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“October is all slanting honey-gold midday sun enveloped by chilly darkness. I am watching my garden shrink back to its bones, and remembering—so very wistfully—each time I floated in the Atlantic this summer. It’s bittersweet season, and I am happily carrying the ache of one of my favorite summer reads as we voyage into fall.” —from Aprill’s Picks
In October, we bring you quotes and characters, poetry and picture books. Plus: cats, cookbooks, nature, magic, and much more! As you start to squirrel away your books for fall, hope you discover a new read or two in all our finds and favorites.
Cindy’s Picks
We just got in SO MANY new children’s books!
The Dinosaur in the Garden is written and illustrated by Deb Pilutti and told from the perspective of an extinct Tyrannosaurus Rex. “I used to live here,” he begins, “back when this was a lush and leafy forest. Flowers bloomed, insects buzzed, and trees towered.” Now it is a pleasant garden where a little girl lives. The ghostly dinosaur compares humans and their differences to the dinosaurs and marvels at how alike they are in some ways. When the little girl’s dog finds a huge dinosaur tooth in the garden, he tells her to “Keep looking. It might take a while, but I will wait…for my story to become part of your story.” The illustrations are sweet and approachable, and this book would be fantastic for a curious 3-to-5-year-old.
Another brand-new picture book is A Big Day for Bike, written by Emily Jenkins and illustrated by the wonderful G. Brian Karas. It is Bike’s first day on the job as a City Bike rental in Seattle, and Bike is nervous that she won’t be able to keep up like the older bikes can. Explore the sights and sounds of the city of Seattle through the perspectives of this adorable teal bike as she successfully navigates her first day on the job!
My final recommendation is a new middle grade novel by Ronnie Riley called Asking for a Friend. Eden Jones has exactly three friends. And they’re all fake. Eden has social anxiety and until now, they have pretended they are best friends with three real kids from school. Everything seems just great, until Eden’s mom announces that she is throwing them a birthday party and all of their “friends” are invited! Now Eden needs to do whatever they can to convince these three kids, Duke, Ramona and Tabitha, to be friends with them before the party happens. What will happen? Read this book to find out!
Julia F.’s Pick
A wonderful read for both Indigenous Peoples’ Day and Halloween (and the return of MaineCat!), Darcie Little Badger’s Sheine Lendetells the story of Lipan Apache teen Shane as she searches for her mother and two missing children in 1970s Texas. Sheine Lende is a prequel to Little Badger’s debut novel, Elatsoe, and is set in the same alternate America shaped by magic, where fairy rings are a common form of transport, and monsters may lurk in the woods. Shane, like all the women in her family line, can raise the ghosts of animals, and she and her mother, Lorenza, lead search-and-rescue missions with the aid of their devoted ghostly bloodhound. Then Lorenza disappears while on a mission, and Shane must call on all her bravery and survival skills to find her. She is a loving and determined protagonist, who draws strength from her family, ancestors, and memories, even the painful ones. She will need to face those memories and travel farther than she thought possible to bring her mother home.
Emily’s Picks
In the realm of kids’ books, Emma Hunsinger’s graphic novel How It All Ends makes me (and my kids) laugh out loud a LOT! When Tara’s told she can skip eighth grade, going right from seventh into her first year of high school, she doesn’t see the big deal. But when she starts, she’s immediately overwhelmed—the students are out of control and she’s convinced she’ll get lost forever in the endless hallways. Then Tara meets a new friend who gets her sometimes over-the-top sense of humor and makes jokes right alongside her, making school suddenly a lot less lonely. It’s goofy and thoroughly engaging, with some of the best scenes playing out in Tara’s rich imaginary world, and is full of beautifully expressive illustrations and characters you can’t help but love.
The cover and title of Someone You Can Build A Nest In were immediately intriguing to me—and once I picked it up and started the first page, I had to keep reading. It’s a story of hunting down monsters, from the monster’s point of view, and what a monster she is. Shesheshen has been hibernating all winter when she’s disturbed by intruders, monster hunters coming to slay her. She slithers and slides out of her watery den, drawing hard objects into her body to give her a more human form, hiding a bear trap in her chest just in case. And things get weirder from there. It’s a wonderful combination of fantasy, horror, and romance, with welcome perspectives on disability and queerness, and extremely funny to boot.
Fionna’s Picks
If scary isn’t your speed, why not celebrate the fall with the strange and bizarre?
I loved listening to The Ministry of Time by Kailane Bradley and The Husbands by Holly Gramazio on CloudLibrary. Both books were a great mix of sci-fi/fantasy with romantic storylines and the result was just delightful.
The Coinby Yasmin Zaher was sharp, funny, and devastating. Don’t be fooled by this slim volume, you’ll be flipped upside down by the time you’re through.
