Book of the Day Roundup: January 5-9, 2026
Making It Up
A Revolutionary Way to Bond with Kids Through Play
Christopher Mannino
Cory Reid, illustrator
Familius
Softcover $18.99 (224pp)
979-889396006-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Practical tips for imaginative play sessions fill Making It Up, former theater teacher Christopher Mannino’s fun, inspiring parenting guide.
Mannino’s method is simple: he recommends that parents schedule daily ten-minute playtimes with their children, following a few easy rules to make those sessions inventive and energetic. Parents, the book says, should think of a child’s creative ideas as “bricks” that build on each other. Using encouraging phrases like “yes, and…” can lead to “magic-filled adventure,” while asking questions or trying too hard to plan ahead discourages spontaneity.
The book includes dozens of examples of effective play, as with a “wonderful” imaginary expedition after Mannino’s son proposed that they “take a hitchhiker from Mercury to Mars.” In another instance, Mannino’s daughter intermittently “freezes” him as a snowman during a grocery shopping trip, entertaining their family and other shoppers.
Numerous prompts and tools are presented to encourage brainstorming and to “unlock” the joy of being silly, as with using wild hand gestures and funny voices. The book also acknowledges that everyday obstacles and stresses can complicate parenting; it recommends that people avoid “doom scrolling” and make efforts to stay positive, even in the face of difficult news. The psychological technique of using “anchors” (strong, positive memories) is suggested to deal with difficult emotions and regulate moods.
Refreshing, exuberant, and levelheaded, the book includes sound advice on engaging children who are reluctant to play, encouraging neurodivergent children, fostering creativity within groups, setting boundaries, and applying parenting concepts to older children and teenagers. It asserts that, in addition to improving playtime and strengthening bonds between parents and children, theater “can actually help heal.”
Making It Up is a delightful, accessible parenting guide with recommendations for incorporating creativity, respect, and wonder into playtime.
KRISTEN RABE (December 18, 2025)
Ever Since We Small
Celeste Mohammed
Ig Publishing
Softcover $18.95 (224pp)
978-1-63246-176-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Generations of women wrestle with an inherited legacy of trauma in Celeste Mohammed’s sprawling novel-in-stories Ever Since We Small.
Split into two sections, “Then” and “Now,” the novel does a masterful job of capturing the nuances of personal and collective histories. It follows an Indo-Caribbean family from 1889 to 2017 in a series of interconnected short stories, beginning with Jayanti, who travels from India to Trinidad to live as an indentured servant after she is charged by her community to commit sati, a ritual self-immolation meant to preserve the honor of her late husband’s family.
In Trinidad, Jayanti’s descendants move through the world marred by historical trauma and contemporary expressions of violence, poverty, shame, and oppression. Proud to be a first-generation Indian immigrant, Jayanti’s grandson Lall nevertheless becomes trapped within the cycles of patriarchal violence responsible for his forebearers’ fates. And his son Shiva takes a child bride whose tragic fate haunts her descendants in the contemporary West Indies.
Although connected by their characters’ ancestral ties and a focus on various manifestations of gender-based violence, the stories are thematically and stylistically diverse. Written in both Standard English and a multitude of forms of Trinidad Kriol, they capture the rich cadences of Caribbean speech and social life. Told from varying perspectives, including in the voice of a forest, the book’s strength is in its various representations of pain, resilience, and self-discovery. Its depictions of violence and tragedy are unflinching. Still, even the most brutal of its characters are rendered with an empathetic eye towards the political and social realities that shape human destinies.
Drawing upon both historical realities and folkloric tradition, Ever Since We Small is a compelling novel built on a tapestry of fractured legacies and spectacular resilience.
