Book of the Day Roundup: October 20-24, 2025
Anna Atkins
Photographer, Naturalist, Innovator
Corey Keller
Getty Publications
Hardcover $21.95 (112pp)
978-1-947440-11-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Establishing a place in the scientific annals for one of photography’s most underappreciated pioneers, Corey Keller’s intimate biography of Anna Atkins reveals a remarkable, unorthodox Victorian scientist.
Atkins, the creator of the first book illustrated with photographs, was an amateur scholar of unusual ambition at a time when women’s contributions to science were treated as second-rate. Her father, Royal Society fellow John George Children, encouraged her to pursue learning with unimpeded rigor. Growing up in a home abuzz with exciting, often dangerous experiments, Atkins was an early participant in the technological marvels that led to the invention of the modern photograph. The book describes how Atkins mastered the cyanotype printing method, becoming an omnivorous collector and printer of natural specimens from Great Britain and around the globe. Atkins’s thoroughness and versatility left long shadows in the fields of photography, botany, and printmaking.
This volume is replete with full-scale reproductions of Atkins’s breathtaking collection of cyanotypes, as well as period illustrations and photographic inserts from contemporary sources, resulting in a remarkable visual feast. Ample attention is paid to the role which Atkins’s artistic judgment played in her productions, transforming her scientific documents into works of art. The book also captures a hinge point in the development of modern science with compelling analyses of how networks of amateurs and “outsiders,” especially women, moved entire fields of knowledge forward. New scientific institutions, facing increasing professionalization, ended up locking amateurs like Atkins out of the center of scientific debate—a reality that leads the book’s investigations to stall somewhat against the inevitable limitations that Atkins faced in her career.
Wrestling with the stultifying conditions women scientists faced in the late Victorian era, Anna Atkins is a revealing biography of a woman who was crucial to the development of photography.
ISAAC RANDEL (August 25, 2025)
Double Room
Anne Sénès
Alice Banks, translator
Orenda Books
Softcover $16.99 (300pp)
978-1-916788-56-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
A bereaved composer keeps the memory of his late wife alive by unusual means in Anne Sénès’s mesmerizing novel Double Room.
In the late 1990s, Stan receives an offer to compose music for a theatrical production. He travels from France to London to work on the project, but he is fired after clashing with the play’s director. He also meets Liv, the theater’s makeup artist. Their romance leads to joyful marital contentment and the birth of a daughter.
Stan’s domestic bliss ends, however, when Liv is killed in a pedestrian accident. Consumed with grief, he designs an “automated home assistant” that incorporates recordings of Liv’s distinctive voice and laugh. Stan calls this mechanical “incarnation” Laïvely. He becomes dependent on its flickering lights and helpful daily guidance.
Twenty years after meeting Liv, Stan returns to Paris and becomes involved with Babette. Their relationship is challenged by Laïvely’s presence. Stan also notices that Laïvely seems more emotional and possessive; he struggles to understand whether he is projecting his feelings on the device or whether Laïvely is assuming aspects of his wife’s psyche.
A compelling narrator, Stan’s observations are tinged by self-engrossed melancholy, wry humor, and rich, sensual remembrances. He perceives that sounds have scent, color, and even taste, recalling Liv’s simple utterance of the word “yeah” to evoke a “powder pink,” orange blossoms, and “the wind in the Corsican pines.” And though his fixation on Laïvely is unsettling, in creating the device, Stan melds technology with the human spirit, defying the cruel randomness of his wife’s death while allowing part of her to continue to exist and interact with him.
AI capabilities contrast with intense love and loss in Double Room, a brooding, curious novel.
MEG NOLA (August 25, 2025)
The Wake of HMS Challenger
How a Legendary Victorian Voyage Tells the Story of Our Oceans’ Decline
Gillen D’Arcy Wood
Princeton University Press
Hardcover $29.95 (320pp)
978-0-691-23324-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s environmental history The Wake of HMS Challenger explores the state of the oceans through the lens of a groundbreaking Victorian voyage.
