and backward in time, circles around the themes of forgetting, remembering and identity, and traces the history of caste and class, race and ethnicity in Colombia, going back to colonial days. Violence, guerrillas, poverty, prostitution, and legendary narcos such as Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin cartel, provide the backdrop to a circular narrative of a family that struggles to survive and that turns to doctors, priests and traditional healers known as "curanderos." Science and the supernatural coexist in a world that's defined by witches, magic, mirrors and the "intersection of different medicines." The Man Who Could Move Mountains takes readers into a world rarely if ever seen in Hollywood movies and North American fiction. "Nobody wants the truth, everyone wants a story," Contreras's shamanic mother tells her. The author provides dozens of stories about injury and healing that would likely please Gabriel García Márquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and the master of magical realism.

NCBR review of Creativity: Where Poems Begin by Mary Mackey

Marsh Hawk Press

A lyrical autobiography by a poet who discovered her true subject after false starts and elusive beginnings. Creativity makes poems and poetry accessible, comprehensible and enjoyable. The book includes nearly two dozen works by the author, herself, that illustrate her crystal-clear ideas and that stand on their own as a testament to the endurance and persistence that enabled her to overcome "suffering, grief, loss, sadness, and despair." Mackey's memoir begins with her childhood. It moves deftly to the present day where she looks back at her life on both coasts and in tropical Central America where she found herself and the source of her poetry in the jungle. Her memoir is especially insightful about her time in male dominated academia and the road she carved out for herself as a faculty member at California State University, Sacramento. Teachers of creative writing may want to make this book assigned reading in college and high school classes. Poets, novelists, and memoir writers will likely find it inspiring, informative, and insightful. By writing about her own arduous journey from the 1940s to the present, Mackey offers a map for lost souls adrift in their own dark nights of the soul.

NCBR review of Year of the Tiger: An Activist's Life by Alice Wong

Vintage

When this book was first published, Wong posted playfully, "Friends, the time is meow." A kind of scrapbook, the book is amply illustrated with poems, graphics, and photos. Soon after Wong was born in 1974, doctors gave her eighteen months to live. Now, at age forty-nine, she's alive and thriving, though she needs a wheelchair for mobility and a ventilator full time. Despite disabilities, she has emerged as an author, activist, and founder, and co-producer of the Disability Visibility Project, hosting a podcast, and also publishing essays, and collaborating with StoryCorps, among other activities. "I feel such a rush of creativity and the urge to tell my story," she writes. "Being so intimate with suffering and death will do that to you." Year of the Tiger is an invitation to the world to enter her universe. The book offers dozens of interviews, including one in which the author asks herself questions and answers them, too. It provides a history of protests by people with disabilities, an account of her relationship with her Hong Kong-born mother, Bobby, and a narrative about how she developed a sense of disability pride and learned valuable lessons from the disability community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Along the way she lambasts "enforced productivity and toxic individualism." The book ends playfully and potently with a story about her own death at the age of ninety-six in the Year of the Tiger, 2070.

NCBR review of Captain of Her Soul: The Life of Marion Davies by Lara Gabrielle

University of California Press

Most people know very little about Marion Davies. Some recall she was supposedly the model for the forlorn, former actress Susan Alexander Kane, in the great Orson Welles film, Citizen Kane. Marion was anything but that, a star in forty-eight films, one of the most popular and well-liked actresses of early Hollywood, an energetic, fiercely independent woman who created and kept control of her life. She was pal or lover of Charlie Chaplin. She partied with the greats of the era, often inviting dozens, such as Irene Dunne, Carol Lombard, Clark Gable, Anna and Eleanor Roosevelt for gala affairs at Hearst Castle. She donated time, and fame and money to The Marion Davies Children's Clinic for children of low-income families in West Los Angeles. Lara Gabrielle is the reigning expert on Marion Davies. She has written a spirited, well researched, highly readable biography that will pull you straight back to those times.

