Book of the Day Roundup: October 27-31, 2025
PlantAsia
Asia’s Vegetable Wisdom in Recipes, Stories and Techniques
Pamelia Chia
The Experiment
Hardcover $32.50 (304pp)
979-889303087-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Pamelia Chia’s celebratory cookbook PlantAsia draws on vivid childhood memories of hawker stall food and extensive travels to proffer encyclopedic knowledge of Asian culinary techniques and ingredients.
Eschewing the environmental impacts of meat-heavy diets, these recipes elevate their vegetable bases by adding pops of flavor from fermented, aromatic, and umami-rich ingredients; through careful cooking methods (sometimes several methods in a single dish); and by adding contrasting textures. Among the colorful and appealing recipes are those for Watercress Noodles topped with Split Pea Fritters, Mushroom Adobo Spaghetti, and Beet Curry with snowy Coconut Sambol.
Organized by cooking technique, the book begins with raw recipes. Its cooking instructions get more complex in subsequent chapters that cover steamed, fried, roasted, braised, and charred dishes. The book incorporates cooking methods and flavors from multiple corners of Asia alongside original creations like Spinach Leaf Chaat, an appetizer of battered fried spinach leaves crowned with several chutneys and crunchy garnishes that has over-the-top visual appeal.
Interviews with cooks, food writers, and food producers, paired with joyful, sparkling watercolor portraits, contribute to the book’s multitude of perspectives about plant-based cooking in places including Tibet, Cambodia, and the Philippines. Sri Lankan Chef Gayan Pieris describes how Buddhist practices shaped meals centered around plant-based ingredients, and Chef Jihee Shin elucidates how numerous small plates of food, banchan, are central to the Korean table.
Clear instructions and color photographs make it easy to re-create these innovative dishes, and multiple photographs accompany recipes with more involved preparations, like hand-shaped dumplings. An extended Asian pantry list with photographs describes dozens of items that add vibrant flavor and mouthfeel, including salted duck eggs, preserved mustard stem, and Korean plum syrup.
PlantAsia is a fantastic cookbook that introduces an adventurous, innovative cooking philosophy alongside a wealth of extraordinary vegan and vegetarian dishes.
RACHEL JAGARESKI (August 25, 2025)
Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean
An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System
Dagomar Degroot
Belknap Press
Hardcover $32.00 (368pp)
978-0-674-98650-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean, Dagomar Degroot’s sweeping history of human encounters with the solar system, is an unconventional, moving account of how Earth’s cosmic neighborhood shaped human existence.
A mixture of intertwined microhistories of how humans interpreted, wrestled with, and explored the planets and other celestial bodies in the solar system, the book combines biographical portraits, cultural studies, and stories of scientific failures and misinterpretations with cosmic-scaled natural histories of the Sun, Venus, Mars, and other astronomical bodies. It reveals unexpected connections across disciplines that had radical effects on human understanding. Inspired by James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, which interpreted Earth’s natural systems as forming one macroorganism, the book treats the entire solar system as a network of interconnected systems of exchange and influence, all of which shape even the most innocuous facts of life on Earth. Its ultimate effect is to pull earthlings out of their complacency to recognize the precarity of their position amid ongoing cosmic dramas.
The book’s balance between the disparate worlds of astrobiology, physics, and human culture is masterful. Outside of its refreshing slate of surprises about the major celestial bodies outside Earth, its biggest highlights include the shocking, and often forgotten, histories of humanity’s faulty attempts to make sense of the heavens. For example, respected scientific institutions claimed the certain existence of life on the Moon until the twentieth century. Even more intriguing are the book’s analyses of how discoveries in outer space created contradictory paradigm shifts in public perception on Earth, as with the ways research on Venus spawned international action to preserve the ozone layer while encouraging climate-change denialism in other quarters.
Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean is a scientific text with new perspectives on the question of how Earth relates to its neighbors in outer space.
ISAAC RANDEL (August 25, 2025)
Widow’s Walk
Jane Willan
Sibylline Press
Softcover $20.00 (284pp)
978-1-960573-45-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
In Jane Willan’s novel Widow’s Walk, a top Boston chef turned Episcopal priest questions her career change when conflicts arise among iron-willed parishioners threatened by any hint of change.
Though Miranda is eager to implement her progressive ideas in her church community, her attempts to bring new flavors to the Thanksgiving meal, and her suggestions for bringing the “Pilgrims and Indians” story into the twenty-first century, are met with anger. When mysterious events reveal that someone has been living in the church basement, issues of sanctuary as a Christian response to human suffering provoke strong emotions on both sides, bringing simmering conflicts to a head. Facing a possible no-confidence vote from her parishioners, Miranda is tempted to accept an offer to resume her culinary career.
About prolonged grief, the effects of rigid traditionalism, and the nature of personal spiritual growth, the story is built on strong women characters, each of whom has a gripping backstory. Miranda sought meaning through ministry after her husband’s death from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis; her church secretary, Peg, hides her compassionate nature under extremes of cold efficiency; an elderly parishioner, Betty, bears secret grief beneath her resistance to change; and Alejandra, a pregnant nineteen-year-old, seeks asylum from violence in Honduras. Tensions peak when Alejandra goes missing in a violent storm with her baby on its way.
Despite the gravity of its events, the book’s tone is warm, inviting, and often humorous, as when a huge, slobbery Irish wolfhound puppy captures the heart of the frosty church secretary. Fast pacing supports its morphing events, and the climax is stunning in its revelation of each character’s secrets.
In the inspiring novel Widow’s Walk, a church community discovers the power of compassion, faith, and coming together to heal broken hearts.
KRISTINE MORRIS (August 25, 2025)
Some Days I’m the Wind
Rebecca Gardyn Levington
Dinara Mirtalipova
Barefoot Books
Hardcover $17.99 (32pp)
979-888859662-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Imaginative illustrations evoke the gamut of human emotions in this picture book about understanding and expressing feelings. Apt nature metaphors make the complex topic of emotions more digestible; children can borrow the language herein until they find their own words to express their feelings. The sun can be “welcoming, warm” or “stubborn, HOT! A raging, blazing glare.” The sea can be “cautious, quiet” or “fearless, fierce.” The dreamy watercolor illustrations depict both the broad landscape of emotions and the breadth of a child’s imagination.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (August 25, 2025)
The Witch’s Egg
Donya Todd
Avery Hill Publishing
Softcover $19.99 (180pp)
978-1-917355-21-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
A mother and her daughters stave off the end of the world in Donya Todd’s fantastical graphic novel The Witch’s Egg.
Urfi, a cat witch, summons an angel in the hope of finding love and starting a family. The relationship doesn’t last, but Urfi is left with an egg containing her unborn children. As she seeks safety, Urfi gives birth to three girls, Isobel, Batzel, and Mazel. Each of the girls has a power of some kind. When their brother, the worm-child, threatens the world’s survival, they help their mother defeat him.
Mythological in scale, this immersive, timeless epic features occasional rhymes, as in a dream predicting the apocalyptic arrival of a worm-king: “The sorrowed song he sings / Brings an end to all things.” Intentional misspellings (“nyght,” “effigie,” and “pidgeon”) and off-kilter, handwritten lettering draw the eye, requiring more time to absorb. The illustrations have a singular, psychedelic style and feature a wide range of stunning colors. Extraordinary creatures with unusual appearances—the stuff of dreams and nightmares—also appear.
An angel’s violent rages and a mother’s fierce struggle to protect her children are evocative in the allegorical graphic novel The Witch’s Egg.
PETER DABBENE (August 25, 2025)
Kathy Young
