I can’t say this is a book you should read once, because this is a book you should read twice. Back-to-back. The language is a love letter to the power of translation to carry lost homelands into other worlds, ensuring nothing is completely lost nor completely other. It will break you at least twice, and you’ll be grateful. Rothman-Zecher has invented a new language here, to connect us to an old language, and the result is wonderment.
Jewish siblings, in their 20’s, slightly estranged and also both slightly strange, inherit a huge crate from a long-lost great-great-grandmother. Inside? Baba Yaga’s hut, which stands up on its chicken legs when they speak in Yiddish, and is animate with its own story to tell, tucked within their story. Also, hunting the hut into the New World is an ancient and terrifying evil, the LongShadow Man, who sends the siblings and their hut into a race across the country. Unique, magical, haunting, satisfying.
Love a story where strong characters leave you wondering about their motives and what exactly happened? This compelling novel is for you! The story of best friends Fabienne and Agnès, young French girls left too thin and too hungry by a WWII childhood, and the story of the power, and danger, of story.
Wilson’s novels always refract the surreal onto the ordinary, and this is no exception. The story of two teens, two sentences, one poster, and months of panic followed by years of conspiracy. The narrator’s voice is so compelling you’ll want to sit and read this straight through, twisting between the secrets of the past and the revelations of the present.
Colin Meloy never disappoints, and this new stand-alone novel gives middle-grade readers an introduction to the creepy fun of intelligent, driven thrillers. Beneath an Oregon coastal town are cliffs with light-killing holes, from which a group of friends sense a great evil is spreading among their parents and local leaders. With only horror movies watched on video and a stash of microfiche photos to guide them, the kids must out-run and out-smart the danger threatening to swallow their town – again.