NCBR review of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis by Adam Hochschild

Mariner Books

Any Adam Hochschild history will be worth reading, and certainly will be full of well researched facts, stories, and thoughtful reasoning. He wrote the best-selling King Leopold's Ghost and Bury the Chains, more than ten books in all. American Midnight is his history of the era from World War I to the beginning of World War II, from the corruption of war profiteering, to the destruction of the Wobblies, to the infamous Palmer Raids and J. Edgar Hoover, past the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. The issues are quite similar to today's: racism, white supremacy, nativism, contempt for the rule of law, chauvinism, greed, the continual attempts to crush free speech. Who now recalls Kate Richards O'Hare, or Emma Goldman, or W.E.B. Dubois, or the Espionage Act of 1917? American Midnight is an important addition to the history of the United States. It is beautifully written and should be taught in every history class across the nation.

NCBR review of Wise Gals: The Spies Who Built the CIA and Changed the Future of Espionage by Nathalia Holt

G.P. Putnam's Sons

From its origin in World War II as the Office of Strategic Services the CIA has been a man's world of dangerous espionage. Women worked as secretaries or office help. Into this came a handful of attractive, dedicated, highly intelligent women such as Addy Hawkins, Liz Sudmeier, Mary Hutchinson, Jane Burrell, and Elaine Page. They took risks like men, entered enemy territory, handled counterspies, everything a man could do and more. They gained respect as hard working, creative, dedicated women. Yet they were treated as inferior, paid less, with most important jobs held for men. An old story, and an accepted practice through the twentieth century.

Mary Hutchinson was an attractive young woman, barely five feet tall, but with a steel mind, and a Ph.D. in Archaeology and Comparative Philology. She spoke several languages fluently, which allowed her to enter danger zones and handle double agents. Today, Ukraine shows the beneficial effects of Addy Hawkins contacts there. Liz Sudmeier risked her life in the Middle East to gain intelligence on Russian weaponry.

These wise gals helped lead the way in the formation of the CIA, and in the struggle for women's rights. Their beauty and especially their clever minds, formed in dealing with a male dominated culture, helped them survive war, foreign intrigue, terrorism. Nathalia Holt has written an important book. It's a great read.

NCBR review of Listen, World! How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America's Most-Read Woman by Julia Scheeres and Allison Gilbert

Seal Press

In this book, we learn how Elsie Robinson became America's most read woman and how she managed to create multiple lifetimes ranging from working a gold mine to becoming William Randolph Hearst's most successful columnist, as well as the woman literally thousands of other women reached out to for advice. She also set up clubs for children in her incredible plan to better their lives. She did all this while devoting her energies to caring for her only son George, who had a life-long chronic respiratory illness. His care involved frequent changes of location, often with different partners.

Julia Scheeres and Allison Gilbert devoted over eleven years combing hard copy letters and columns that had never been collected. When Robinson was writing her columns and stories, often illustrating them with her cartoons, no one thought about preserving her work. Even Hearst, for whom she worked many years, didn't consider it worthy of cataloging and saving. Such is the history of women. All of Robinson's thirty-five years of writing were dredged up from lost or forgotten files. The authors have done a great service to us as readers and also to future historians by publishing rich notes and careful notations of where they learned of the fascinating details of this maverick newspaperwoman's life and work.

NCBR review of Who Killed Jane Stanford? A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University by Richard White

W.W. Norton & Company

In this fascinating reconstruction of the early years of Stanford University, we follow the lead of the writer, noted historian Richard White. We learn that Jane Stanford fully intended for the new university to become a monument to her dead son. A committed spiritualist, Jane used her vast fortune to hire and fire for the new university. White is meticulous in showing how her wishes were followed, setting up the players in the emerging battles. We gradually come to know which characters were suspect when a first poisoning occurred. It was identified as strychnine, and lays the foundation for what follows.

The entire book is so carefully built up that we are prepared for the finale of Jane's life. What we then are faced with is the aftermath, as multiple possibilities for her death are put forward. We also see why there was a great push to declare her death by natural causes.

