Book of the Day Roundup: November 3-7, 2025
Heaven, West Virginia
Ravi Teixeira
Oni Press
Softcover $19.99 (172pp)
978-1-63715-874-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
A man grapples with the lingering effects of his late father’s homophobia in Ravi Teixeira’s graphic novel Heaven, West Virginia.
After his father’s death, Lamont arrives in the Appalachian town of Heaven to stay with his aunt, Latoya. As Lamont receives visions of a lupine creature, his aunt puts him to work helping her make teas and other concoctions. He meets Coyote, a handsome resident, and pursues a romantic relationship, coming to terms with his sexual orientation and his father’s past as the leader of an anti-gay group. Identifying his visions as ghosts of his father, he is able to put the past to rest and move forward with Coyote.
The book incorporates local flavor, as well as elements of Aunt Latoya’s tea business, including recipes for Mint and Blueberry Iced Tea, Ginger Chamomile Tea, and a “World-Famous Love Potion.” In addition, Lamont’s foraging expeditions include entertaining, informative insights into plants and fungi. These elements, along with Lamont’s complicated past and the ghost-wolf threat, make the book engrossing from the start.
The book makes extended use of symbols and metaphors too: its art utilizes a raw, visceral, gripping style for the ghost-wolf scenes, while other images play on religious iconography in interesting ways, as with the climactic “crucifixion” of the ghost-wolf. The romance between Lamont and Coyote develops in an organic way, and a sexual encounter is depicted using both direct and metaphorical images.
Heaven, West Virginia is a quirky, emotional graphic novel in which a young man learns to accept himself and cast aside his father’s negative influence.
PETER DABBENE (October 17, 2025)
My Gender, My Rules
Andy Passchier
Little Bee Books
Hardcover $14.99 (32pp)
978-1-4998-1812-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
A primer on all things gender, this affirming picture book offers understanding and education for readers of all ages. The book covers gender identities, pronouns, and different ways of expressing gender, from haircuts to footwear, while clarifying that one’s interests, hobbies, and other forms of expression do not define one’s gender. Throughout, the language centers how a child feels rather than their physical appearance, as with “I feel confident when I dress up,” creating a welcoming environment for children to learn and explore.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (October 17, 2025)
Roam
Wild Animals and the Race to Repair Our Fractured World
Hillary Rosner
Patagonia
Hardcover $32.00 (358pp)
978-1-952338-31-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Hillary Rosner’s fascinating, lively nature book Roam describes global conservation initiatives focused on connecting the planet’s ecosystems.
In this engaging and wide-ranging book, Rosner considers the movement of animals through human landscapes and the importance of projects that connect fragmented natural areas. While wilderness areas are vital to protecting biodiversity, she asserts, most are small, isolated, and inadequate to accommodate animals’ natural movements. Human developments, including cities, roads, and fences, further challenge animals’ instincts to migrate, follow food sources, and establish breeding territories. Fortunately, more conservationists are recognizing these issues and sponsoring remedial projects to address them, including bridges and tunnels across busy roads, ribbons of greenery through developed areas, and links between nature reserves.
Using powerful firsthand observations, Rosner profiles leaders of conservation initiatives including Andy Whitworth, who heads a Costa Rican nonprofit linking protected rainforests to assist roaming species like jaguars and peccaries. Biologist Ana Ibarra of Bat Conservation International plans corridors of agave and other food sources to support the migration of endangered bat species across Mexico, while Mpayon Loboitong’o leads a group of women monitoring elephant movements through Kenyan communities.
Dozens of full-color photographs illustrate the juxtaposition of humans and nature, as with a lone coyote wandering through Central Park, pronghorn antelope crossing a Wyoming highway, rare Marsican bears ambling in the Apennine mountains near Rome, and a bearded dragon caught in an Australian dog fence. The book also addresses the impacts of climate change: In the Everglades, burgeoning thickets of native Carolina willow, encroaching because of warming temperatures, act as barriers to connectivity.
