Book of the Day Roundup: February 2-6, 2026
Chicken Heart
Morgan Boecher
Street Noise Books
Softcover $23.99 (260pp)
978-1-951491-44-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Morgan Boecher’s emotive graphic novel Chicken Heart is an exploration of individual gender identity.
Just before working a stand-up comedy set, Jackie reads a letter from the Chicken Heart Love Commune informing him of the death and upcoming funeral of his Aunt Sheila, a trans woman who was ostracized from their family. The news causes Jackie to face a fact he’s been trying to bury: Though everyone knows Jackie as a woman, he identifies as a man.
While visiting Chicken Heart, Jackie begins a romance with Will and witnesses as Estelle, Sheila’s widow, grieves. Though Jackie wants to avoid the struggles Sheila faced before her death by suicide, he decides he must be true to himself.
Jackie’s work as a comedian is reflected in the book’s interesting narrative approaches. For example, an inner monologue is portrayed as a fantasy stage performance, in which Jackie’s inner doubts, fears, and aspirations are acknowledged. It also exists in stark contrast to his actual performances, which tend to end in disaster and emphasize the false life he leads.
The illustrations make use of color changes to smooth the narrative’s transitions: Jackie’s stand-up routines are cast against pink backgrounds, while his fantasized sets are set against blue ones. Elsewhere, scenes in Chicken Heart’s wooded domain are dominated by green. Hand lettering adds to the intimate feel of the book.
About life, death, love, identity, and acceptance, Chicken Heart is a thoughtful graphic novel in which a trans man finds the strength to accept his own identity.
PETER DABBENE (December 18, 2025)
The New Cafe Beaujolais Cookbook
Recipes from the Iconic Mendocino Restaurant
Julian Lopez
Daniela S. Tallman, photographer
The Collective Book Studio
Hardcover $35.00 (304pp)
978-1-68555-523-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Featuring lush photography and innovative recipes, Chef Julian Lopez’s The New Cafe Beaujolais Cookbook captures the history and ambiance of a popular Northern California restaurant.
Highlighting the café’s fifty-year history, the cookbook includes dishes that showcase Lopez’s “elegant but approachable” style, as well as classic recipes contributed by Margaret Fox, who owned the café for twenty-three years. Recipes from the two chefs are sometimes paired together. For example, Fox’s rustic Black Bean Chili, which captivated Julia Child in the 1980s, is followed by Lopez’s updated version using cocoa powder and chipotle cream.
The book combines Asian, Mexican, and Middle Eastern influences with a California farm-to-table focus. Breakfast items include Shakshuka, an inventive North African egg dish, and baked goods including Buttermilk Cinnamon Coffee Cake. Lunch dishes focus on salads, including a tempting Vietnamese Shrimp Salad, and thin-crust pizzas, including a creative rendition with spinach-basil pesto, lemon zest, and snap peas. Dinner options include Chinese Five-Spice Duck Breast and Mexican-style Pork and Hominy Soup.
Most of the recipes are straightforward. The fantastic Mendocino Fish Stew, for instance, relies on common pantry items, while recipes for butternut squash soup, pumpkin muffins, and halibut in parchment are simple and flavorful. “Stretch” recipes for ambitious cooks include an exquisite Cioppino and the chef’s signature Black Cod with Agnolotti, Beets, Bok Choy, and Truffle-Madeira Sauce.
The book is packed with gorgeous photographs of the dishes, as well as of the café and its verdant gardens. Sidebars profile local farms that supply its eggs, heirloom produce, and other ingredients. Throughout, Lopez includes helpful tips, as for achieving an extraordinary Pasta Bolognese, based on his work at admired restaurants in Italy and San Francisco.
Loaded with imaginative recipes for entertaining or for everyday use, The New Café Beaujolais Cookbook has the makings of a modern classic.