This book will, of course, be of great interest to many in the Bay Area who have only current assessments of the power of Stanford University. It may come as a surprise to discover the original intent of Jane Stanford and lengths she went to to have the university fulfill her personal dream of a monument to her son.

NCBR review of Fiat Lux by Paula Abramo, translated from the Spanish by Dick Cluster

Flowersong Press

Fiat Lux is a beautiful and rich family history in poetry. As translator Dick Cluster says in his introduction, "I see the book as a meditation on the act of writing poetry and bringing historical characters to life." The poems trace the path of the Paula Abramo's ancestors as political refugees from Italy and Eastern Europe to Brazil, Brazil to Bolivia, back to Brazil and then to Mexico. The stories are loosely placed in chronological order and have a consistent theme, that of striking a match and fiat lux—let there be light. The poet's grandmother worked in a match factory in Brazil that made the popular brand Fiat Lux; she is remembered in the poem "in Memory of Anna Stefania Lauff, Match Factory Girl." The book is bilingual, and traces of other languages appear throughout, reflecting the family's travels through many countries. For example, "Batalha da Praca da Se, 1934," which again talks of Anna Stefania, retains its Portuguese title in the translation. Later appears "Hic Incipit Vita Nova, Maria Zelia, Political Prison, 1935," which shows the Latin in the title. All of this adds to an engrossing poetic journey through time, place, and history.

NCBR review of It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Coral Bracho, translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander

New Directions

It Must Be a Misunderstanding, by acclaimed Mexican poet Coral Bracho—about whom, Poetry magazine is quoted as saying "Her work has altered the landscape of Mexican poetry in a way that is comparable to John Ashbery's in the U.S." —is dedicated to her mother, who lived with and eventually died from complications of Alzheimer's in a Memory Care facility.

In this bilingual edition, in its original Spanish and translated here into English by Forrest Gander, whose mother also died of Alzheimer's, we feel the tenderness and compassion of the poet-daughter as she tries to navigate, understand, and witness the daily struggles inside a community of people who are losing their grasp on language and themselves. We also feel Gander's own comprehension and empathy.

As Gander says in his insightful foreword: "Dream logics are at work all through Bracho's most personal and emotionally expressive collection…The poems involve us in the mind's bafflement and wonder…shadows might be taken for realities…everything exists and doesn't exist at the same time."

NCBR review of A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts by Wang Yin, translated from the Chinese by Andrea Lingenfelter

NYRB Poets

A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts, Wang Yin's bilingual new and selected—published here in its original Chinese and translated into English by Andrea Lingenfelter—spans almost forty years, beginning with early work from the 1980s and including new poems, some written as recently as 2021, which form the first section of the book.

Known initially as one of the "post-Misty poets", his work has evolved over the years, due partly to his wide travels and to his personal journey as a photographer. To quote Bei Dao: "Wang Yin's poetry is ever-changing and unpredictable, at once fierce and subtle, and infused with the spirit of the international poetry world in which he participates. He is one of the most outstanding avant-garde poets to emerge in China since 1980."

As Lingenfelter says in her preface: "Wang Yin is a poet of the ineffable. He is drawn to paradoxes, to the multiplicity and unknowability of the world around us. He is also a poet of witness, a historian of subjective experience…marked by an intensity shaped by an acute awareness of ephemerality." As Wang Yin himself writes: "My poems are flecks of salt clinging ambivalently to a horse's back."

NCBR review of The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu Byeong-mo, translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim

Hanover Square Press/HarperCollins

An international bestseller, this novel by best-selling author Gu Byeong-mo is her first to be translated into English. The story follows sixty-five-year-old Hornclaw, who lives alone in a small apartment with her dog Deadweight. She has had a successful career as a "disease control specialist," in actuality an assassin, and has spent her life ruthlessly killing the targets she has been hired to eliminate. However, an unexpected injury changes everything, as she has to seek help, which results in an unexpected connection with a doctor. The author leads the reader on a thrilling, surprising, compassionate, sometimes humorous, sometimes melancholy journey, following the inevitable path of aging and decline as well. The book is a page-turner, hard to put down, and award-winning translator Chi-Young Kim has done a superb job in keeping the flow of action and surprise.

