Book of the Day Roundup: March 16-20, 2026
Residual
Tisa Bryant
Nightboat Books
Softcover $19.95 (272pp)
978-1-64362-296-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Queer Black author and professor Tisa Bryant’s bold, inventive autobiographical essay collection is about memory, grief, home, and belonging.
The hybrid essays combine poetry, stream-of-consciousness prose, scraps of dialogue, lists of favorite books, quotations, handwritten notes, and old family snapshots. Fragmentary passages capture the unresolved complexity of Bryant’s thoughts and feelings: “my penchant for narratives and story assembled from pieces, associations, pointillism and accretion…stems from the life-puzzle of my mother’s story.” Indeed, enigmatic, powerful essays address Bryant’s work to come to terms with her mother’s life and death. Bryant experienced complex, conflicting emotions of guilt, rage, sadness, and joy, admiring her mother’s strength, artistic sensibility, and stoic suffering while also feeling the sting of neglect: her mother was “an infernal insect…exhorting against the pest I always felt myself to be.”
Also described is Bryant’s work to gain acceptance and success as a professor, researcher, and writer. Her full-time faculty position was marred by discrimination, including a colleague’s racial slur. A five-month position at a writing program in Iowa had better results, as did a fascinating commission from the Huntington Library to research and write about Octavia E. Butler. Indeed, the book often cites Butler and other Black feminist writers who influenced Bryant.
The writing becomes more cohesive as Bryant contemplates “a hidden thing left for me to find.” Emotional and physical interiors often intertwine; the teal and chartreuse “space age” living room of Bryant’s childhood home reflects her mother’s elegant taste and determination, “rich with Black aliveness.” Elsewhere, the “fabled” stone house in Barbados that her great-grandfather built by hand encapsulates an exotic fantasy of the past.
Featuring experimental prose and poignant insights, this autobiographical essay collection concerns the messy processes of mourning and self-acceptance, as well as the challenges posed by racism.
KRISTEN RABE (February 27, 2026)
City Like Water
Dorothy Tse
Natascha Bruce, translator
Graywolf Press
Softcover $16.00 (112pp)
978-1-64445-375-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
In Dorothy Tse’s striking, surreal novella City Like Water, a person navigates a contorted reality in a nameless city.
An unnamed narrator experiences displacement, both in memory and space. They recall the top bunk they once slept in and the secret crevice it offered. This recollection leads to further reflections on their city and on their unreliable memory: The streets are no longer visible on any map, because “the world decided for itself” to remove them.
Throughout, allegories of censorship and an unreliable reality dominate. Governmental authorities play a role in the city’s life. For example, as the Department of Health institutes changes in a wet market, the “Law,” personified as a genderless agent, strikes fear into the narrator’s neighbors. The motif of a bleeding lotus root returns throughout.
Told in brief vignettes, with some chapters spanning as few as three pages, the plot is loose and eschews deep characterization. People, like the city’s streets, disappear without notice, die, or are replaced. Momentum is carried through images, tones, and allegorical suggestions instead. The prose is melancholic and detached, reflecting implicit fearfulness and desensitization.
The narrator seems haunted by the sound of bodies thudding, but rather than prompt them to investigate, the sound carries their mind to varieties of coral in the city’s sea and their teacher, who disappeared. A man approaches the narrator on the subway, having patched his broken neck with all-purpose glue, and asks if it will heal if he returns home. The narrator, uncomfortable and reluctant to engage, returns home and helps him navigate the subway system he once had memorized.
City Like Water is a captivating novel with memorable, grotesque visions of the distorted reality of living under an authoritarian government.
