Book of the Day Roundup: September 22-26, 2025
Why We Struggle to Go Green
Hard Truths About the Clean Energy Transition
Thomas Manuel Ortiz
Stoney Creek Publishing
Softcover $26.95 (270pp)
978-1-965766-28-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Thomas Ortiz’s Why We Struggle to Go Green is a pressing exposé on the state of the world’s carbon economy.
Examining what can be done to curb the rate of carbon emissions, including relying less on fossil fuels and more on wind, solar, and nuclear power, the book conveys the urgency of curtailing climate change. It also names the challenges to doing so with clarity born of extensive research and engineering experience. The current rate of emissions puts the world at significant risk of not meeting the climate goals outlined in the Paris Agreement, it says, while the global rate of fuel extraction and usage is unsustainable. “We are consuming the world’s existing stock of fossil fuels at a rate over 13,500 times faster than nature can regenerate it,” it notes. The problem is compounded by the finite nature of such resources and the increasing inaccessibility of deposits of essential elements including lithium, cobalt, and nickel.
This book’s examination of the drastic shifts in energy consumption and distribution required of industrialized nations in order to curb emissions and transition to green energy sources is striking. It avoids alarmist rhetoric to serve as a comprehensive primer on the reasons corporations, cities, and nations find the transition to green energy so challenging. Decades of environmental research and experimentation are synthesized into a fascinating exploration of why low-carbon energy sources have been adopted at a plodding pace despite the severe global ramifications of anthropogenic climate change.
An illuminating sustainability survey, Why We Struggle to Go Green is about the multitude of different considerations citizens and cities must contend with in the ongoing battle toward a greener energy grid.
CAITLIN CACCIATORE (August 25, 2025)
The Light Between Apple Trees
Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit
Priyanka Kumar
Island Press
Hardcover $32.00 (256pp)
978-1-64283-363-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
About the history and cultivation of apple trees, Priyanka Kumar’s informative, lively nature book emphasizes the importance of reconnecting with the natural world.
Inspired by her family’s adventures foraging for wild fruit along the Santa Fe River Trail and her own childhood in the biodiverse Himalayan foothills, Kumar took on a year-long quest to understand the history and science of apple trees. Combining sparkling prose with charming photographs, the book describes the gratification of nurturing Kumar’s family’s garden and the value of connecting with “micro-wilderness” areas in neighborhoods. It emphasizes the power of trees to offer sustenance and “regenerate us and the planet.”
Wild apple forests in Kazakhstan, which may be the primary ancestors of apple cultivars, are described in a wistful manner, as is the discovery of grafted heirloom apple trees in Mission Garden near Tucson, thriving where orchards were first planted by Spanish explorers in the 1600s. Ancient apple trees in the Tesuque, New Mexico, gardens established in the 1800s by French missionary Jean-Baptiste Lamy, Thomas Jefferson’s historic orchards at Monticello, and vast commercial orchards in the Willamette Valley are also featured.
Kumar praises the tantalizing flavors and textures of heirloom apples, though noting that just a fraction of the sixteen thousand named varieties of apples are still accessible. She blames declining biodiversity on relentless urbanization; a “hyper-focus” on crop efficiency and monocultures; the loss of small, independent nurseries; and soil depleted by unprecedented amounts of pesticides and fertilizers. Climate change is also a factor. In New Mexico, thousands of acres of forests are “dying of thirst,” and even Yakima, Washington, the nation’s largest apple-producing region, has been affected by rising temperatures.
A captivating cultural history of the heirloom apple, The Light Between Apple Trees delivers an urgent message about maintaining biodiversity during a time of ecological tumult.
KRISTEN RABE (August 25, 2025)
Thereafter Johnnie
Carolivia Herron
McNally Editions
Softcover $19.00 (272pp)
978-1-961341-61-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
A Black family’s traumas are the focus of Carolivia Herron’s rending novel Thereafter Johnnie, in which a bereaved daughter examines her origins.
At first, Johnnie is a solitary “light,” condemned to haunt a former Carnegie library. She recalls being an infant and feeling her mother Patricia’s pain. Patricia was abused by Johnnie’s father, John Christopher, a prominent Washington, DC, heart surgeon. She was paid to disappear, in part because Johnnie’s birth was visible proof of his sins. But in her fractured soul, Patricia still loved John.
Narrated with feverish urgency, the novel explores the family’s secrets. Johnnie’s early revelation that Patricia drowned herself in the Potomac results in suspense. And Johnnie is incisive, omitting nothing during her quest to understand her mother’s suicide. She conjures the sea and imagines her birth city in epic terms.
John’s manipulative eroticism and pride complicates his characterization. His wife, Camille, sets aside her suffocating anguish to aid Patricia’s exit from their neighborhood. The plot is further fueled by questions surrounding how Johnnie bore her grief.
The prophetic narration circles through Johnnie’s memories and spirals toward events beyond her purview, with the blanks filled in by Patricia’s sisters. Experimental chapters from John’s perspective—one concerning surgery, the other portraying his daughters as enchanted witches—reveal his malformed ego alongside his sharp assessments of others. People’s resilience glimmers, too, even when they must fabricate myths to understand their circumstances. From casting Patricia as a seductress to placing blame elsewhere, the tragedy is amplified through unsettling considerations of other angles. Stark coverage of Johnnie’s lineage, which is marked by enslavement and rape, concludes the novel, hinting that the intimate crimes began long ago.
A dazzling novel about generational harm, Thereafter Johnnie portrays a family’s visceral downfall.
KAREN RIGBY (August 25, 2025)
Emmie Builds Something New
Marjorie Crosby-Fairall
Red Comet Press
Hardcover $19.99 (48pp)
978-1-63655-139-5
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
Intricate illustrations reminiscent of the I Spy book series open up the world of Emmie the mouse, an avid inventor who lives in a dollhouse-cum-Rube Goldberg machine in a cluttered attic. Everything is just the way she likes it—until the family gets a cat. Emmie creates elaborate contraptions to drive the cat away, only to realize that some problems have simple solutions. This charming tale about unlikely friends will offer a fresh discovery with every reading.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (August 25, 2025)
North of Tomboy
A Novel
Julie A. Swanson
SparkPress
Softcover $14.99 (355pp)
978-1-68463-330-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop)
A fourth grader adopts a creative way to remedy the gulf between how she feels inside and how others perceive her in Julie A. Swanson’s insightful novel North of Tomboy.
No one in Jess’s Northern Michigan rural family, church, or community seems to understand that dresses and dolls just don’t cut it for a child who looks like a girl but feels more like a boy. When her requests to cut her long hair and wear “boy’s clothes” are denied and Christmas brings her yet another pretty doll, Jess takes action. She cuts the doll’s hair short, making it a representation of her real self—an outspoken, funny, sports-loving boy, Mickey. Jess speaks her mind through Mickey until she realizes that she has become a shadow of herself, her being engulfed by the doll that became her alter-ego.
Jess’s frustration is palpable. Using her strength and creativity to channel her boy-self into the doll, she leads others to admire Mickey’s adventurous spirit and wit. While excessive space is given to minor events and family dynamics within the book, each step that Jess takes toward self-expression, as shown when she cuts her hair in defiance of her mother, infuses her tale with energy and optimism. Knowing that it’s only a matter of time before everyone in their close-knit community learns her secret, Jess devises a dramatic solution that relieves her of Mickey and frees her to integrate his strengths into her character.
North of Tomboy is an engaging novel that reveals the inner world of a creative child who explores and learns to express her nonconforming gender identity.
KRISTINE MORRIS (August 25, 2025)
Kathy Young
