Book of the Day Roundup: February 16-20, 2026
Joe the Pirate
Hubert
Virginie Augustin, illustrator
Ivanka Hahnenberger, translator
Iron Circus Comics
Softcover $18.00 (224pp)
978-1-63899-157-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Hubert’s grand graphic biography Joe the Pirate profiles a rich, eccentric figure known for her colorful life.
Marion Carstairs, later known as “Joe,” was born into a wealthy but dysfunctional family. Sent to boarding school, she felt attracted to women. Later, she developed her trademark style of dressing as a man. Though she was notable for dalliances with the likes of Tallulah Bankhead and Marlene Dietrich, her success in speed boat racing, and her purchase of an island in the Bahamas, the book suggests that perhaps Joe’s most unusual quirk was her bizarre, lifelong attachment to a doll, Lord Tod Wadley.
The black and white art uses light and dark contrasts in an effective and appealing manner, emphasizing and deemphasizing key visual elements while maintaining a pleasing balance between positive and negative space. Throughout, the book showcases the reputation for independence and charm Carstairs developed, but also explores her intriguing imperfections. She established herself as ruler of her island, Whale Cay, creating draconian rules for the inhabitants, including insisting that she have final approval over the names of newborns. So, too, are Carstairs’s noble and heroic moments held up, like her daring service in World War I and World War II. By showing Carstairs at her best and worst, the book provides a rollicking, entertaining, and unpredictable story.
Joe the Pirate is the engrossing graphic biography of a woman who lived her life to the fullest, uncontained by social expectations.
PETER DABBENE (December 12, 2025)
Born at the End of the World
Donica Merhazion
Catalyst Press
Softcover $21.95 (384pp)
978-1-960803-33-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
A determined Ethiopian woman enters the fight for Eritrean independence in Donica Merhazion’s riveting historical novel Born at the End of the World.
To escape an arranged marriage, Elen leaves Ethiopia for Eritrea. There, her aunt arranges for her to work as a waitress. Elen keeps the job through her young adulthood, honing her observational skills. After the Derg coup, she overhears a plot to detain and torture members of the Eritrean resistance. Passing along the information sets Elen on a path that tests her mental and physical fortitude.
The book is set primarily during the mid-1970s, before and during the Red Terror of the Derg regime. Elen is a formidable lead who plumbs the depths of her determination in her activism. Her love for her adopted countrymen is evident in her work, first as an unofficial informant and then as a full member of the resistance. In alternating sections, the narrative also follows Girmai, a former street boy turned successful businessman who is part of the Eritrean resistance. Girmai is resolute and steadfast in his belief in a free Eritrea. Through him and the men around him, the book covers the planning, maneuvering, and machinations that underlie a resistance front.
The fraught, hostile history between Ethiopia and Eritrea is woven throughout the narrative, which includes the horrors and dangers of war and resistance. There are scenes of torture and details of the stench of imprisonment. Moving at a steady pace, the story also balances its intrigue with moments between family members and friends. Through it all, Elen clings to her faith, repeating her mantra “if it is for the good of others, it is worth doing.”
Born at the End of the World is a thrilling historical novel about a woman’s resilience and resistance.
DONTANá MCPHERSON-JOSEPH (December 11, 2025)
Celebrate We Gullah Geechee
Yvette R. Murray
Tonya Engel, illustrator
Free Spirit Publishing
Hardcover $19.99 (44pp)
979-833090506-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
This picture book honors the history and the present of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, a 12,000-mile stretch of coast from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida. Five children invite readers to experience what Gullah Geechee means to them, from fingerprints captured in red bricks to crab boils and beating drums. The acrylic and oil illustrations capture the vibrant colors and energy of a thriving culture and people—and might just whet your appetite, too.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (December 18, 2025)
2008
A Novel
Susan McCarty
Carnegie Mellon University Press
Softcover $26.00 (312pp)
978-0-88748-728-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
In Susan McCarty’s absorbing, nostalgic novel 2008, the lives of a group of estranged high school friends intertwine again fifteen years later.
The story begins in 1993, on the night teenage Stevie, her boyfriend Sam, and her best friend Jen have a threesome that changes their relationships forever. It then jumps ahead to 2008: Stevie is fired from her job in New York when her shady boss and ex-lover discovers her blog; she learns that Jen died in an apparent suicide. After reconnecting with Sam at the funeral, she moves back in with her mother in their small Iowa hometown. Sam, now married and an alcoholic realtor, struggles with the collapsing housing market; he is convinced that Jen was murdered and plans to find out what really happened.
The story takes a gripping route through Stevie and Sam’s early years, covering their strong feelings for Jen, their attempts to escape their small-town lives, and their work as adults to make sense of 2008’s instability. Both have their own struggles independent of Jen’s death, and the narrative shifts in important and unexpected ways that add depth, introducing growing uncertainty as Stevie and Sam each try to make sense of their trajectories.
2008 does an excellent job of evoking its setting—that narrow period of time when the subprime mortgage bubble was just starting to burst. Herein, Barack Obama is still a presidential candidate, and technology is a new world, marked by “poking” people on Facebook and cell phones that are not online. Still, the book is sparing with its period markers, having characters’ situations and choices reflect the era in subtle ways.
2008 is a layered novel in which teenage friendship leads to chain reactions that continue years into the future.
JEFF FLEISCHER (December 18, 2025)
The Sound of Feathers
Attentive Living in a World Beyond Ourselves
Kathryn Gillespie
Duke University Press
Softcover $28.95 (224pp)
978-1-4780-2940-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Emphasizing the importance of quiet observations of the natural world, Kathryn Gillespie’s probing, meditative nature book The Sound of Feathers is about human encounters with animals.
The thoughtful essays address the ethics of humanity’s “mundane and taken-for-granted” relationships with animals, including running animals over on roadways and displacing animals to build homes. Personal anecdotes, as of orca watching on the Puget Sound, prompt engaging discussions of human incursions into wild habitats for entertainment or “hollow” connections. A family trip to a feed store to buy baby chicks for a backyard chicken coop leads to deliberations on the “insidious” violence of raising animals for food, and the adoption of a shy beagle who had never “seen grass or the sky” opens a disturbing rumination on biomedical research. Elsewhere, the extermination of infesting rats as requested by an urban neighbor provokes Gillespie’s troubled contemplation of her own complicity in prioritizing some lives over others.
Gillespie considers social, political, and economic structures such as a consumerism and the capitalistic drive for perpetual growth that are indicted for driving harmful behaviors and promoting environmental and climate crises. The book argues that the antidote to such destruction is paying attention and living closer to the earth: “I walk quietly down the sidewalk, listening carefully for the sound of feathers … This attentiveness necessitates slowing down—not only in pace but also in thought, clearing space in the mind for wonder.”
With a finely attenuated conscience, the essays question the values that separate humans from nature and urges reconnections. While it often criticizes human behaviors, its tone remains gentle, discerning, and encouraging—focused on solutions, not judgments.
The Sound of Feathers is a profound essay collection about the relationships between humans and animals and the need to imagine new possibilities.
KRISTEN RABE (December 18, 2025)
Kathy Young
