Table of contents for Booklist, Vol. 121, No. 11/12, February 2025 in Booklist

February 1 & 15, 2025 Volume 121, Issue 11/12 This issue’s Spotlight on History inspired me to celebrate Booklist’s commendable history. Booklist was launched by the American Library Association as a service for library workers way back in 1905, which makes this year our 120th anniversary. It’s fascinating, even overwhelming, to trace the arc of history alongside the development of Booklist and ALA over the past 120 years. Thanks to the support of committed and dedicated library professionals like you, Booklist has endured turbulent times and enjoyed good times as we remain committed to delivering the best, most trusted book reviews, collection development resources, and readers’ advisory materials. Next year, ALA will celebrate its 150th anniversary. ALA has exciting plans for 2026, and, as always, we depend on and are…

General Fiction The Anatomy of Magic. By J. C. Cervantes. Mar. 2025. 320p. Park Row, paper, $18.99 (9780778310822). Lilian “Lily” Estrada, who has memory magic, has prided herself on her ability to work hard and use science instead of magic to heal people. However, after a patient dies during a routine operation, she flees to her family’s ancestral home in Mexico. This home is no ordinary home, but rather the enchanted Hacienda Estrada. Returning home puts Lily back into the orbit of her first love, Sam, whom she thought she would marry until the day Sam told her he didn’t love her anymore. Deeply hurt, Lily closed off her heart (both figuratively and literally, with magic) so that no one else could hurt her. Seeing Sam again stirs up lots…

The top 10 historical fiction titles reviewed in Booklist from May15, 2024, to January 1, 2025, cover locales from Washington, DC, to Nigeria to France, and time periods from the Protestant Reformation to the Harlem Renaissance to the mod era in London, exploring themes and revealing truths that transcend geography and time. Another Man in the Streets. By Caryl Phillips. 2025. Farrar, $27 (9780374613556). A boy leaves St. Kitts with dreams of becoming a newspaperman in 1960s London in this heartbreaking novel that contrasts the long shadows of colonialism and WWII with the shininess of the mod era. The Briar Club. By Kate Quinn. 2024. Morrow, $28.99 (9780063244740). This compulsively readable novel shifts perspectives among the residents of a boarding house in Washington, DC, and explores gender roles, romance, money…

Adult Galaxy of Madness, v.1. By Magdalene Visaggio. Art by Michael Avon Oeming. 2025. 128p. Mad Cave, paper, $17.99 (9781545815878). 741.5. In this Silver Age–inspired, swashbuckling, cosmic adventure, Vagrant Queen’s Visaggio and Powers’ Oeming and Soma bring Vigil Virgo, an orphaned space archaeologist, and her existential quest to vivid life. Vigil is on a journey to prove her discredited parents’ research was truth, and standing in her way is an entire galaxy of trouble—even her own adoptive father and professional mentor, Odysseus Rex. Thrown in is a bit of time travel, which wholly affects the plot, including the already vivid art, allowing for changes in character designs. Truly, the art is what separates this book from its space-faring peers, as Oeming and Soma deftly use page layouts, panel shapes, and…

Valuable perspectives and learning opportunities are found in the following accounts of historical events or figures, all reviewed inBooklist between February 1, 2024, and January 1, 2025. And Yet You Shine: The Kohinoor Diamond, Colonization, and Resistance. By Supriya Kelkar. Illus. by the author. 2024. Candlewick, $18.99 (9781536228298). Gr. 2–5. Keklar’s dazzling picture book charts the journey of the Kohinoor diamond—stolen from what is now India though eventually returned—through the lens of colonialism. Born Naughty: My Childhood in China. By Jin Wang and Tony Johnston. Illus. by Anisi Baigude. 2024. Random/Anne Schwartz, $16.99 (9780593563618). Gr. 2–5. Bursting with delightful shenanigans, merry adventures, and family love, this memoir follows eight-year-old Jin Wang’s experiences in her Mongolian village during the year 1982. Coming Home: A Hopi Resistance Story. By Mavasta Honyouti. Illus. by…

