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BENEATH THE BLACK PALMS

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Los Angeles is both the setting and the unifying force behind these 11 tales of crime, false hope, and down-and-out disillusionment. Knight writes primarily in the third person, past tense, usually from multiple viewpoints within each story. This narrative omniscience allows readers to experience events from different perspectives and heightens the effect when lives and choices inexorably come together in an ill-fated concatenation. Such interconnectedness is most evident in “Tip the Barkeep” and “White Horse,” tales in which a murderer … Read the rest

THE NIGHT-BIRD’S FEATHER

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The Sosunovs are humans who settled in an “isolated, demon-haunted otherland” long ago. They’ve developed such skills as lucid and shared dreaming as well as spiritual combat. This novel, broken into chronological stories, mostly centers on one member of the Sosunov family: Valentina Grigorievna. When she’s a young girl, a heron-witch goes after her family in a fishing village named Fortitude. This heron-witch, striking in dreams, renders comatose all of Valentina’s 15 family members. The girl, along with the never-ending … Read the rest

PRESIDENTIAL CONVERSATIONS FOR KIDS

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Corey at least tries to tone down the satire of 2020’s Presidential Conversations by replacing his original time-traveling protagonist Donald Trump with grade schoolers—GiGi, whose family comes from the West Indies, and her BFF, Georgie, who is of Egyptian and Lebanese descent—but the high spot of this romp through history is a Kennedy Center performance by Richard Nixon with backup singers Trump, Bill Clinton, and Andrew Johnson warbling, “Impeachment is not that bad / So many other things are … Read the rest

LIONESS OF PUNJAB

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Now known to generations of Sikhs as Mai Bhago, the young woman born Bhag Bhari is a teen at a crossroads when the novel opens. Growing up in a traditional Sikh family in Jhabal Kalan near Amritsar, Bhag Bhari resists prescribed feminine tasks like cooking and sewing. Rather than dreaming of settling down and raising a family, she yearns to study martial arts like the men in her family—and displays striking talents when she does so. She also yearns to … Read the rest

NOBODY

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A menagerie of animals (a raccoon, a penguin, an elephant, and more) gather for many fun activities. But a young human tot is always left out. Alone on the page, with sad eyes and a huge frown, the youngster wonders, “Does nobody love me? / Does nobody care?” The animals pile into a car for an ice-cream trip (there’s no room for the child), they trick-or-treat through the neighborhood (they don’t wait for the kid), and they splash in the … Read the rest

MY THREE DADS

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Crispin, who lives in Philadelphia but grew up in Kansas, begins by describing a haunting she discovered in her home after moving back to her home state. The ghost in question, dubbed Charlie, came with a specific type of “dad energy…this disapproval, this long list of unspoken rules, this very Midwestern version of masculinity that is all emotional constipation yet still strangely captivating, that leaves those around it scrutinizing every glimmer of the eye, every change in tone or inflection, … Read the rest