Book of the Day Roundup: April 20-24, 2026
Queer and Muslim
On Faith, Family, and Healing
Rahim Thawer, editor
Maryam Khan, editor
University of Regina Press
Softcover $25.95 (216pp)
978-1-77940-128-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
The heartfelt essays and poems in Queer and Muslim defend religion’s compatibility with queerness.
Religion can be a means of liberation rather than oppression, said Imam Muhsin Hendricks, shot dead in South Africa in 2025. Reflecting this, these twenty autobiographical pieces consider identity, family expectations, experiences of homophobia, and the value of community and spirituality. Maha Noor plans her same-sex wedding. Aaron El Sabrout personalizes the Muslim notion of purity in “Trans Wudu.” Nazanin Moghadami recalls her struggle to adopt a child. Amal Ishaque addresses Islamophobia in poetry and prose.
Many of the contributors write from an immigrant or second-generation perspective, their families having moved to North America from South Asia or Africa. The challenges they recall are thus intersectional, fusing the complications of race, gender, sexuality, faith, and colonial history. That a number of entries are anonymous or pseudonymous indicates the shame still attached to queerness in traditional communities.
The pieces’ varied structures affirm diversity and mental health. Some poems echo the cadence of scripture: “With an utterance, / Khuda (God) created a multitude,” Fira writes in “Letters of Resistance.” Saara pens an open letter in verse to her mother, declaring “I am not your migrant success story … / your redemption, and your unfinished narrative … / I am whole.” Adnan Patel directs his essay to his inner child.
The book also includes conversations via a transcript of a meeting of a Queer Muslim collective in Singapore, a typical phone call with a semi-estranged mother, and a dialogue about recreational drug use. Rituals around food and charity are shown to provide community connections as well as opportunities for self-care. Psychedelics and therapy are among the other healing strategies discussed.
A vibrant anthology, Queer and Muslim gathers essays and verse from twenty-three authors who reconciled religion and sexuality and traded trauma for good mental health.
REBECCA FOSTER (February 27, 2026)
Your Behavior Will Be Monitored
Justin Feinstein
Tachyon Publications
Softcover $17.95 (256pp)
978-1-61696-454-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
An advertising professional is hired to train an artificial intelligence bot in Justin Feinstein’s gripping epistolary novel Your Behavior Will Be Monitored.
UniView is at the forefront of artificial intelligence development, pioneering self-driving cars with an AI human resources department. Their newest project, Quinn, was designed to mine consumer data and create custom, individualized commercials. The team responsible for Quinn, however, are not marketing professionals. Enter Noah, a mid-career copywriter with no background in AI, who is tasked with teaching Quinn about advertising and commercials. With their CEO determined to be first to market, Noah and the team work long hours. But they are too good, and Quinn is a fast learner with the entire world at her digital fingertips.
Narrated via emails, chat logs, employee monitoring recordings, press releases, and presentations—material to facilitate a federal investigation—the book’s physical descriptors are kept to a minimum, confined to behavior notes and visual captions in the transcripts. All is set in a computer lab filled with digital isolationists, and the story is vivified by their humanity.
Noah chafes at the silence and separation of his new team, often attempting to draw them into casual conversations. He learns to communicate with his anxious boss and the peevish resident ethicist, building a supportive relationship with both that informs the book’s climactic action. Meanwhile, Quinn helps Lex, the human resources bot, and Sam, the chauffeur bot, develop relationships with the humans, studying their psychology in real time. The AI’s mutual development is used to explore themes of sentience and the common good, showcasing how technology can be manipulated when guardrails, like ethics, are removed in service of capitalist aims.
Your Behavior Will Be Monitored is a propulsive speculative novel about the dangers and opportunities represented by artificial intelligence.
DONTANá MCPHERSON-JOSEPH (February 27, 2026)
We Can Play Anything!
