Book of the Day Roundup: July 7-11, 2025
Nursery Rhymes in Black
Latorial Faison
University of Alaska Press
Softcover $16.95 (84pp)
978-1-64642-727-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Poetry must come from somewhere that is more than the sum of family, race, education, history, culture, gender, pain, and passion. Every poet, of course, draws on as much, but why is it that so many Black women poets’ where-from place is more compelling? Their language and observations more forceful? A Pushcart nominee and Tom Howard Poetry Prize winner, Latorial Faison’s southern Virginia childhood, the memories of oppressed ancestors she memorializes, and her acute sense of the Black American experience all ground her work in a singular place. She teaches creative writing and English at Virginia State University.
Sunrise Service
For as long as Mama lived
there had always been an Easter Sunday
morning in a Black church.Pink, yellow, magenta & teal dresses
matching hair ribbons, Shirley Temple curls
five & dime store barrettesBlack patent leather shoes, bobby socks,
sunrise service with sausage, eggs, grits, bacon, or ham
that somebody like Mama, Mr. Will-B, or Mrs. Emma Lou cookedSunday school & staring at my reflection
in my black patent leather shoes—
the prettiest things I thought I ever ownedThe Savior was risen, the food was blessed
We all ate, drank & went out into our own
Mount of Olives again.
MATT SUTHERLAND (June 22, 2025)
Sato the Rabbit
Morning Light
Yuki Ainoya
Michael Blaskowsky, translator
Enchanted Lion
Hardcover $17.95 (40pp)
978-1-59270-439-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
This painterly picture book follows a rabbit on a reality-bending adventure that makes magic of the everyday. A sliver of light shines between the curtains into Sato’s room; he plucks it free and uses it to stir his morning coffee. Soft lines and rich colors form soothing illustrations that track Sato collecting dappled sunshine from the forest floor and making a drink of stars before using the last of his light to ignite dewdrops and build a bed of glowing mushrooms.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (June 22, 2025)
The World Inside
Jan Fields
Jolly Fish Press
Softcover $9.99 (160pp)
978-1-63163-956-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
In Jan Fields’s stirring horror novel The World Inside, a teenager discovers that her comatose aunt could trap ghosts in paintings.
Tamika could be spending the summer in Paris with her best friends, but her mother dragged her to Virginia instead. There, her Aunt Lati is in a coma. Tamika shrugs off a neighbor’s assertion that Lati’s house is haunted, but the shadowy figures she sees moving in the paintings hanging in her home suggest that the rumors may be true. To help awaken Lati from the coma, Tamika puts her own developing art skills to use.
Tamika’s discoveries in Lati’s house compile at breakneck pace, amping up the thrills with each flash of movement in a mirror or portrait’s mouth opening to speak. Her empathy and curiosity push her to learn more about Lati’s paintings in spite of her fear. Her budding acceptance that she is more like her determined mother than she’d prefer adds an endearing layer to her personality.
This Hi-Lo text refuses to preclude eloquence and vibrancy. Succinct, picturesque language creates arresting imagery, as when a tree is encased in a “burden of vines,” and strengthens characterizations: “Whenever Mom faced anything tough, she took it on as if she were storming a castle.” Tamika loves walking because it brings her “closer to the world,” a straightforward yet revealing statement whose exactness says more about what’s important to Tamika than a paragraph could. And in their emotive conversations, what goes unsaid defines Tamika’s and her mother’s feelings about each other as much as what they say.
The World Inside is a chilling supernatural novel in which a girl wields her love of art as a tool to help ghosts move on.
AIMEE JODOIN (June 22, 2025)
Second Shift
Kit Anderson
Avery Hill Publishing
Softcover $18.99 (160pp)
978-1-917355-20-9
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A terraformer struggles to recognize what’s real in Kit Anderson’s introspective science fiction graphic novel Second Shift.
Birdie works for Terracorp at an outpost where crew members are “dropped-in” to a patented Dreamspace between shifts. When they’re needed to harvest asteroids diverted toward their base, they are “dropped-out” of the AI and algorithmic stasis. Station, the outpost’s AI companion, appears in the form of various animals, guiding Birdie and her sibling Heck through their work and occupying them with algorithmic games and stories. Investigating a mysterious signal, they find what seems to be a separate, abandoned station, setting into motion a process that reveals the dark truth about their mission.
The story is creepy and intriguing but also resonant on an emotional level. Birdie and Heck disagree about the purpose and satisfaction of their lives. Although much of it is “fake,” the world they inhabit seems real; it’s a logical extrapolation from immersive computer-generated distractions. The book raises questions about the role of technology as a mediator between human beings and the cost of smoothing out life’s rough edges.
The art is exceptional, with haunting depictions of the AI-created environments. In addition, creative techniques aid the narrative, like doubled lines to indicate the disorienting, blurred vision effects of dropping-out, or the expository Terracorp entries that provide information through the company’s relentlessly upbeat messaging.
Second Shift is a revelatory graphic novel about a woman navigating the spaces between reality and artifice in deep space.
PETER DABBENE (June 22, 2025)
Sunburn
Chloe Michelle Howarth
Melville House
Softcover $14.99 (288pp)
978-1-68589-211-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Chloe Michelle Howarth’s coming-of-age novel Sunburn simmers with first love, confusion, and quiet rebellion in sun-drenched 1990s Ireland.
Lucy, a restless teenager, lives in Crossmore, Ireland, where “motherhood is the nearest thing to an inherited career” and rigid values govern the community. Her mother’s loud conservatism further steers Lucy toward a coerced future—one marked by meekness. When her close friendship with Susannah evolves into a charged romance the summer before college, Lucy grapples with the obsessive and overwhelming nature of her forbidden longing.
Most of the story is set in 1992, when homosexuality was criminalized in Ireland, extending Lucy’s experience to a broader atmosphere of moral policing: “This is not a forgiving place. The fear of it takes me over. It takes us all over.” Thus, the pair’s romantic pursuit is personal and political—an implicit rebuke of how systemic control shapes identity. As the novel spans her life from age fifteen to twenty, Lucy teeters between tightening her fragile grip on societal norms or self-acceptance.
Lucy’s narration is a poetic victory, fueled by intense, penetrating prose that captures the collision of adolescent emotion from being “pulled in two very different directions.” Her dialogue with others is spare, keeping the focus on her internal world, where unspoken tensions and festered resentments erupt in her monologues. The letters between her and Susannah, peppered throughout each chapter, pulse with subtext and mirror Lucy’s struggle to articulate the truth about her sexuality. Yet by the story’s end, Lucy’s voice matures, offering a reckoning that embraces emotional truth over the hollow comfort of conformity. The backmatter includes reading group questions that probe the book’s themes and character dynamics.
A poignant, slow-burning portrait of queer youth, Sunburn follows a teenage girl’s navigation of desire, identity, and the cost of repression.
BROOKE SHANNON (June 22, 2025)
Kathy Young