NCBR review of The Performance by Claudia Petrucci, translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel

World Editions

The arc of this novel involves a love triangle centered on Giorgia, an actor who abandoned her career to live with Filippo, but by chance meets a former director, Mauro, who re-awakens her passion for the theater. Her return leads to a severe breakdown and then to a complicated alliance by the two male characters who attempt to restore Giorgia's sanity by scripting their own fantasies of what she should become. Seen from that angle, this novel is a tour de force of ambivalence and ambiguity (or perhaps pure sexism). Well-written and well-translated, the story also touches on borderlines of reality and fiction, possession and control, passivity and power.

NCBR review of Ablaze with Color: A Story of Painter Alma Thomas Jeanne Walker Harvey, illustrated by Loveis Wise

HarperCollins

This book takes young readers on a vibrant and colorful journey through the life and art of an influential African American artist. The story begins with Alma Thomas as a young girl with a burning passion for color and a strong desire to express herself creatively. Making things brought her joy. She grew up in the segregated South and wasn't allowed to go to the white school, museums, or library. To compensate, her parents brought learning into their home through teachers and speakers. The family moved to North so Alma could go to high school. She eventually studied art in college and recreated art and learning experiences for the Black children in her community. It wasn't until her seventies that Alma Thomas focused on her own art. She painted in a new style, inspired by vibrant colors and abstract shapes in nature. The world noticed, and Alma Thomas became the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Obamas selected one of her pieces to display in the White House, making her the first Black woman to be displayed there. This gorgeously written and illustrated book is a celebration of artistic expression, diversity, and perseverance. It encourages children to embrace their own creativity and appreciate the beauty that surrounds them, a must-read for aspiring young artists seeking inspiration through the power of art.

NCBR review of Eighteen Vats of Water by Ji-Li Jiang, illustrated by Nadia Hsieh

Creston books

Set in ancient China, Eighteen Vats of Water tells the story of Xian, a young boy who dreams of becoming a master calligrapher like his father. Xian embarks on a journey to learn calligraphy, discovering that it involves both writing and painting, but most importantly patience. Xian is eager to fast track his studies and become a well-regarded calligrapher like his father. Xian's father, however, knows his son must learn the art, science, and craft of calligraphy, and that must be done through years and years of practice. He introduces his son to his own method which involved washing his ink brushes in vats of water. Each vat took up to a year to turn black with ink. Once eighteen vats of water had turned black with ink, his studies were complete. Xian persevered for many years and spent countless hours perfecting his craft, not just copying his father. In the end he developed his own style of Chinese calligraphy, bringing joy to his family, and himself. Both the story and illustrations capture the essence of ancient Chinese art forms, while imparting important lessons about perseverance and following one's passions. The book teaches readers the history of Chinese calligraphy through a story about love, patience, hard work, and mentorship. This is an inspiring story to share between generations.

NCBR review of Listen to the Language of the Trees: A story of how forests communicate underground by Tera Kelley, illustrated by Marie Hermansson

Dawn Publications

Set deep in a great forest, Listen to the Language of the Trees follows the life of a young seedling that sprouts at the base of a giant old tree and struggles to grow up and into the sunlight from the shade of the forest floor. Fortunately, the little tree is not alone. The seedling's tiny roots meet the roots of older trees. Threaded between those roots are fungi that allow the trees to talk to one another, passing along warnings about pests and droughts, and speaking of what one tree needs and another has to give. The giant tree acts as a mother, sending the little seedling food and water. When beetles attack the Mother Tree, trees of different species feed it. Wrapped in this great nurturing net, the little seedling grows and thrives as it listens to the language of the trees. Beautifully illustrated and scientifically accurate, this book offers children a vision of a secure world where even the smallest and weakest are taken care of while at the same time encouraging an interest in science and a love of nature.