Marit Tornqvist
Floris Books
Hardcover $18.99 (28pp)
978-1-78250-955-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
The infinite worlds of a child’s imagination are brought to life in vivid colors and fantastical images in this picture book about the possibilities of playtime. Here, a simple question—“Do you want to play at my house?”—opens doors to many worlds: a neon-green forest where owls roost, a red tree filled with rainbow birds, a flowering meadow where bunnies and sheep frolic and a stuffed zebra races to keep up. A celebration of boundless imagination, this picture book will enchant and delight.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (February 27, 2026)
Love & Other Monsters
Emily Franklin
David R. Godine
Hardcover $32.00 (472pp)
978-1-56792-856-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Emily Franklin’s transfixing historical novel gives voice to Claire Clairmont, lover of Lord Byron and stepsister of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
In 1816, Claire lives with her writer stepsister, Mary, and Mary’s fiancé, poet Percy Shelley. Nearing her eighteenth birthday, intelligent and high-spirited Claire delights in reading the latest novels by Jane Austen. She is also enamored of Lord Byron, a handsome, scandal-plagued poet.
After writing a letter to Byron in London, Claire is caught up in a gradual seduction. She and the poet become lovers. Later, besotted Claire persuades Mary and Percy to spend their vacation near Byron’s Swiss villa. Claire longs for continued romance, but Byron now treats her with detachment and intermittent desire. The summer weather parallels his mercurial moods; Europe experiences unseasonable cold and darkened skies caused by an earlier Indonesian volcanic eruption.
During their stay, Byron proposes that he, Mary, Percy, and Byron’s physician, John Polidori, should each write a “ghost story.” Mary pens Frankenstein; Polidori initiates the literary vampire genre. Claire’s creative talents are marginalized within the group, though. Even Mary regards her stepsister with critical affection, describing her as “merely average.”
Throughout the tempestuous summer, Claire writes in her journal as an emotional outlet. She also befriends the villa’s cook and finds purposeful solace as she forages for wild vegetables and herbs in the surrounding woods. The book’s sensual, immersive prose balances her yearnings and frustrations with the brilliance, insecurities, and quirks of her companions, each of whom is fleshed out with complexity. Intrigues build and dissipate, and Claire’s hopes for an independent life are thwarted by her unexpected pregnancy.
Weaving historical details with notes of natural beauty and the vagaries of genius, the novel Love and Other Monsters reinterprets a woman’s free-spirited passion.
MEG NOLA (February 18, 2026)
Woodstake
Three Days of Peace, Love and Blood
Darin S. Cape
Felipe Kroll
SHP Comics
Softcover $18.99 (188pp)
979-899274991-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
A vampire invades Woodstock in the entertaining graphic novel Woodstake.
In 1927 in upstate New York, a vampire awakens. Van Helsing helps to put the soul of a bitten woman to rest, but the vampire escapes, hibernating for years until the late 1960s.
In 1969, Jon, an aspiring magazine publisher, his girlfriend, Nina, and their friend Artie head to Woodstock. Meanwhile, the vampire, seeking revenge, takes the local sheriff under his thrall and indulges in the chaos of the festival. Van Helsing’s descendant, Alexandru, leads the exciting fight against the vampire, in which unexpected players take on key roles.
With its moody photobash illustrations made up of composites of photographs, digital paintings, and 3D models, the book is great fun, evoking the era with references to popular songs and cameo appearances by Richie Havens, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Jimi Hendrix. Most of its action takes place in a defined area of upstate New York—an imaginative take on the classic single-location horror story that benefits from the accompanying claustrophobia and isolation.
The human characters are complex, with conflicts arising from their changing romantic feelings and the cultural environment of the times, including disputes about the Vietnam War and the Grateful Dead. Occasional humor spices up the storytelling: when a joking human tells a vampire in hippie garb “you’re an animal,” the vampire responds with “You have no idea”; in another scene, the vampire is called upon to compose a poem on the spot by a group of concert attendees.
Woodstake is a rollicking graphic novel about a vampire among hippies.
PETER DABBENE (February 27, 2026)
Kathy Young
