Book of the Day Roundup: November 10-14, 2025
Alyte
Jérémie Moreau
Milky Way Picture Books
Hardcover $26.99 (304pp)
978-1-990252-47-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
An orphaned toad journeys through the natural world in the magnificent graphic novel Alyte.
Alyte is one of many eggs on his father’s back. When his father dies, he is thrown into a harsh but beautiful world. After meeting other animals and facing many dangers, he becomes the leader of a hopeful resistance against the intrusions of humans.
The first scene, in which Alyte’s father is hit by a car, is shocking and serves notice that the version of nature on display won’t be a sanitized one. It also shows the determination of Alyte’s father as he struggles off the road to save his children. Indeed, throughout the book, death illuminates the interconnections of different species and the wonders of life and survival.
The perspective is fascinating and nonhuman: Fish see ducks as “liminal feathers,” demigods who live in the sky but come down to eat; to a lizard, the sun is a “yellow marble” and “the best drug in the whole universe.” Alyte is memorable, too, as he demonstrates curiosity, perseverance, and bravery.
The art is magical, with an appealing, simplified style marked by its accuracy in depicting the anatomies of its varied cast. Among the wonderful images is a moving two-page spread featuring fifty-six individual panels capturing the memories of a dying tree. Sound is prominent and immersive as well, through stylized lettering indicating the “shh” of water as salmon swim upstream and the “rrr” of a roaring automobile.
Begging for screen adaptation, Alyte is an amazing graphic novel about a toad’s struggles to survive.
PETER DABBENE (October 17, 2025)
Once Upon a You
Keyshawn Johnson
Mona Meslier Menuau, illustrator
Bettina Bush, contributor
Ryan G. Van Cleave, contributor
Bushel & Peck Books
Hardcover $18.99 (32pp)
978-1-63819-232-9
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Children are encouraged to reach for the stars no matter what gets in their way in this inspirational picture book from Super Bowl champion Keyshawn Johnson. A diverse cast of children dig up dinosaurs, blast off into space, paint murals, score touchdowns, and do whatever else they want to, writing their unique stories “of you.” Colorful stars serve as a motif throughout the illustrations, a visual representation of the magic of childhood dreams and imagination.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (October 17, 2025)
Carnaval Fever
Yuliana Ortiz Ruano
Madeleine Arenivar, translator
Soft Skull Press
Hardcover $27.00 (208pp)
978-1-59376-809-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
A percipient girl narrates her tumultuous life experiences in Carnaval Fever, Yuliana Ortiz Ruano’s lyrical, pulsing novel.
In the 1990s, in Ecuador’s Afro-Ecuadorian neighborhood of Esmeraldas, Ainhoa lives at her grandmother’s house with her extended family. She dislikes playing with other children and prefers the company of her girl relatives; she loves to climb the backyard guava tree and commune with nature. Keen-eyed, Ainhoa dreads the approach of womanhood, having witnessed how mature girls attract men, and how often men bring conflict and abuse.
Narrated from Ainhoa’s garrulous perspective, the novel is peopled with vibrant personalities. Ainhoa’s hardworking father is like “an old car, always puffing smoke and playing music”; her grandmother and great-grandmother are respected midwives, skilled in natural healing. Ainhoa’s grandfather, Papi Chelo, reinforces her fear of adulthood and men; Chelo’s brutal and moralizing domination of his daughters is hypocritical, and he pursues frequent extramarital affairs. He is also predatory towards Ainhoa, sneaking into her bedroom at night with a gun, smelling of “bitter sweat” and “alcoholic breath.”
Beyond Ainhoa’s worries about her impending adolescence, another unstoppable force overwhelms the family: the arrival of Carnaval. The annual celebration is detailed with verve. Swarms of people indulge in the passion of the season. Beyond the raucous joy are episodes of violence, alcoholic excess, and sexual assault. Ecuador’s drug trade and financial crisis intensify its economic disparities, and Ainhoa’s uncle succumbs to a mysterious disease, AIDS.
