Table of contents for Vol. 118, No. 16, 4/15/22 in Booklist

Philosophy & Psychology Ambitious like a Mother: Why Prioritizing Your Career Is Good for Your Kids. By Lara Bazelon. Apr. 2022. 272p. Little, Brown, $29 (9780316429757). 158.3. Bazelon was inspired by her mother’s life: she got married and went to medical school, outsourcing home chores and childcare while having a successful career. She considers her mother a pioneer—one who gained financial independence, rewrote expectations of mothering, and was a great mom. This book has Bazelon wondering why, after so many years, working women still face the same age-old topics that plagued her mother: workplace gender bias and heavy lifting at home, including most of the child rearing. Today, 86 percent of U.S. women between 40 and 44 have children. During the COVID pandemic, the plight of working women has been…

Calls for justice, tributes to courage, sound advice, and compelling true stories propel the most commanding and illuminating health and wellness books reviewed in Booklist over the past 12 months. —Donna Seaman The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found. By Frank Bruni. 2022. Simon & Schuster/Avid Reader, $28 (9781982108571). After New York Times columnist Bruni awakes with blurred vision in one eye, he valiantly investigates, visiting specialists and talking with people who have refused to let their physical limitations limit their dreams. Embrace Aging: Conquer Your Fears and Enjoy Added Years. By Jeannette Guerrasio. Apr. 2022. Rowman & Littlefield, $32 (9781538164228). Medical doctor Guerrasio shares her tips for addressing the challenges of getting older, offering sensible, sometimes intimate, advice meant to empower people to take control of how…

Adult 6,000 Miles to Freedom: Two Boys and Their Flight from the Taliban. By Stéphane Marchetti. Art by Cyrille Pomès. Tr. by Hannah Chute. Apr. 2022. 128p. Pennsylvania State Univ./Graphic Mundi, $26.95 (9781637790212). 741.5. Adel is a young Afghan boy, and, when his father unexpectedly dies, his story suddenly changes from one of family life to one of survival. A couple months later, his father’s brother marries his mother, and he sends Adel to a Taliban school. Eventually, he is strapped with explosives and told to become a martyr for Allah. Luckily, the detonator doesn’t trigger the explosion, and to escape his uncle and the Taliban’s wrath, he and his cousin Shafi begin a months-long journey to England, where Shafi’s brother Muhammad lives. This story is heavy, but Adel is…

All That Fills Us. By Autumn Lytle. May 2022. 352p. Revell, paper, $15.99 (9780800740160); e-book, $10.99 (9781493436330). Mel Ellis knows her eating disorder and exercise obsession are killing her, but living as a daily disappointment feels worse. When doctors insist she do something before it’s too late, Mel decides to make a pilgrimage by foot from her Michigan home to Mount Rainier in hopes of enlightenment and healing. During her journey, Mel wrestles in her prison of self-condemnation as her disease consumes her body and mind. But she discovers that the road to recovery is well-traveled by fellow broken humans searching for something or someone big enough to fill their empty bodies and souls. All That Fills Us is a compelling drama of the complex battle with the debilitating longing…

The Top 10 women’s fiction titles reviewed in Booklist from April 15, 2021 through April 1, 2022 explore relationships of all stripes—friends, partners, mothers, and children—in slyly funny, deeply poignant, and page-turningly suspenseful ways.—Susan Maguire A Conspiracy of Mothers. By Colleen van Niekerk. 2021. Amazon/Little A, $24.95 (9781542023832). In 1994 South Africa, Ingrid and her mother, Yolanda, are forced to face the truth about Ingrid’s father—he’s white, making his affair with Yolanda against the law. Cover Story. By Susan Rigetti. 2022. Morrow, $27.99 (9780063072053). NYU student Lora falls under the spell of Cat Wolff, a big-spending socialite who is not what she seems in a winning combination of The Devil Wears Prada and Gone Girl. Home or Away. By Kathleen West. 2022. Berkley, $27 (9780593335505). West’s nuanced, heartfelt novel portrays…

Older Readers The Code Breaker (Young Readers’ Edition): Jennifer Doudna and the Race to Understand Our Genetic Code. By Walter Isaacson and Sarah Durand. Apr. 2022. 320p. Simon & Schuster, $17.99 (9781665910668). Gr. 7–10. 576.5. This biography of Jennifer Doudna, a genetic researcher who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Emmanuelle Charpentier for their work with CRISPR—a genome-editing system instrumental in the development of COVID-19 vaccines—is based on the 2021 adult title of the same name. This version covers Doudna’s life and career, including technical explanations of her groundbreaking work in molecular biology and RNA research. Doudna’s story serves as an inspirational model for young women who intend to pursue a career in science. Despite dealing with dismissive teachers, misogynistic discrimination, funding fights, patent feuds, restrictive government regulations,…