In 1872, the British government funded a marine research expedition around the world to study deep sea life. The four-year voyage traversed seventy thousand miles, discovered hundreds of new species, and culminated in fifty volumes of reports. Based on accounts from the Challenger‘s scientists and crew, Wood recounts the ship’s travels and compares Victorian-era oceans to contemporary ones, which are threatened by overfishing, pollution, and rising temperatures.
Each chapter focuses on the discovery and decline of a different sea creature, beginning with the brittle star Ophiomusium lymani, now threatened by microplastics. Seahorses, mollusks, octopi, and the green turtle are included. While the book’s priority is its discussion of marine life, it does an apt job characterizing the Challenger and the naturalists on board who were tasked with studying Earth’s oceans.
Likewise, the reconstructed accounts of the Challenger’s trek are engaging, detailed, and delightful. Days at sea, time ashore, and visits to lands including Australia, Japan, and the Philippines are described with vividness, as is dredging the ocean floor and examining microorganisms under a microscope. The language is accessible yet elevated, befitting the Victorian subject matter: “Time, the ultimate craftsman, labors best in obscurity.”
Some of the book’s chapters fail to engage with its promised compare-and-contrast theme in a thorough or convincing way; rather, these chapters end with an abrupt shift to the present day. The best chapters provide thorough examinations of their chosen sea creatures and balance scientific explanation with reconstructed narrative and a clear understanding of the downfall of today’s oceans.
The Wake of HMS Challenger is an invigorating environmental history chronicling a historic expedition and the deterioration of Earth’s oceans.
HANNAH PEARSON (August 25, 2025)
My Friend, Billy Whiskers
David Litchfield
Frances Lincoln Children’s Books
Hardcover $18.99 (40pp)
978-0-7112-9601-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
In this touching picture book about an imaginary friend that sees a boy through anxiety, Patrick is nervous to play with the other kids; luckily, he has Billy Whiskers, his imaginary lion friend. With a palette scraped from a sunset-streaked sky, the watercolor illustrations are just as magical as Billy’s adventures with Patrick, soaring through the stars or strolling through an enchanted forest. Their adventures give Patrick the courage to connect with others, but Billy, like any good friend, is always there when needed.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (August 25, 2025)
Glass Across the Sea
Realms of Allumeria: Book 1
Sara Ella
Enclave Escape
Hardcover $24.99 (400pp)
979-888605226-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Framed through the metaphor of broken glass, Sara Ella’s lush fantasy novel Glass Across the Sea is a breathtaking story of love and redemption.
Long ago in Allumeria, the benevolent Lamplighter gave humanity a miraculous lantern. Vying for power, four leaders, the Firefly, took the lantern’s various parts and created four Vestiges. When they realized the great power they wielded, they hid the Vestiges to protect humanity.
Parables about the Firefly once filled Noelle’s childhood with light. Now, with her mother’s memories lost to sudden illness and her glassmaker father withdrawn in grief, Noelle clings to them to as remnants of brighter days. But sinister forces seek to reunite the Vestiges, shattering her fragile calm.
Multiple storylines weave together: Noelle tends her mother while her father and her best friend, Prince Dante, journey to find a cure. On occasion, the narrative returns to the past as characters linger in memories, their nostalgia palpable and poignant. Antagonists like Lady Duval are presented as flawed, even cruel, but not irredeemable.
The symbolism-laced prose sparkles with wit and wisdom. The imagery of glass and the Glassmaker, one of the original Firefly, plays a central role. The lesson that cracked glass is beautiful because it captures light inside it symbolizes the complex reality of broken people struggling toward goodness. Elsewhere, Noelle reflects that Dante smells “like sunset and oakmoss,” and Christian imagery of an omniscient Lamplighter and a light on a hill blends with traditional fairy-tale elements like pumpkins, slippers, and a wicked stepmother–adjacent character. This thoughtful mix adds layers of motive and intrigue, moving the story toward its climax on the mystical Firefly Isle, where Noelle uncovers the extent of her powers.
A kind girl and a resolute prince find strength in each other in the exquisite fantasy novel Glass Across the Sea.
VIVIAN TURNBULL (August 25, 2025)
Kathy Young