Two 17-year-old best friends, Sophie and Hanna, disappear on Winter Solstice night, 1941, under the Bridegroom’s Oak in their German village. Prior to their disappearance, Sophie, a romantic, held onto her belief in the matchmaking magic of the Bridegroom’s Oak tucked away in nearby Dodauer Forest, even though her peers teased her for it. Hanna, pragmatic, athletic, and social, was more willing to participate in required girls’ league activities but had secret messages of her own. Backtracking to 1939, their idyllic small town fractures after the German invasion of Poland. When SS Obergruppenführer Jaeger and his soldiers take up residence, everyone must choose between loyalty and resistance. Family members and friends are set against one another in their tight-knit community where little goes unseen. And yet, this is a story…

Philosophy & Psychology Growing Self-Compassionate Children: A Family Guide for Nurturing Resiliency and Kindness. By Wendy O’Leary and Louise Shanagher. Mar. 2025. 160p. Shambhala, paper, $19.95 (9781645473008). 155.4. Everyone wants their children to be happy and well-adjusted, but life can be stressful and challenging. Rather than shield our children from uncomfortable situations and emotions or jump in to fix things, authors O’Leary and Shanagher suggest that parents instead cultivate and nurture self-compassion in both themselves and their children. They provide the reader with research that explains and supports the benefits of a mindful, focused practice of self-compassion and illustrate the ways it can be transformative to family life. Drawing on their extensive experience working with mindfulness, meditation, children’s education, and psychology, they provide authoritative guidance, including over 70 activities, crafts,…

These superlative books shine a spotlight on individuals, families, and countries, disasters, battles, and centuries-long conflicts, and their essential roles in shaping human history. An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence. By Zeinab Badawi. 2025. Mariner, $32.50 (9780063335417). Badawi’s overview of Africa and its 54 countries moves from the appearance of humans some seven million years ago to the twenty-first century, emphasizing the factors that make Africa’s history so complex. The Afterlife Is Letting Go. By Brandon Shimoda. 2024. City Lights, $17.95 (9780872869295). In an illuminating book full of deeply devastating insights, Shimoda visits the ruins of Japanese American incarceration sites and connects with descendants of the Japanese Americans whose lives were upended during WWII. The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land…

Reviewed between May 15, 2024, and January 1, 2025, these debuthistorical novels cover lots of the twentieth century, but also delve into deeper historical time lines. The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye. By Briony Cameron. 2024. Atria, $28.99 (9781668051023). In this wonderfully gripping adventure, a queer woman of color in the seventeenth century dreams of leaving her stifling life in Santo Domingo and becomes a notorious pirate captain. The English Problem. By Beena Kamlani. 2025. Crown, $29 (9780593798461). In 1931, a young Indian man arrives in London, which he finds both charming and repellent, to become a barrister and follow the path personally laid out for him by Mahatma Gandhi to help overthrow British colonial rule in India. Frederick Douglass. By Sidney Morrison. 2024. Hawthorne, $32 (9780998825793). This wrenching and insightful…

Whether you’re looking to partner with social-studies teachers and build lesson plans or to fill out the history- or historical-fiction-manga collection of your library, here are some selections that will appeal to readers who are looking for a variety of historical content.Asadora! By Naoki Urasawa. Art by the author. VIZ Media. Gr 9–12. This series opens in 1959 with violent Typhoon Vera bearing down on Japan along with a mysterious and unexplainable kaiju attack, which takes out most of Asa’s village. Next, readers travel to 1964, when Asa is deputized to save the opening of the Tokyo Olympics from this same kaiju attack before the Americans can become involved and loose another nuclear weapon. Barefoot Gen. By Keiji Nakazawa. Art by the author. Last Gasp. Gr 10–12. Based on Nakazawa’s…