NCBR review of Undercover Latina by Aya de León

Candlewick Press

An international organization that protects people of color? If only! But fourteen-year-old Andrea Hernandez-Baldoquin actually does work for a covert one called The Factory. You see, she comes from a family of spies and is needed to go undercover with her mom to infiltrate an Arizona high school and befriend Kyle, who might be the son of a suspected white supremacist planning a terrorist act. Though she succeeds in making him her new friend, she develops feelings for Ramon, Kyle's Latinx buddy. They all engage in an online fantasy game called Triangulo, and so Andrea and Kyle dress as characters from the game while attending San Diego ComicCon—where a potential bomb threat is discovered. All the while, Andrea has been passing as white and needs to reconcile her hidden identity and Latinx heritage with the racism she observes so as not to blow her cover.

Aya de León populates her book with witty, intelligent characters and gets profound points across without patronizing young readers. Her plotline maintains a beautiful equilibrium of romance, espionage, and familial relationships without losing its level of intelligence, sense of purpose, or abundance of heart. Fast-paced and action-packed, yet resonant and thought-provoking, this story turns a learning opportunity about discrimination into an exciting adventure.

NCBR review of Wave by Diana Farid, illustrated by Kris Goto

Cameron Kids

Thirteen-year-old Ava loves to surf with her buddy Phoenix and reads Rumi poems to settle her mild OCD. She also sings and uses music to process her feelings and her connections to others. Ava's parents are divorced: her dad lives in Paris with his new family; her Iranian-born mom is an OB/GYN doctor at the local hospital. Her mom hopes Ava will follow her into the medical field and signs her up as a volunteer on Saturdays for the summer, which prevents Ava from pursuing her interests; she finds she must carry the weight of her mother's expectations against her love for music and her best friend. When Phoenix's past lymphoma returns, it threatens Ava's relationship with the one person who gives her a sense of belonging.

Set in 1980s Southern California, this coming-of-age story about a Persian American girl is written in free verse with liberal use of spatial form and onomatopoeia. The wave conceit is employed throughout the narrative and beautifully mirrors the ebb and flow of Ava's emotions. Small but appropriate illustrations support the text, adding an extra dimension to Ava's innermost thoughts and feelings. Lyricism and natural aquatic rhythms convey her sense of loss and the burden of her cumulative problems with honesty and compassion. The result provides readers with an accurate exploration of identity, heartbreak, loss—and hope.

NCBR review of Seen and Unseen: What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams's Photographs Reveal About the Japanese American Incarceration by Elizabeth Partridge, illustrated by Lauren Tamaki

Chronicle Books

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, it forcibly relocated all Japanese immigrants and their descendants—many being American citizens—into concentration camps. The harsh conditions under which they suffered were depicted in images shot by three very different photographers. The War Relocation Authority hired Dorothea Lange to capture the internment process, to show that it was done ethically; instead, Lange used her camera to show the depressing reality of the situation. Toyo Miyatake, a prisoner, secretly constructed a camera and took candid shots of his inadequate facilities and the hostile environment. Ansel Adams posed subjects to show his perspective by depicting the resilience in the camps. Seen and Unseen is beautifully presented with illustrations by Lauren Tamaki and contextual information by Elizabeth Partridge, both of whom had a personal proximity to this chronicle. Many pages of backmatter include biographies of the photographers and photo credits. Together with the body of the book, they depict an accurate picture of the injustice suffered by Japanese Americans during an era of rampant prejudice and racial nationalism. The firsthand accounts of the prisoners are particularly poignant and even heartbreaking. This impactful examination of a misrepresented chapter of American history conveys a crucial awareness of injustice and censorship that can visually educate young readers.

NCBR review of No Stopping Us Now by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

Three Rooms Press

Seventeen-year-old Louisa is dissatisfied with playing basketball in the city rec league, but her high school still refuses to fund an all-girls team, even though it's 1974 and a law that prohibits discrimination based on sex had passed two years before. After meeting a group of feminists and hearing Gloria Steinem speak, Louisa is inspired to petition her school to add a girls' basketball program. Unfortunately, she meets with more opposition than anticipated and becomes the focus of a major local controversy as well as a target of male coaches and the school board. Additionally, Louisa has to deal with her grandfather's dementia, rejection by her best friend, and her newfound attraction to Barb, a Black teammate. Will Louisa summon the emotional strength to continue her fight and find sufficient community support to emerge victorious?