KRISTEN RABE (December 18, 2025)
The Little Girl and the Rain
Milena Lukesova
Jan Kudlacek, illustrator
Albatros Media
Hardcover $18.95 (36pp)
978-800007619-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Enchanting and poetic, this picture book suggests a new way to look at rainy days. A lonely girl is caught in the rain on her way home; she rushes inside, but the rain searches for her. The rain is rebuffed at every turn—until it finds the girl, dressed in a raincoat and splashing in a puddle. Other rain-loving creatures join in as colorful, layered raindrops fall on geese, frogs, and flowers before turning to a spray of rainbows in the sun.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (December 18, 2025)
The Unravelling of Ou
Hollay Ghadery
Palimpsest Press
Softcover $19.95 (200pp)
978-1-997508-09-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
A first-time grandmother reckons with the ways she retreated from herself in Hollay Ghadery’s melancholy but hopeful novel The Unraveling of Ou.
Minoo’s strict, conservative mother ingrained in her the belief that she was shameful, in body and mind. After being exiled to live in Canada with a relative, attending university, and getting married and raising her daughter, Minoo remains separate from herself, expressing herself through homemade sock puppets. When Ecology Paul, Minoo’s first puppet, accompanies Minoo to the maternity ward to meet her grandchild, Minoo’s daughter banishes them. On the drive from the hospital, Ecology Paul helps Minoo pore over her life and consider taking control of it at last.
“Ou” is a genderless Farsi pronoun that Ecology Paul uses to describe themselves. In poetic and lyrical language, Ecology Paul traces Minoo’s life from childhood to present, revealing her vulnerabilities with an unflinching yet empathetic eye. Through Ecology Paul, Minoo’s relationships with her mother figures are rendered with startling clarity. She neither assigns blame nor grants absolution, but illustrates the ways in which they failed, enabled, and tried to encourage her.
Farsi words pepper the narrative, which loops upon itself as Minoo, through her puppet, reflects on how she arrived at this moment. Even as she uses the puppet to avoid her identity struggles, she uses them to process her emotions and communicate through dissociative periods. Ecology Paul is proof of Minoo’s distrust of herself and disengagement with her body. The book’s subtle reveals of her repeating patterns and of Minoo’s fragmented self-image solidify into a portrait of a woman on the brink of either total emotional collapse or complete transformation.
The Unraveling of Ou is an insightful novel about personhood, emotional well-being, and the often fraught relationships between mothers and daughters.
DONTANá MCPHERSON-JOSEPH (December 18, 2025)
An Enchanted World
The Shared Religious Landscape of Late Antiquity
Michael L. Satlow
Princeton University Press
Hardcover $35.00 (360pp)
978-0-691-25659-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
In Michael L. Satlow’s rigorous religious study, the daily practices of Late Antiquity faiths, set in a world alive with the supernatural, reveal the shared experiences of human beings negotiating the divine realm.
Focusing on Late Antiquity (200-600 CE), the book is a rich compare-and-contrast of believers’ worlds, whether they followed the Greek and Roman pantheon of gods or the Christian or Jewish traditions. Satlow’s two primary observations are that evidence of the supernatural was ubiquitous in Late Antiquity, to the extent that it was difficult to distinguish between Christians, Jews, and so-called pagans based on the ways each interacted with the invisible world. In this view, quotidian spiritual practices to maintain favorable relationships with the supernatural—sacrifices, rituals, amulets, and astrology—reveal how ancient peoples’ hopes and fears might challenge religious boundaries and rigid doctrine today.
With a cogent structure, drilling down from large categories of religion, identity, and ethnicity into the detailed landscape of individual experience, Satlow employs a thoughtful lens that shifts the frame away from groups and institutions and centers it on flesh-and-blood people. Through this refreshing approach, Satlow makes effective use of archaeological evidence and historical documents to tell the story of a world that “crackled with the energy of the supernatural.”
With fascinating detours into the spiritual practices of Christians, Jews, and the waning followers of Greek and Roman gods, Satlow also engages with the “literate elite” of Jewish rabbis and Church Fathers (St. Augustine features throughout) whose writings form the bulk of his sources. The academic-speak makes this book a good fit for specialists, and its arguments make room for more tolerance and empathy among religious people of varying faiths.
Heady and magical at once, the religious survey An Enchanted World issues an unapologetic, humanizing vision of a transformative period, showing how ancient spiritualism still has much to teach modern believers.
PEGGY KURKOWSKI (December 18, 2025)
Kathy Young