Older Readers All the Hidden Monsters. By Amie Jordan. Mar. 2025. 352p. Scholastic/Chicken House, $19.99 (9781546136613). Gr. 9–12. A broody warlock, a nervous werewolf, and a particularly domestic poltergeist walk into a bar, but it’s not for quiz night. Oren, Sage, and P, the respective members of this unusual trio, are brought together to solve a murder—a task that Sage hopes will make the Arcānum, the magical police force, understand that being a werewolf shouldn’t preclude her from solving crimes. The basic, initial world building expands as the investigation progresses; while this effectively prevents information overwhelm, it also results in a somewhat disjointed, fast-paced plot that stymies any efforts the reader might make toward thinking through the mystery themselves. The characters are largely minimally developed, making it easy to confuse…

Poignant, fictionalized experiences of hardship, adventure, andcare across old and new history make up this list of top titles, reviewed in Booklist between March 1, 2024, and January 1, 2025. Adventures of Mary Jane. By Hope Jahren. 2024. Delacorte, $19.99 (9780593484111). Gr. 9–12. Mary Jane of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the star of this adventure tale, in which she must travel 400 miles south to care for her ailing and distraught family. Everything Is Poison. By Joy McCullough. 2025. Dutton, $19.99 (9780593855874). Gr. 9–12. As Carmela ventures into apprenticeship at her mother’s apothecary, she quickly learns there’s more darkness to the work—and more venomous realities of the world—than she imagined. The Gift of the Great Buffalo. By Carole Lindstrom. Illus. by Aly McKnight. 2025. Bloomsbury, $18.99 (9781547606887).…

This announcement section offers readers a selected preview of notable new titles for young-adult, middle-grade, and young readers. All titles will be published in the spring or summer 2025 seasons. YOUNG ADULT Nonfiction • American Spirits: The Famous Fox Sisters and the Mysterious Fad that Haunted a Nation. By Barb Rosenstock. Astra/Calkins Creek, $24.99 (9781635928051). Gr. 7–12. Apr. • Black History Is Your History. By Taylor Cassidy. Illus. by Adriana Bellet. Atheneum, $19.99 (9781665957700). Gr. 9–12. Aug. • Caitlin Clark: Basketball Superstar and Inspiration for a New Generation. By Leanne Currie-McGhee. ReferencePoint, lib. ed., $33.95 (9781678210007). Gr. 7–12. Mar. • Design Thinking: A Guide to Innovation. By Fred Estes. Lerner/Twenty-First Century, lib. ed., $38.65 (9798765608005). Gr. 7–12. Mar. • Fault Lines in the Constitution (Third Edition): The Framers, Their Fights,…

Looking ahead to late spring and summer, we see too many high-profile novels across genres to count. Meanwhile, basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s latest save is savingthis list from being all fiction. Atmosphere: A Love Story. By Taylor Jenkins Reid. Ballantine, $30 (9780593158715). Jul. A professor selected to go on a 1984 NASA expedition, and the men and women who will join her on the mission, form the cast of Reid’s (Daisy Jones & the Six, 2019) next character-driven novel. Coded Justice. By Stacey Abrams. Doubleday, $28 (9780385548342). Jul. Multi-hyphenate powerhouse author Abrams’ third Avery Keene thriller, following Rogue Justice (2023), finds the former Supreme Court clerk working for a tech firm promising to revolutionize medicine with AI. El Dorado Drive. By Megan Abbott. Putnam, $30 (9780593084960). Jun. Two sisters get…

Older Readers Banned Together: Our Fight for Readers’ Rights. Ed. by Ashley Hope Pérez. Illus. by Debbie Fong. Mar. 2025. 304p. Holiday, $19.99 (9780823458301). Gr. 8–12. 098.1. In response to record-breaking book challenges, Pérez’s anthology brings together essays, comics, poetry, and more from over a dozen authors whose books have been challenged and sometimes outright banned. Authors including Maia Kobabe, Kyle Lukoff, and Nikki Grimes explain not only the challenges their books have faced but why they wrote their books and the needs fulfilled by those books being on library shelves. Powerfully, they also address the overall effect book bans, challenges, and general vitriol from those targeting their books have on them personally. Interspersed among the authors’ contributions are statistics about book banning, brief lists of titles, and concrete advice…