Based on the author's true story and set during a tumultuous period of transition for women's rights, this is a compelling exploration of gender equality and the power of activism. Being true to oneself and standing up for your beliefs are positive themes throughout the narrative. If you challenge the status quo, you might make some enemies, but you might also discover your voice and change history in the process.

NCBR review of Self-Made Boys by Anna-Marie McLemore

Feiwei & Friends

Picture it: New York City, 1922; the Jazz Age. Prohibition and bathtub gin. Nicolás Caraveo, a seventeen-year-old transgender boy from Wisconsin, arrives in The Big Apple intent on establishing himself professionally without succumbing to urban corruption and immorality. His eighteen-year-old cousin, Daisy Fabrega, knows his secret and rents him a cottage out in West Egg so he can commute to the city. She shocks Nick by rejecting her heritage and passing as white to marry into a wealthy family in nearby East Egg. Nick's nouveau riche neighbor, Jay Gatsby, befriends him, drawing Nick into a dazzling world of extravagant parties and decadent behavior—but Gatsby has ulterior motives and harbors secrets of his own. Can Nick maintain his newfound faith in the American Dream and accept his complex feelings for Jay without revealing his own past or falling victim to the lure of vice and glamor?

This reimagining of The Great Gatsby pulls F. Scott Fitzgerald's subtext to the surface and builds upon it exponentially, intensifying relationship dynamics and plotlines. Diverse trans, Latinx, and queer characters are deftly interwoven into the original story, adding great depth to their arcs and creating a new, all-inclusive version. Racial prejudice is handled delicately and sexuality is depicted with nuance. The result is nothing less than a politically correct, romantic thriller that blurs the borders of race, gender, and age without skipping a narrative beat.

NCBR review of Mattie and the Machine by Lynn Ng Quezon

Santa Monica Press

Mattie has the uncanny ability to fix anything mechanical and is very tall for a girl of fifteen. She lives in 1868 New England, however, and she is subjected to the drawbacks of employment in Columbia Paper's all-female bag division. Though her expertise is noticed and seemingly appreciated, she receives thirty percent less pay than her male counterparts. Determined to call out her boss on the situation, she proposes a bet: If she can build a machine that fully automates the paper-bag-making process, women employees will receive equal pay; if she fails, she will resign as a mechanic. Her boss accepts under the condition that Frank—Mattie's romantic interest—also builds one. And the race is on to see whose machine can produce the most intact bags in two minutes, on a tight deadline.

This book is a fictionalized yet historically accurate account of Margaret E. Knight's fight to obtain recognition as a nineteenth century female inventor who would eventually be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006. Exploration of gender roles in the context of their historical settings and Mattie's struggles are realistically depicted, including all the technical challenges she encounters while taking her invention from the initial concept to a working prototype. Her inspiring resourcefulness, optimistic sense of purpose, and unwavering determination to overcome prejudice and treachery, both in the workplace and in the courtroom, make this an empowering feminist commentary.

NCBR review of All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir

Razorbill

The American Dream can have its drawbacks, and so it does for Misbah and Toufiq who moved from Lahore, Pakistan after their arranged marriage and settled in the Mohave Desert town of Juniper, California, where they run the Cloud's Rest Inn Motel. Their son Salahudin and Noor, a close family friend, are connected by history and the many challenges of growing up as outcasts in a place where Islamophobia is rampant. Misbah's failing health and Toufiq's alcoholism convince Sal to take drastic measures to maintain the motel. Meanwhile, Noor strives to escape her bad-tempered uncle's grasp and her job in his liquor store by making plans to leave for college; however, she gets sidetracked by her love for Sal and dedication to his parents.