Addressing environmental issues with a sense of urgency, Roam is a thought-provoking book that emphasizes the complexity of fragmented habitats and describes initiatives that promote the healthy coexistence of animal and human communities.
KRISTEN RABE (October 17, 2025)
Hymn to Moray Eels
Mireille Best
Stephanie Schechner, translator
Seagull Books
Hardcover $25.00 (244pp)
978-1-80309-557-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Mireille Best’s multifaceted novel Hymn to Moray Eels is about queer attraction, social expectations, and the intricacies of women’s friendships in 1950s France.
Adolescence made sixteen-year-old Mila feel exposed and vulnerable. Aware of her developing attraction to other women, she imagines that she is growing wings that need to be “clipped.” She is also troubled by her family’s poverty.
Frustrated by her daughter’s emotional changes, Mila’s mother agrees to send her to a sanatorium. There, Mila befriends boisterous Josette, ethereal Lili, and Nicoli, who can cry on cue from an “unending reserve” of tears. The girls interact with quarrelsome camaraderie, speaking in standout metaphors and slang. Their close dynamic is detailed through Mila’s incisive yet agitated stream-of-consciousness narration.
Mila’s occasional same-sex intrigues are organic and intimate but also fleeting. She later flirts with a staff member, Paule; they share almost combative eroticism, but their differences in age and status skew the relationship. Paule maintains a position of continued dominance, fondling Mila’s hair with possessive force and asserting her authority when challenged. When Paule becomes interested in another girl, Mila feels rejected and angered. Her revenge comes in the form of a comical inpatient production of The Little Mermaid that contains a coded message for Paule during the performance.
As a dramatic device, Mila’s direction of the play combines engaging dark humor with her increasing resolve to escape both Paule and the sanatorium. And while the book ends with a sense of wry and tenuous hope, its conclusion is shadowed by the realities of the era. Within the confinements of social norms, Mila will have to repress her true personality to stay out of “trouble.”
Sharp-edged yet poignant, the historical novel Hymn to Moray Eels contrasts queer coming-of-age emotions with the pressures of postwar conformity.
MEG NOLA (October 17, 2025)
The Unrepentant
Short Stories
Sharmini Aphrodite
Gaudy Boy
Softcover $19.00 (196pp)
978-1-958652-20-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Insurgency and sociopolitical revolution link those fighting for freedom in Sharmini Aphrodite’s luminous short story collection, The Unrepentant.
Set in twentieth-century Malaya, the book’s fourteen stories share a tone of restrained intensity and subversive determination. Allusions to Malaya’s colonization by Britain and occupation by the Japanese during World War II add historical context: the return to British rule was challenged by labor, anticolonial, and communist alliances, leading to British retaliation and the violent “Malayan Emergency.”
Set in the 1960s, “The Light of God” contemplates a Malayan boy’s longing to become a cosmonaut like Soviet space pioneer Yuri Gagarin. But as the boy matures and is angered by exploitative labor practices and poverty, he joins the communist guerrillas and abandons his dream of being the “first Asian to touch the stars.” In the haunting story “Antipodal Points,” a Catholic priest is unsettled by the fervid political urgings of his Jesuit associate. Within the chapel, a young woman attends Mass, preparing to join communist fighters hiding in the “black womb of the jungle.”
Taut complexities of secrecy and emotion distinguish the interconnected characters. Elderly Aruvalam is a survivor of brutal prisoner-of-war labor enforced by the Japanese; he now works on a Johor plantation, where the “hills running down the spine of the peninsula are soaked in the blue of the evening.” And in the poignant entry “Crossing the Border,” a man lives among exiled Malayan communists who resettled in Thailand. As they gather to watch television coverage of Malaysia’s 2018 elections, the man glimpses the “familiar streets” of his hometown and contemplates his years of grueling yet meaningful sacrifice.
An evocative, penetrating, and subtle short story collection, The Unrepentant captures the political and emotional turmoil behind Malaysia’s struggle for independence.
MEG NOLA (October 17, 2025)
Kathy Young