BELLA MOSES (December 18, 2025)
The Most Wonderful Gift in the World
Mireia Olivé Obradors
Anastasia Wessex
Angus Yuen-Killick, translator
Red Comet Press
Hardcover $18.99 (32pp)
978-1-63655-168-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Narrated by a mouse pup whose mother’s special day is fast approaching, this heartwarming story is about trying to find the perfect present for the person you love. The young mouse considers a pine cone, a flower, a feather, and a bit of the moon captured on moss, but none of these options make it home in ideal condition. To staunch their tears, their mother reveals the truth: she already has all that she could possibly want. Sweet illustrations in soft pastels mix clear pen lines with watercolor-evocative touches, fleshing out the mice’s lovely natural settings well, including in the blue moonlight.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (December 18, 2025)
Shelter from the Storm
How Climate Change Is Creating a New Era of Migration
Julian Hattem
The New Press
Hardcover $27.99 (272pp)
978-1-62097-847-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Julian Hattem’s Shelter from the Storm is an insightful, sobering overview of the past, present, and future of human movement in the age of climate change. The book’s thesis that “We Have Always Been Climate Migrants” frames migration as a fundamental part of the world’s present and of humanity’s future response to the stressors of climate change.
From the Little Ice Age to the Dust Bowl, the book covers the history, theory, and dynamics of climatological migration as a phenomenon. In doing so, it provides a distinct frame and context for the stories of human suffering, resilience, and hope within.
The text moves seamlessly from historical anecdotes to modern interviews and on-the-ground economic and scientific theory with competence and familiarity. The more narrative aspects of the text, which tell the stories of many people impacted by the changing climate, clash a bit with its more systems-oriented discussions of policy, history, and economics. However, the two support each other well thematically, and the examples of individuals affected by climate change are compelling, as are discussions of decision-making that illuminate the book’s more abstract theories.
It is remarkable how the text manages to discuss the hard realities of immigration, life as a refugee, oppression, genocide, and ecological collapse while still retaining sparks of human joy, collaboration, and ingenuity. As much time is spent discussing the advantages and drawbacks of potential solutions as is given to acknowledging the vastness of the problems themselves. The central topic is treated with nuance throughout, preventing excessive grimness and unrealistic faux-optimism from forming.
Shelter from the Storm is a thoughtful, in-depth study of the nature and consequences of climate change in an increasingly mobile world, and of how ecological shifts will continue to shape human movement in the years to come.
BRENDAN MCKELVY (December 18, 2025)
Always Carry Salt
A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture
Samantha Ellis
Pegasus Books
Hardcover $28.99 (288pp)
979-889710028-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Samantha Ellis’s powerful memoir Always Carry Salt exemplifies diaspora yearning and determination.
Ellis grew up in the United Kingdom, hearing snippets of the Judeo-Iraqi Arabic of her parents and ancestors. By adulthood, though, she was unsure of how to pass her fading milk language on to her son. She joined groups dedicated to learning the language, a remnant of a once-bustling community that had dwindled to a handful of people following vicious displacements, but their members struggled, too: “everything I learned about my language was … contradictions and confusion, shreds and patches.”
Though the prose is steeped in perpetual longing, there is also ferocious joy in Ellis’s accounts of gathering memories from her disperse community. Things carried stories, though people had not been allowed to carry much with them; food, which was “literally easier to swallow than the trauma and political complexity,” nourished her need, too.
The book is flush with edifying historical and cultural context, though Ellis’s love of her community is what lingers most. Barred from visiting the homeland of her parents and ancestors, she writes about longing for tastes that cannot be replicated and about wanting to travel streets she never will. There’s power and poignancy in her essays about rewriting the magic of bowls inscribed with Lilith’s name and of tasting nabug far from where it fruits. And while some aches are impossible to resolve, there’s also hope in Ellis’s presentation of translation being about “working hard to make spaces where we can talk to each other,” and of sharing memories being akin to “caring and repairing from past to future.”
Written with the belief that “sleeping languages can be kissed back to life,” Always Carry Salt is a remarkable memoir about what we pass down and why.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (December 18, 2025)
Kathy Young