This year’s list of the top 10 health and wellness titles, reviewedin Booklist between February 15, 2021, and April 1, 2022, covers a wide range of topics, including mental health, human biology, neurodivergence, consent, and therapeutic dogs. —Ronny Khuri Bodies Are Cool. By Tyler Feder. Illus. by the author. 2021. Dial, $17.99 (9780593112625). PreS–Gr. 2. This joyous, uncompromising, vividly illustrated picture book celebrates the various physical aspects of bodies of all kinds, showing an array of multi-cultural, multiabled, multishaped characters enjoying everyday activities. Burying the Moon. By Andrée Poulin. Illus. by Sonali Zohra. 2021. Groundwood, $19.99 (9781773066042). Gr. 4–7. Poulin’s novel in verse explores the realities women and girls face in a remote Indian village, where the lack of proper toilets leads to widespread health problems. Rich back matter offers…

Older Readers Arden Grey. By Ray Stoeve. Apr. 2022. 288p. Abrams/Amulet, $18.99 (9781419746000). Gr. 9–12. High-school junior Arden Grey learns how to recognize, set, and push her personal boundaries in Stoeve’s (Between Perfect and Real, 2021) second novel. Arden has always been happy spending time with her best friend, Jamie, who is trans, and honing her photography skills—even though she never shows anyone her art. When Arden’s cold and demanding mother abandons the family and Jamie starts a romantic relationship with a classmate, Arden must learn how to trust herself and her voice. As she navigates the complicated, often embarrassing feelings of being left behind in her friendship with Jamie, Arden also tries to figure out if and how her asexual identity fits into these feelings. Another layer of complexity…

Adult Tired as F*ck: Burnout at the Hands of Diet, Self-Help, and Hustle Culture. By Caroline Dooner. Read by the author. 2022. 8.5hr. HarperAudio, DD, $23.99 (9780063053090). After The F*ck It Diet (2019), Dooner realized that while she may have fixed her lifelong diet addiction and improved her body image and her relationship with food, she was—as the title indicates—very, very tired. She dissects how this happened through an examination of her own path through compulsive dieting, a cult-like acceptance of a string of quick-fix philosophies, and our culture’s obsession with hustle culture and busyness and how that harms us, why it persists, and how to start to break free. Dooner’s tale begins with personal health struggles that plagued her for decades, culminating in the need to forfeit her years…

Brown Girls. By Daphne Palasi Andreades. Read by Tashi Thomas. 2022. 4.5hr. Books on Tape, DD, $47.50 (9780593416402). “We live in the dregs of Queens, New York,” debut Filipina American author Andreades introduces her polyphonic Brown Girls, with names like “Khadija, Akanksha, Maribeth, Ximena, Breonna, Cherelle, Thanh, Yoon, Ellen …” Thomas—a relative, albeit already convincing, audiobook newbie—moves effortlessly among the diverse community of girls who vow to remain bffs forever … until life (and even death, “in the literal sense” of 2021’s “novel virus”) frays promises and bonds as decades pass through generational disconnects, cultural clashes, (d)evolving relationships, getting out/staying stuck/coming home, opportunities, and denials. Andreades writes prose here in short, crisp bursts, creating chapters that are sometimes just a paragraph, at most a few pages, that Thomas affectingly ciphers…

This year’s Top 10 Women’s Fiction titles on audio tap into the relationships women have with themselves, with each other, and with the larger world around them, all conveyed meaningfully through sensitive narrations. All titles were reviewed in Booklist from May 1, 2021 to April 15, 2022. —Heather Booth 30 Things I Love about Myself. By Radhika Sanghani. Read by the author. 2022. 10.5hr. Books on Tape (9780593457627). Nina wakes up in jail on her thirtieth birthday and decides to make some changes, starting with loving herself better. Sanghani, with her great sense of timing, covers some profound topics beneath the book’s humorous veneer. Dear Miss Metropolitan. By Carolyn Ferrell. Read by Bahni Turpin. 2021. 11h. Macmillan (9781250804693). Turpin showcases her talent for accents and characterizations as she relates the…

The Butterfly’s Burden. By Mahmoud Darwish. Tr. by Fady Joudah. 2006. Copper Canyon, $20 (9781556592416). No list of Palestinian poetry is complete without Mahmoud Darwish, one of the Arab world’s most notable poets. This bilingual volume brings together three of his best-known collections and showcases his gifts for formal innovation, contrasting emotions, and the blending of memoir and witness poetry. Rifqa. By Mohammed El-Kurd. 2021. Haymarket, $16 (9781642595864). Named for the poet’s grandmother, this powerful debut collection introduces a promising voice of protest and outrage. Years earlier, Rifqa, a poet herself, was forced to sell half her home to Israeli colonizers. A film, My Neighbourhood (2009), documents this injustice, and El-Kurd’s blistering lyrics pick up where the documentary leaves off. Sadder Than Water: New & Selected Poems. By Samih al-Qasim. Tr.…