Among Ghosts. By Rachel Hartman. Random, $20.99 (9780593813720). Gr. 7–12. June. With her trademark lush writing, Hartman returns to the world of Seraphina in this stand-alone novel following a boy discovering dark secrets about his town while on the run from a dragon. Best of All Worlds. By Kenneth Oppel. Scholastic, $19.99 (9781546158202). Gr. 7–12. June. Xavier, his family, and their vacation cabin are transported to a mysterious, inescapable place in this unsettling survival thriller from the acclaimed author of the Overthrow trilogy. El Niño. By Pam Muñoz Ryan. Illus. by Joe Cepeda. Scholastic, $18.99 (9781338068559). Gr. 3–7. May. Award-winning Ryan’s latest follows Kai, an adept swimmer who’s trying to move on after the disappearance of his sister—until he finds clues about an underwater world she was fixated on. Here…

Max in the Land of Lies is the second installment in Adam Gidwitz’s Operation Kinderspion duology, a WWII spy-thriller that began with 2024’s Max in the House of Spies. Here, 13-year-old Max Bretzfeld, a Jewish German boy previously evacuated to England following Kristallnacht, has returned to Nazi Germany as a British spy. As Max—with the help of the wise-cracking supernatural commentary duo of Berg the kobold and Stein the dybbuk—attempts to infiltrate the heart of Nazi radio propaganda and locate his missing parents, Gidwitz takes readers on a journey, equal parts thrilling and harrowing, through Nazi territory and the powerful, pernicious ideas underpinning their movement. I had the privilege to ask Gidwitz a bit about his latest middle-grade masterpiece. Ronny Khuri: My impression of you as an author is that you…

Adult Nonfiction Dirtbag Queen. By Andy Corren. Read by the author. 2025. 10hr. Hachette Audio, DD (9781668643747). The unorthodox but viral obituary origins of this book match its eccentric narrative. Andy Corren, a self-proclaimed Jewish redneck, dedicates this memoir to his late mother, the “Dirtbag Queen” Renay Corren, who passed in 2021. The title doesn’t do the book justice—it’s about so much more than Renay, though her presence perpetually looms. The large Corren clan is full of rowdy dirtbags, each with an affectionately donned nickname (“Shithead,” “Asshole,” “Rabbi”). Corren details his colorful life growing up with five siblings (mostly) in Fayetteville, NC, where they had no choice but to embrace loss, poverty, and estrangement with humor. As a gay musical theater kid, Andy clung to Renay and relished nights painting…

The People Could Fly. By Virginia Hamilton. Read by Andrew Barnes. 2024. 3.5hr. Listening Library, DD (9798217070527). Gr. 3–6. Don’t miss the latest retelling of Newberry Medalist Virginia Hamilton’s classic 1985 collection of 24 short American Black folktales celebrating creativity and resilience during enslavement and the struggle for freedom. The title story, The People Could Fly, is the last in Hamilton’s collection, an inspiring story of Black slaves who possessed the secret magic to fly, like birds, from the land of slavery into freedomland. Perfectly suited to be read aloud, the entertaining folklore (of animals, the supernatural, exaggerated, fanciful, and cautionary, and of actual extraction-from-slavery narratives) is designed to be shared and preserved as a historical document for generations. Barnes is masterful in the art of traditional African storytelling. He…

The Birchbark House. By Louise Erdrich. Read by the author. 2024. 6hr. HarperAudio, DD (9780063064195). Gr. 4–7. A new look at a classic beloved by many. The Birchbark House tells the story of a young Ojibwe girl, Omakayas, and her life with her family in the early days of white settlement along Lake Superior. Together, the family makes it through bear encounters, sickness, periods of joy, and periods of hardship. The simple, slice-of-life narrative is much loved by historical fiction readers of all ages. The audio version, narrated by the author, is a treat. Erdrich’s sparse narration gives the story a sense of gravitas and realism that makes it seem as if the reader is experiencing life alongside Omakayas and her family. Her soft voice invites listeners in, and the…