Book of the Day Roundup: December 1-5, 2025
Live Like You Give a Damn
25 Bold Moves to Get Honest, Face the Hard Stuff, and Show Up for Yourself
Andrea Owen
Sounds True
Softcover $18.99 (224pp)
978-1-64963-365-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Andrea Owen’s Live Like You Give a Damn is a bold, irreverent, and encouraging guide to meeting life’s conundrums and challenges with courage, strength, and a good dose of humor.
The book targets the limiting beliefs that sabotage attempts at personal growth and authenticity. It suggests twenty-five ways to break out of the “comfort zone” trap. Taking a no-holds-barred, full-on charge against the fears, lingering traumas, lack of self-trust, and excuses that forestall efforts to rise to personal greatness, it demands honesty and the courage to show up for oneself every day, even when life gets complicated and messy.
Relatable anecdotes humanize the information-rich text, whose twenty-five chapters can be read in any order. Provocative titles give clues to the type and depth of the inner work that is required in each. For example, “Stop Just Pretending You Want to Change” invites rigorous investigation of hidden fears and resistance, while “You Will Disappoint People” examines the way seeking to please others can sabotage one’s growth and authenticity.
Conversational, direct, and persuasive, the book includes tips for identifying a problem and understanding and admitting the consequences of ignoring it, backed by personal and client experiences and the work of experts in the field. Visualization exercises, prompts for journaling, and questions for reflection are present to guide the imagination in envisioning a brighter, better future. Among the lessons emphasized in the book are the importance of self-trust, the need for healthy, values-based boundaries, and the power of asking questions over making assumptions.
Live Like You Give a Damn is a powerful guide to making bold, transformative changes, living by intention rather than by default.
KRISTINE MORRIS (October 17, 2025)
How the Husky Got Its Mask
An Alaska Tall Tale
Levi Homstad
Little Bigfoot
Softcover $12.99 (32pp)
978-1-63217-572-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
A tall tale about man’s best friend, this picture book will enchant animal lovers of all ages. Sitka and her human, Sam, live in the wilds of Alaska; though life isn’t easy, they have always helped one another make it through. When their food runs out during an especially long winter, they risk the snowy wilderness to reach a frozen mountain lake. When an avalanche buries Sam in the snow, Sitka’s heroism saves the day—and leaves a lasting impression.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (October 17, 2025)
Canticle
Janet Rich Edwards
Spiegel & Grau
Hardcover $30.00 (368pp)
978-1-966302-05-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
In Janet Richard Edwards’s luminous, mesmerizing historical novel Canticle, a thirteenth-century saint-in-the-making has her faith fostered by a community of women.
As a teenager on her family farm, Aleys lives to pray and teaches herself Latin to read the Bible. When her father arranges her marriage, she runs away and takes up Franciscan orders. Her spiritual advisor, Friar Lukas, deposits her with the beguines in Bruges, a closed community of religious women who reveal other ways of worshiping God. Aleys’s ability to read and translate the Bible marks her as different and dangerous, as do her miraculous healing abilities. Soon, Aleys is forced to make life-altering decisions to protect her sisters from the Church’s scandal-sniffers.
The narrative spans four years in Aleys’s eventful life. The prose buzzes with electric spirituality, getting inside the hearts and minds of medieval Christians. Mysticism is handled from women’s perspectives, too. The friendships and animosities that Aleys stirs within the tight-knit beguine sisterhood are compelling, and the engaging conversations between the women ring true. From welcoming and warm Magistra Sophia to suspicious Sister Katrijn, the tale is ripe with rich personalities and human foibles.
The story unfolds at a sequential clip, amping up the dread when Roman inquisitors arrive to verify Aleys’s miracles and investigate rumors of the beguine’s altering of biblical texts. These crises bring out the heroic or frail sides in Aleys, the beguines, and Friar Lukas. Their reactions are used to explore the metronome nature of faith as it swings from doubt to certainty and back again. Through Aleys’s trials, profound questions about what it means to seek God, and what the cost of searching is, are issued.
Told from the vantage point of women, Canticle is a glorious historical novel that evokes the fervor and flavor of medieval Christian culture.
PEGGY KURKOWSKI (October 17, 2025)
Calamity Before Jane
Noah Van Sciver
TOON Books
Hardcover $17.99 (96pp)
978-1-66266-540-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
The truth behind the legend of Calamity Jane is revealed in Noah Van Sciver’s graphic biography Calamity Before Jane.
At the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 in Buffalo, New York, crowds pay to meet Martha Jane Cannary, better known as Calamity Jane. She shares thrilling tales about her experiences as a Pony Express rider in South Dakota and her capture of the killer of her friend Wild Bill Hickok. After meeting two homeless waifs at the show, she tells them a less exaggerated version of her story. A scout for George Custer, she saved an army captain during a Sioux attack; longing for the “Wild West,” she left the traveling show of Buffalo Bill Cody and headed home.
The book prioritizes entertainment over comprehensiveness, fitting with its main point: many of Jane’s tales were fabricated or exaggerated. Still, Jane is celebrated as a storyteller, a role in which she excels. Key moments puncture the myths Jane created about herself and the West: in one scene, the Native American Chief Black Heart advises Jane that the West is not as it once was because of US government actions like the extermination of buffalo. A text postscript by a Native American historian is accompanied by photographs and provides more context for the story, with factual accounts of both Jane and the experiences of Native American populations. The art captures the fanciful aspects of the Wild West but also includes subtle hints of ugly truth, such as the loneliness Jane seems to feel and the alcohol that she carries with her.
The graphic biography Calamity Before Jane gives a sense of the mystique of the historical figure while also pointing out the falsehoods that made her a legend.
PETER DABBENE (October 17, 2025)
Fit Into Me
A Novel: A Memoir
Molly Gaudry
Rose Metal Press
Softcover (208pp)
978-1-941628-37-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Molly Gaudry’s Fit Into Me is a hybrid book that challenges notions of the self, authenticity, reliability, appropriation, and truth.
This multigenre work—both a novel-within-a-memoir and a memoir-within-a-novel—follows the teahouse woman as she navigates her rocky romantic life, cares for her dying father, and wrestles with her sense of obligation to her family business and the vibrant community it sustains. Nested within her story is Gaudry’s memoir, which confronts life with a traumatic brain injury and plumbs the depths of memory, family, and childhood trauma.
The memoir’s vivid descriptions of brain injury experiences are stirring, as is the section in which Gaudry explores her identity as a transnational adoptee via a speculative essay in which she imagines her half-brother returning from Korea to inform her of her father’s death. By blurring the lines between fiction and memoir, even within the sections most recognizable as nonfiction, the book further stretches genre conventions and makes a compelling case for hybridity and multiplicity. As the book progresses, the two narratives interact and blur, fracturing any static sense of narrative in favor of a more nuanced understanding of authorship and storytelling.
Reflections on selfhood, autonomy, and language appear not only in the book’s content, but in its innovative form, style, and meta-attention to its own construction. Interspersed throughout the memoir are descriptions of Gaudry’s writing process, which involves generating lists of words from other texts and using them as touchstones to craft her fiction. The book also explores the possibilities of found language by integrating longer quotes from authors writing from diverse times and contexts, including Sappho and Roald Dahl.
By removing the veil that makes invisible the author’s tumultuous relationship to reading and writing, Fit Into Me creates an intimate space to explore questions of self-making and unmaking.
BELLA MOSES (October 17, 2025)
Kathy Young
