Book of the Day Roundup: May 19-23, 2025
Somewhere Past the End
Alexandria Faulkenbury
Apprentice House Press
Softcover $21.99 (272pp)
978-1-62720-561-0
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Soon-to-be mothers struggle with cult brainwashing in Alexandria Faulkenbury’s question-filled novel Somewhere Past the End.
Disowned after her teenage pregnancy, Teresa finds a new family with Richmond and his alternative religious group, the Collective. Years later, Teresa’s daughter Alice is pregnant against Richmond’s orders. She intends to escape the Collective while the cult members gather to be uplifted to heaven. She is forestalled when she witnesses the group disappear into thin air, leaving her behind. In the aftermath, Alice must decide whether to lead a second Homecoming with her childhood friend Edwin.
The book is ever compassionate and nonjudgmental toward those under the sway of cults. Depictions of Teresa’s frustration and stress as an impoverished teenage mother, as when she cries about losing quarters for laundry, are heartfelt and vulnerable. When she makes the flawed choice to trust Richmond’s initial charitable generosity, it’s sympathetic. Why people stay in cults is considered with similar nuance and empathy. Teenage Alice explains, “Maybe I hate it here, but it’s still my home”; adult Alice is protective of the remaining Collective members despite Richmond’s flagrant abuses.
Intimate in portraying abuse, trauma, and motherhood, the narrative overflows with grief and loss. Revisiting her now-abandoned childhood home on the Collective farm, adult Alice laments, “I feel like that same little girl, small and unsure of myself.” Throughout, Richmond’s villainy is diabolical, looming, and terrifying. He uses shame, lies, breadcrumbs of approval, and former fond memories to amass power. The genuine kindness of strangers is touching, and Alice’s relationship with Edwin, an always zealous supporter of the Collective, adds interpersonal suspense. She cannot help considering Edwin a friend despite his mind games.
Struggling against cult leaders, mothers fight to protect their daughters in the mournful novel Somewhere Past the End.
ISABELLA ZHOU (April 21, 2025)
The Phone Booth in Mr. Hirota’s Garden
Heather Smith
Rachel Wada, illustrator
Orca Book Publishers
Softcover $14.95 (32pp)
978-1-4598-3570-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Inspired by the true story of a personal art piece that became a comfort to thousands, this heart-wrenching picture book includes an age-appropriate portrayal of grief. Makio and Mr. Hirota make a game of watching for Makio’s father and Mr. Hirota’s daughter to return with the morning catch—until both are lost to a tsunami. When Mr. Hirota builds a nonfunctional phone booth to help him grieve his daughter, it offers Makio a way to begin his own healing, too.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (April 21, 2025)
Wednesday Night Wine-Down
52 Drinks for Low-Alcohol Midweek Sipping
Jennifer Newens
The Collective Book Studio
Hardcover $19.95 (152pp)
978-1-68555-929-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Wednesday Night Wine-Down trips through the calendar with hump day highlights of low-alcohol cocktails to lubricate you through to the weekend. Recipes and informative tips are complemented by numerous color photographs to benefit the novice bartender.
While wines feature in many of these creative cocktails, some contain spirits; each drink is a low alcohol-by-volume concoction. Wine replaces one or more spirits in revisions of traditional recipes, and the original cocktails are wine-forward. Useful advice on selecting barware, glassware, fashioning eye-catching garnishes, and descriptions of various wine types guide cocktail-makers throughout, while sidebars about making flavored simple syrups and fruit purees also make the creation of these weekly cocktails engaging and easy to envision.
Seasonal qualities arise as the book moves through the year: spring’s beverages feature delicate herbs, citrus, and fruits, while summer’s garden bounty shimmers in cocktails with deep flavors and colors, like Sherry-Basil Cooler and a remake of the traditional Pimm’s Cup with red zinfandel, ginger beer, and a tri-color garnish of strawberries, cucumber, and mint. Bolder beverages arrive in the autumn, while winter cocktails, both hot and cold, usher in fortifying, festive, and spicy cocktail combinations like the Poinsettia, laced with cranberry juice, triple sec, and sparkling wine.
Wednesday Night Wine-Down is an alluring invitation to start a weekly tradition of enjoying easy to make, elegant low-alcohol cocktails.
RACHEL JAGARESKI (April 21, 2025)
The Wild Dark
Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light
Craig Childs
Torrey House Press
Hardcover $24.95 (212pp)
979-889092018-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In his fascinating travelogue The Wild Dark, Craig Childs goes on a quest to reclaim dark nights.
Childs remembers the mixture of awe and fear he felt under a Colorado night sky when he was five years old. Since then, he’s taken every opportunity to live off-grid and observe the patterns of the moon and stars. Along with his friend Irvin, he embarked on a ten-night mountain-bike ride from Las Vegas into the surrounding desert. Darkness is “historic and political,” he insists, prevalent out west only because millions of acres of public land were stolen from Indigenous people.
Reflecting how the Bortle dark-sky scale ranges from 9 (lightest; includes Vegas) to 1 (darkest), the book’s chapter numbers count from 9 down to 1. As the pair leave civilization behind and rediscover the wonder of a sky brilliant with stars, a sky quality meter is used to confirm their progress. Rich metaphorical language, such as “dusk shakes out its soft, furry tail,” and imaginative turns, such as imagining the sky from a grasshopper’s point of view, play in.
Details of the grueling trip trade off with contextual information. The book marshals ample evidence of the injurious effects of light pollution. Artificial light disrupts circadian rhythms, it notes; night shifts are detrimental, contributing to higher rates of cancer. The natural world, too, suffers grievous harm. Hormonal changes due to excess light cause birds to reproduce too early, before food is available. There are sobering stories of human events causing unwitting devastation. The 9/11 memorial light beams, for instance, attracted thousands of birds, many of whom collided with buildings or died of exhaustion.
Scientific and poetic, The Wild Dark conveys a galvanizing message: Light pollution is the simplest environmental damage to reverse. Just turn the lighting down, or off.
REBECCA FOSTER (April 21, 2025)
Heartcore
Štěpánka Jislová
Martha Kuhlman, translator
Graphic Mundi
Softcover $29.95 (236pp)
978-1-63779-090-8
Buy: Amazon
Štěpánka Jislová’s revelatory graphic memoir Heartcore is about feeling unable to form romantic connections.
From a young age, Jislová felt different from other girls. She dealt with her insecurities by pursuing boys, thinking “if I found someone, it meant I wasn’t ugly.” After a number of brief, unfulfilling relationships, she developed a drinking problem. She also entered into a long-term relationship, but neither party felt committed to the other.
Forced to confront the origins of her problems, Jislová recalled a sexual assault when she was a teenager and realized that the incident, along with her troubled history with her father, kept her from forming a proper, loving relationship. A temporary change in point of view is used to probe Jislová’s longtime romantic partner, showing how he was damaged in his own way.
The prose is introspective, sometimes poetic: “With my eyes closed … / nothing seems dangerously close … / … or unbearably far.” Such lines are reinforced by complementary images, as of Jislová’s closed eyes, or are juxtaposed to contrary images, as of two hands almost touching. The art is inventive too: Flowcharts illustrate dysfunctional, destructive relationship cycles. A list of books and additional resources acts as a bridge for those who identify with the problems analyzed in the book.
Heartcore is a searing graphic memoir about sexual assault, the lingering damage it causes, and recovery.
PETER DABBENE (April 21, 2025)
Kathy Young