Written with unsparing sensual velocity, the novel Carnaval Fever is about family and cultural complexities and an exuberant, troubled girlhood. Both anguished and enlivened by the world around her, Ainhoa is a spirited, compelling heroine. Her increasing struggles with her “girl-not-woman body” and muddled mind lead to impulsive defiance leading into the book’s somber, integral conclusion.
MEG NOLA (October 17, 2025)
Devouring Time
Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life
Todd Goddard
Blackstone Publishing
Hardcover $28.99 (350pp)
978-1-79990-236-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Drawing on intimate gossip and rigorous critical scholarship, Todd Goddard’s Devouring Time is the first full-scale biography of Jim Harrison, the mold-breaking and large-living man of letters who transformed the literary landscape of his time.
Harrison, as the book outlines, cut an unusual figure in the world of twentieth-century American literature. A lifelong skeptic of the MFA pipeline through which so many of his peers made their writing careers, Harrison sought and achieved a far wider audience for his work than most literary writers of his time could expect. Although Harrison considered himself a poet above all else, Devouring Time details his unorthodox route to literary stardom, tracing his early successes with sports journals and food columns and his explosive career as a Hollywood screenwriter. The book collects countless interviews and anecdotes to describe how, while moving through these disparate literary circles, Harrison crafted a mythologized self-image for himself as an omnivorous, hard-partying Renaissance man, though also bristling against disappointments with his literary legacy.
Exhaustive in every way that matters, the book reveals the often frustrating circularity of Harrison’s personal habits. After establishing his rise to prominence, it follows its subject from one boozy fishing retreat, cocaine-fueled “research” trip, and culinary gorge-fest to another. Such excursions are mapped onto larger thematic throughlines that connect, for example, Harrison’s excesses with his creative processes and his lifelong apprehension about being locked out of coastal literary establishments. The text also achieves a rare level of intimacy from its masterful incorporation of Harrison’s sometimes jovial, often agonized, letters to writers including Denise Levertov and Thomas McGuane, who were paramount to his artistic development.
Devouring Time is a meticulous, loving biography of one of the twentieth century’s most exuberant literary personalities.
ISAAC RANDEL (October 17, 2025)
Revolutions Are Made of Love
The Story of James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs
Mélina Mangal
Sun Yung Shin
Leslie Barlow, illustrator
Carolrhoda Books
Hardcover $18.99 (40pp)
979-876561152-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Sun Yung Shin and Mélina Mangal’s innovative dual biography Revolutions Are Made of Love, combines paired poems with beautiful illustrations.
Activists James and Grace Lee Boggs built a lasting social justice and civil rights movement in Detroit, where they met as adults and married. Poetic treatments of their parallel stories of growing up, finding work, and developing their interest in social issues appear: Grace’s story begins in Providence, Rhode Island. She was the daughter of Chinese immigrants who needed to overcome discrimination to open a restaurant. James’s starts four years later in Alabama. He was the grandson of enslaved Americans and spent much of his childhood working to help his family get by. After Grace and James worked on a labor newspaper together, they teamed up for good.
The prose poems are accessible and clear, with a pleasant cadence and beauty. The two activists are well distinguished by the poets’ differing treatments of them, mirroring how the couple used their particular experiences to inform programs like Detroit Summer for teenage activists and Detroiters for Dignity to set aside food and other resources for elderly neighbors.
The illustrations are also outstanding throughout, with bright colors and rich details. An image of James working in a busy Detroit factory during World War II evokes the era’s Thomas Hart Benton paintings, while another of Grace being told to vacate a train seat evokes the experience of Rosa Parks. Other images deepen their characterizations, as with a beautiful painting of young Grace seeing a famous Asian actress onscreen.
Revolutions Are Made of Love is a creative dual biography in poems—a meaningful story about love and partnership.
JEFF FLEISCHER (October 17, 2025)
Kathy Young
