Book of the Day Roundup: June 23-27, 2025
The Tiny Things Are Heavier
Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo
Bloomsbury Publishing
Hardcover $28.99 (288pp)
978-1-63973-410-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
An immigrant contends with alienation and love in Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo’s spirited novel The Tiny Things Are Heavier.
Nigerian Sommy is a graduate student in Iowa, though she’s ambivalent about the virtues of the American dream. She rooms with boisterous Bayo—also from Nigeria—and hides her guilt over her brother Meizie’s recent suicide attempt. She tries to fit in with her classmates, experimenting with clothes and copying their intellectual pretensions. Still, she knows that she’s an outsider. Comfort sex somewhat alleviates her loneliness but also leads to a misunderstanding.
Sommy is an introspective heroine. For her, homesickness leads to malaise, but it is also a potent reminder of who she is. Studying overseas is a form of exile but also a chance to unearth her strength.
After Sommy meets Bryan, a biracial writer whose Nigerian father left his family, she travels with him to Lagos on an extended break. This sparks the duo to reckon with the strength of their bond. In Lagos, Sommy—a daughter who chose to move away—is buffeted by her family’s opinions: She is treated as both a success story and someone who betrayed her roots.
Lagos is a shimmering, cacophonous backdrop for Sommy’s tale—a place of contrasts and culture. A manslaughter and a lie about its perpetrator add themes of justice and privilege to the story. Amid this tangle, Sommy’s perceptions about her loved ones bloom into clearer awareness of whom she needs to prioritize most to survive.
The Tiny Things Are Heavier is a piercing coming-of-age novel in which a woman learns to separate other people’s expectations from her own desires.
KAREN RIGBY (April 21, 2025)
Bringing the Beach Home
Laura Atkins
Evgenia Penman, illustrator
The Collective Book Studio
Hardcover $18.95 (40pp)
978-1-68555-836-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
A child uses creativity to find comfort within the changes of divorce in this gentle picture book. Rowan is tired of traveling between Mom’s house and Dad’s; nowhere feels like home anymore. A surprise beach day gets off to a rough start, but nature calms Rowan’s stormy attitude. With Dad’s help, Rowan finds a way to hold onto that feeling of home. Vibrant illustrations apply multiple techniques to evoke the textures of a beach day, from flowing water to rough sand.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (April 21, 2025)
One of the Boys
Victoria Zeller
Levine Querido
Hardcover $19.99 (344pp)
978-1-64614-502-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Victoria Zeller’s humorous coming-of-age novel One of the Boys follows a transgender teenager’s changing relationship with the football team she left behind.
Grace, a high school senior, gives football one more chance after quitting last year to transition. She contends with transphobia from all sides and balances her social life between her football friends and her new, queer girl friends. As Grace goes through her senior year, she struggles with her new identity while enjoying aspects of her pretransition life—including attention from her ex-girlfriend, Zoe.
The phenomenal characterizations of Grace, her friends, and members of the football team make the novel special. Most people in the cast are well-meaning, too. Truck, a big guy with a big heart on the team, speaks to Grace with earnest simplicity, asking blunt questions about her transition while trying his best to understand. Tab, a bisexual theater kid who was the first to support Grace’s transition, denounces sports altogether, prompting Grace to wonder if she is the “right kind of queer.”
Despite the adversity Grace faces, the story is light and full of humor. Grace herself is prone to hilarious observations, such as that “Diet Coke tastes like robot sweat.” The football team has their own language—when they want to talk seriously, they invoke “feelingsball.” There are flawed personalities on the team, but it’s heartwarming to see the effort the jocks go through to ensure that Grace fits in. Indeed, the conflict between Grace’s queerness and her love for football culminates in a dramatic climax, leading to a satisfying conclusion.
Laced with humor and hope, One of the Boys is an exceptional coming-of-age novel about a trans girl forging her own identity while playing on her high school’s football team.
LEAH BLOCK (April 21, 2025)
The Enduring Wild
A Journey into California’s Public Lands
Josh Jackson
Heyday
Hardcover $38.00 (264pp)
978-1-59714-675-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
The Enduring Wild is Josh Jackson’s captivating portrayal of California wilderness under the Bureau of Land Management, including large wilderness areas in the Mojave Desert, Eastern Sierra, and the Lost Coast.
The Bureau of Land Management manages 245 million acres across western states and Alaska, and this book documents the degradation of Bureau land through overgrazing and unchecked extraction of coal, gas, oil, and various minerals. Bureau lands are important, it says, because they are “refuges of sanity and solace” that provide sanctuary to biodiversity and help alleviate the impacts of a warming planet. A visit to Bodie Hill, for instance, uncovers upheaval and toxic waste at an abandoned gold mine. The book also cites the impacts of climate change on desert ecosystems and populations of coho and Chinook salmon.
Jackson describes his adventures traversing rutted gravel roads and remote trails on land across the state. These parcels are often described as “leftover lands” that weren’t suitable for homesteading, weren’t profitable enough to interest businesses, and weren’t attractive enough to be designated as a national park or forest. Jackson asserts, however, that these lands are “a gift of seismic proportions” that possess a “subtle” beauty. With “the contemplative steps of a pilgrim,” he observes quiet splendor in a moonrise over desert mesas, the delicate red flowers of an ocotillo, and a surprise sighting of a northern spotted owl in the King Range. Ninety spectacular color photographs showcase dramatic views of snowy mountain peaks, wild rivers, barren deserts, and dazzling shorelines while dozens of illustrations, rendered in striking earth tones, depict local plants and animals.
The Enduring Wild is a breathtaking tribute to the threatened California public lands that many people overlook.
KRISTEN RABE (April 21, 2025)
Soul Machine
Jordana Globerman
Annick Press
Softcover $17.99 (228pp)
978-1-77321-959-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
In Jordana Globerman’s ambitious graphic novel Soul Machine, a girl tries to protect a family business that supplies souls.
After the disappearance of their father, Chloe and Lacey continue the family trade, spinning souls from a substance called breth. With real breth difficult to acquire, MCorp introduces Digibreth, an artificial replacement. Chloe travels to find more breth and meets the Nuspiritualists, a group protesting MCorp. Then Chloe meets Maya, the CEO of MCorp, who wants to find Morris, Chloe’s father. Lacey and Chloe are transported to their father’s secret hideout, where Chloe finds a way to save the dying breth crops—at a steep cost.
The art uses a limited color palette to indicate moods and settings and powerful techniques to emphasize emotion, as with a page split down the middle showing Chloe and Lacey worrying about each other. Fantasy elements are evident, such as the giant flying insects that transport the Nuspiritualists.
The story has a dreamy quality; it’s surreal and surprising in pleasing ways. Chloe is exposed to contrary viewpoints that challenge her, and no one is without flaws. When asked to side with either the Nuspiritualists or Maya, Chloe replies with hard-won wisdom: “Neither of you care about souls … just your own ideologies.”
Soul Machine is a compelling graphic novel about a girl’s quest to save her family and the world.
PETER DABBENE (April 21, 2025)
Kathy Young