Sarah M.’s Pick
“This is the memory he keeps but doesn’t see, the one that lives in him, in a room he has all but abandoned.”
October is all slanting honey-gold midday sun enveloped by chilly darkness. I am watching my garden shrink back to its bones, and remembering—so very wistfully—each time I floated in the Atlantic this summer. It’s bittersweet season, and I am happily carrying the ache of one of my favorite summer reads as we voyage into fall. Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland tells the story of Adina Giorno, an alien who was sent to earth to live as a human. At age four, she is “activated” and begins communicating with her home planet via a salvaged fax machine, conveying her observations of human life on Earth. Bertino writes details with incredible but gentle precision, from the shade of pantyhose that Adina’s mother pinches pennies to buy, to Black Sheep’s The Choice is Yours as background to a Wildwood, New Jersey-set summer, to the date night meal of salad and sesame pizza that adult Adina and her best friend share. Time and place—1980s working-class Philadelphia, and New York City just before, during, and after 9/11—are delivered to us like precious gifts. Beyond all its specificity, there is the wry comedy, distance, connection, loss, and the eventual heartbreak of Adina’s time on Earth. Not since my childhood fixation on Robin William’s Mork have I felt humanity’s fumbles and foibles celebrated quite like this, and that feels quite bittersweet too.
October is also the time of year when I tend to see horror in possibly unlikely places. In the horror genre, a final girl is the character who faces the monster and lives to tell the tale. It’s been said that Sarah Manguso’s Liars is dazzling autofiction, or the autopsy of a marriage, or a whodunnit with patriarchy as the bad guy. I think we can also read it as a horror novel: the monster a grotesque nesting doll of husband inside marriage inside compulsory gender roles inside capitalism inside—yes—patriarchy. Manguso gives us a fresh and blood-boiling take on a tale old as time: a brilliant woman subsumed by a not-quite-so-brilliant husband, her career put on the far back burner in the interest of his mediocre and unsuccessful one. The nightmare begins when Jane falls for John and her promising future as a writer threatens to outshine his directionless creative pursuits. Like many a final girl, Jane doesn’t necessarily ignore the relationship’s many, many (MANY!) red flags —in fact she keeps meticulous record of them —collecting each one to alert the rest of us to the myriad dangers of matrimony. It’s not surprising that things get worse and worse the deeper Jane gets, and marriage and parenthood threaten to completely undo her. I found Liars impossible to put down. Each page vibrates with hot rage, although there are also interstitial moments of sweetness in Jane’s relationship with her son. Manguso’s voice reads with an immediacy and force that I felt in my bones.
These five interconnected novellas follow the cleric Chih as they travel the mythical empire of Ahn in search of stories to record. Although these books are each only about one hundred pages long, they pack a punch thanks to Vo’s skillful storytelling. One book tells the tale of an empress’ rise to power, another sees Chih captured by a band of tigers, yet another details Chih’s eventful return home after long years away. My favorite titles are The Empress of Salt and Fortune and Mammoths at the Gates, but you can’t go wrong!
These two books are a collaboration prompted by the removal of nature words like “acorn,” “fern,” and “otter” from a popular children’s dictionary. The books attempt to honor and revive those words by featuring them as “spell-poems” with accompanying artwork. I was particularly entranced by Morris’ vivid illustrations and the double meaning of “spell” as a form of orthography and magic-casting. Each time I read the books aloud I feel like I’m part of keeping these words and beings alive. Perfect for kids and grownups alike!
Elizabeth’s Picks
These days, I keep coming back to a quote from Vanessa Angélica Villarreal in her book Magical/Realism:
“Magical realism is of the heart; how the heart sees the world, how the heart thinks, reads, remembers, what it calls out for to stay alive. Magical realism is seeing what the heart believes possible in the real world, even after it’s broken. Maybe even especially then.”
In more new nonfiction, Edwidge Danticat’s sharp and stunning essay collection We’re Alone sweeps from childhood to motherhood, through hurricanes, heroes, and Haiti. Determined to Stay is a richly illustrated book about the Palestinian children of Silwan, whileRecognizing the Stranger shares award-winning author Isabella Hammad’s Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture. How Women Made Music brings readers a compelling new history from NPR music. Everything to Play For critiques videogames and Tattoo You offers almost 700 images of the vibrant work of 75 artists.
In The Age of Loneliness, Laura Marris explores human relationships and responses to environmental loss with writing on marshes and horseshoe crabs, birdsong and airplanes—a book one reviewer described as “showing your love for the places you live by giving them your attention.” Loving the North Woods is a look at forest conservation in Maine. Housing the Nation offers numerous new perspectives on social equity, architecture, and affordable housing. And The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer reimagines community and reciprocity: “All flourishing is mutual.”
