Book review: Damnation Spring — by Ash Davidson

(Scribner)Be prepared to fall hard, fast and deep for the people who inhabit this debut novel by Ash Davidson as they navigate changing livelihoods, a changing climate, and changing families. Rich Gundersen, his wife Colleen, and their son Chub, make their home beneath a swath of ancient Redwoods — Damnation Grove and the 24-7 Ridge, a logger’s dream — in a Pacific Northwest logging town in California. Rich takes the biggest risk of his life to secure a future for his family, as generations of his family an … (read more)

Book review: Dark Waters — by Katherine Arden

(G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers)In this hair-raising novel by Vermont author and Middlebury College alum, Brian, Ollie and Coco, still banded closely together for safety, make a chilling discovery about the “incident” last October when their s … (read more)

Book review: Once There Were Wolves — by Charlotte McConaghy

(Flatiron Books)Inti Flynn, biologist — impulsive, idealistic yet deeply knowledgeable and passionate about reintroducing wolves as a way of rewilding environments and thus combating climate change — cannot bear the possibility of their decimation as a sp … (read more)

Book review: This Is Your Mind On Plants — by Michael Pollan

(Penguin Press)In his distinctive journalistic form, Michael Pollan, food writer and garden sage, takes a closer look at three plant “drugs” humans use to alter our consciousness: opium, caffeine, and mescaline. Given the focused scope of this book, I was … (read more)

Book review: Mona at Sea — by Elizabeth Gonzalez James

(Santa Fe Writer’s Project)Mona — also known as Sad Millennial, infamous star of a viral video captured as her much-deserved job vanished before her eyes in the economic crash of 2008 — knows how to work hard, strives for perfection in everything she does … (read more)

Book review: The Startup Wife — by Tahmima Anam

(Scribner Book Company)Asha, daughter of Bengali immigrants, is a coder, and a brilliant coder at that. She is developing an algorithm that will attempt to endow AI, artificial intelligence, with empathy. When she reunites with her high school crush, Cyru … (read more)

Book review: Fox and I: An uncommon friendship — by Catherine Raven

(Spiegel & Grau)For someone like Catherine Raven — natural history teacher, former national park ranger, and self-professed loner — consorting with a fox, or appearing to anthropomorphize a wild animal, is costly at best, and uncool at worst. So when a st … (read more)

Book review: Seven Days in June — by Tia Williams

(Grand Central Publishing)It would clearly give away too much, but imagine for a second if this book title was “Seven Steamy Days in June” and you would have a very good idea of how this is going to go. Geneviève, pronounced John-vee-EV, now Eva, and Shan … (read more)

Book review: How the World is Passed — by Clint Smith

(Little Brown and Company)Clint Smith, poet, educator and writer, is the perfect tour guide for this road trip to America’s most racially-charged settings, as he visits, in person, the monuments and landmarks of slavery that exist today. He illuminates th … (read more)

Book review: Love and Fury: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft — by Samantha Silva

(Flatiron Books)This biographical novel is a fictionalized historical account of the birth of Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter and the days immediately following. Wollstonecraft was courageous, with a sensibility and mind well ahead of her time, and this we … (read more)

Book review: Legends of the North Cascades — by Jonathan Evison

(Algonquin Books)By every measure, Dave Cartwright was a hero and a legend in his small Pacific Northwest town — star quarterback of the Vigilante Falls high school football team, and a Marine, veteran of three tours in the Middle East. But Dave may have … (read more)

Book review: With Teeth — by Kristen Arnett

(Riverhead Books)Sammie and Monika’s marriage is not unusual. They’ve assumed roles, chosen at first, but, as time has passed, those roles, and how they have come to define them, are now limiting, causing resentments. Sammie has slipped into the main care … (read more)

Book review: Punch Me Up To The Gods — by Brian Broome

If you’ve been feeling numb around the edges lately, as, wearily, year two of the global pandemic marches on, you are sure to be fully woken up by this brilliant but raw memoir. The title references the oft-held-belief that “any black boy who did not sign … (read more)

Book review: Project Hail Mary — by Andy Weir

(Ballantine Books)The title of Andy Weir’s latest sci-fi thriller immediately imparts a good sense of the plot, taking its name from the common American idiom which refers to a desperate attempt at a very long football pass that has only a small chance of … (read more)

Book review: Mary Jane — by Jessica Anya Blau

(Custom House) Mary Jane — a 14-year-old girl in 1970s Baltimore, sheltered from the seismic cultural shift the country has taken by her strict, conformist parents — has been hired as the summer nanny for Izzy, the young daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Cone, a j … (read more)

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