Book of the Day Roundup: August 4-8, 2025
Trumpets of Death
Simon Bournel-Bosson
Graphic Universe
Softcover $17.99 (232pp)
979-876564432-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
A boy is turned into a deer in Simon Bournel-Bosson’s surreal graphic novel Trumpets of Death.
Amid his parents’ marital troubles, Antoine is sent to stay with his paternal grandparents. His grandfather Gilbert is an imposing, dismissive presence, while his grandmother is sweet and indulgent. When she leaves to run errands, Antoine is sent to join Gilbert, who’s looking for mushrooms in the woods. Antoine drifts off alone and discovers a glowing white mushroom; he picks it and is transformed into a white stag. Antoine communes with nature for a time, but later, a confrontation with Gilbert alone leads to a surprising, elegant twist.
The story reads like a dream, with touches of fantasy like an impossible trail of mushrooms, or the central transformation from boy to deer. But it’s also grounded in emotional truths and the intergenerational tension between Antoine and Gilbert. Information is delivered through conversations and internal thoughts, but there are also long sequences of silent pages. One example comes when Gilbert’s dog Bullitt pursues Antoine in the woods, a scene in which action and subtlety are communicated through memorable images that transcend written language. The art uses a palette of psychedelic colors to convey or contrast emotions, best seen in a memorable page featuring Gilbert striding past while meek Antoine sits with his handheld video game.
Trumpets of Death is a beautiful graphic novel about a boy whose transformation into a stag leads to personal growth and maturity.
PETER DABBENE (June 22, 2025)
All That You Are
Smriti Prasadam-Halls
Chaaya Prabhat, illustrator
Little Bee Books
Hardcover $18.99 (32pp)
978-1-4998-1824-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Pieces of the past, present, and future untold come together in this dreamy picture book that reminds children of their incalculable individuality. A grandmother’s wisdom, “the gleam of ripe mangoes,” and “stories of struggle and strife” are but some of the parts that come together to form a sum far greater: each unique child. Vibrant illustrations capture ships sailing sunset seas, tranquil jungle waterfalls, and soaring birds as children are encouraged to honor their pasts by forging their own futures.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (June 22, 2025)
Trying
Chloé Caldwell
Graywolf Press
Softcover $18.00 (208pp)
978-1-64445-347-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Chloé Caldwell’s inventive memoir Trying recreates her years of attempting to become pregnant.
Caldwell devoted much of her thirties to trying to get pregnant via intrauterine insemination. She developed rituals to ease the grueling routine: After every visit, she made a stop for luxury foodstuffs and beauty products. But then her marriage imploded with the revelation that her husband was a sex addict who spent thousands on prostitutes and drugs. When she began dating women and her determination to become a mother persisted, a new conception strategy was needed.
Blending experience with research, the book theorizes on the causes of infertility and surveys its representation in popular culture. Its title, a synonym for “challenging,” blends with a reminder that the term “essay” originated with the French for “attempt.” Wishing she could come up with a more profound extended metaphor, perhaps from nature, Caldwell draws on lessons learned from retail work, where she combated potential customers’ body image issues by promising “life-changing pants.”
The book’s fragmentary style suits its aura of uncertainty about the future. Sparse pages host a few sentences or paragraphs, interspersed with wry lists of celebrities who got pregnant, divorced, or came out; later, an extended run-on section replicates the disorientation of Caldwell’s former life crumbling. Comments on the composition process arise: Caldwell ponders how the fact of divorce will change the narrative as well as the course of her life. “Sometimes I wonder if I was mostly with him because of the easy access to sperm,” Caldwell writes. The open-ended conclusion suggests that loss can mean freedom; the choice is between novelty and surrender.
Trying is a candid, intrepid memoir that documents shifting desires by interlacing infertility and queerness.
REBECCA FOSTER (June 22, 2025)
The Ever End
Audrey Wilson
Bywater Books
Softcover $19.95 (260pp)
978-1-61294-323-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
A woman discovers her new fiancé and his family are not what they seem in Audrey Wilson’s Midwestern thriller The Ever End.
Following her mother’s death, Margo represses her grief with an engagement to Sam, her boyfriend of six months. In anticipation of their eventual wedding, Sam takes Margo to meet his family in Iowa. The change of scenery from her Chicago home unsettles Margo, as do the religious tendencies of Sam’s relatives. She feels uneasy enough without the paranormal visions that haunt her as the visit begins. Margo’s only source of normalcy is Rebecca, the town’s wedding planner, who is coincidentally the only other queer woman in town.
On top of being overbearing when it comes to wedding planning, Sam’s family engages with the teachings of an unusual televangelist. During her stay, Margo squirms under the pressure to accommodate their disconcerting traditions. As she gets bullied into decisions that she’s uncomfortable with, Margo is forced to reevaluate her own agency, her relationship with Sam, and the inexplicable things she’s been seeing since arriving in town. All the while, her grasp on reality slips further.
Margo’s queerness haunts the story as much as any paranormal presence. Since she can pass for straight in her relationship with Sam, she keeps her bisexuality hidden from her fiancé’s family. Despite a sexual relationship with a woman in the past, her “virginity” with a man is still suspiciously important to Sam’s relatives. From the validity of her queer identity to the clothing she wears to bed, almost every decision is made without her input, contributing to the book’s tormenting sense of invalidation and powerlessness.
A narrative of control set against a rotting Midwestern backdrop, The Ever End challenges the agency of a woman in a new engagement.
VIOLET GLENN (June 22, 2025)
Little World
Josephine Rowe
Transit Books
Hardcover $22.95 (120pp)
979-889338016-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
A murdered girl’s essence persists, her body resisting deterioration and inspiring whispers of miracles, in Josephine Rowe’s radiant novel Little World.
The body of a child, a possible saint-to-be, arrives in the Australian desert, placed in Orrin’s temporary care. She is cradled in a box made of wood that’s since become rare. Facing “the tedious matter of veneration,” those who want her beatified keep her name and story secret. Still, the truth roils behind her closed eyes: she’s from a violent time and place; there, “girls her age and younger grew accustomed to the rasp of fresh stubble.”
Less saintly than indignant, the girl rages over the injustices visited upon her body, which led to her death. As the men charged with her care pass away one by one, she endures. She mourns the life she might have had and revisits memories of her sister and their seaside home with longing.
Years later, Matti sets out on an Australian road trip, dogged by memories of the child she gave up and of her wartime childhood. On an unmarked road, she encounters Orrin’s dilapidated home and seeks refuge for the night. And in the darkness, she finds the forgotten girl, her body serene and unravaged by decay: “a plurality, a midget universe unto itself.”
Composed with poetic fury, the book alludes to violence while pronouncing evidence of feminine vivaciousness. Even its treatments of the ordinary simmer: home is where “the birds don’t chivvy you so much,” and rain falls with “warm, animal sentience [and] an appetite for skin that will not be dissuaded.” The girl—first concealed, then released, but never departed—backgrounds it all, inspiring wonder and heartbreak.
In the sumptuous novel Little World, neither human cruelties nor fiery spirits can be erased.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (June 22, 2025)
Kathy Young