MIKE GOOD (February 27, 2026)
Stars Align
Kristina Kaufman
Notable Kids Publishing
Hardcover $18.95 (32pp)
979-898959042-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Painterly and poetic, this picture book follows a girl as she chases her dreams and finds new friends. Fascinated by the stars, she undertakes a trip to see a whole new sky; she arrives in New Zealand, where she meets fellow “star seekers” and forms fast, enduring friendships. Dreamy illustrations follow the girl’s mystical journey through dark forests, over tall mountains, and across the sea, riding trains, horses, and a paper airplane along the way.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (February 27, 2026)
The Witch of Prague
J. M. Sidorova
Homeward Books
Softcover $24.00 (388pp)
979-899942490-7
In J. M. Sidorova’s propulsive fantasy novel The Witch of Prague, a girl unravels political scandals amid discoveries of her own mystical abilities.
In the late 1960s in Prague, Alica is on the cusp of adulthood. Craving independence from her mother and wrathful stepfather, she answers an ad for lessons in stenography and typewriting in exchange for “light housework” for austere, mysterious Pani Agáta. She also secures a job at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and becomes entangled in its power struggles among corrupt, abusive men. All the while, Pani Agáta trains Alica in relation to a unicorn-hunt tapestry that hangs in her home.
Alica’s narration is breathtaking. As she faces daily troubles, her views of the world are variously whimsical, gritty, and hopeful. Elements of political thrillers, works of magical realism, and dark fairy tales wend into her coming-of-age story: Alica rages against the systems that seek to possess or silence her and others. The book’s magic is nonetheless subtle, so quick that Alica often doubts if it’s real at all: an expansive series of dreams involving a hunt and a mysterious man, a shifting in the tapestry’s art, a persuasion with someone in power, all spied via elusive flourishes that blur the line between fantasy and reality.
The abuses that Alica and the women around her endure at the hands of men in power are unyielding, and the Ministry operates with toxic, unfettered duplicity. This darkness is tempered by the relationships Alica forms within her community. Kind, generous people live in Pani Agáta’s building, including Pan Kaska; the son of Pan Kaska, Vasek; and Alica herself, who takes joy in observing the world around her.
A profound novel about a fearless girl, The Witch of Prague celebrates inner strength and magic.
NATALIE WOLLENZIEN (February 27, 2026)
Spellbound by Murder
A Mystic Hollow Bookshop Mystery
Stacie Ramey
Crooked Lane Books
Softcover $29.99 (336pp)
979-889242412-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
In Stacie Ramey’s cozy mystery novel Spellbound by Murder, a single mother and her teenage daughter return to their family bookstore, facing murder and magical secrets.
Veronica and Phoebe leave Florida for Mystic Hollow to help Gran at her aging bookstore, where Veronica spent summers as a child. En route, Veronica hears from Almira, a rival bookseller who hints at trouble with Gran’s store, which is set to host a literary festival. Once in town, she notices inexplicable changes in the bookstore, including a self-healing roof leak and extraordinary upticks in inventory. She thinks that Phoebe, Gran, and Kim, a store employee, are hiding something, and she wonders about the town’s magic.
Veronica also becomes the festival lead. When the keynote cancels, she recruits a famous but controversial author as a replacement. The festival opens to enthusiastic attendees, vendors, and the author’s rousing speech. Not long after, he is dead, and Veronica is the suspect. Searching for the real killer, she rediscovers her ability to trust and realizes that she and Phoebe are home.
Veronica, a writer with ADHD and a single mother, has little interest in romance; her relationship with Mack, the sheriff who works at his sister’s diner and offers vegan specialties to Phoebe, is refreshing. Phoebe, who had no real friends in Florida, buddies up with Kim, bonds with Gran, and sometimes parents her mother. Several women in their seventies are among the centered cast, including Gran and a librarian, Cassandra—depicted as active, fashionable, and culturally aware, saying “Good thinking, you” and “slide into his DMs.” The bookstore itself, referred to as “she,” and the magic of the town vivify the story further.
A delightful cozy mystery novel, Spellbound by Murder follows difficult situations that deepen family relationships and foster true friendships.
LYNNE JENSEN LAMPE (February 27, 2026)
Kathy Young
