Book of the Day Roundup: September 29-October 3, 2025
Sugar Bush Babies
Stories of My Ojibwe Grandmother
Janis A. Fairbanks
University of Minnesota Press
Hardcover $17.95 (152pp)
978-1-5179-1902-3
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Janis A. Fairbanks’s reverential family memoir recounts her Native American childhood in Minnesota, wherein love outweighed poverty.
Fairbanks belongs to the Fond du Lac band of the Lake Superior Chippewa people. She grew up the fourth of seven children in Bena, Minnesota, on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation. When she was five years old, her nuclear family moved to Duluth, where she came into contact with more white people than before.
Fairbanks ran away from kindergarten until her mother promised she could spend all school holidays with her grandmother, Cecelia. Though she felt unimportant in her large, busy family, her grandmother made her feel significant. Meals and conversations were signs of love, and rituals made life extraordinary. Cecilia even started a tradition of serving toasted raisin bread on Fairbanks’s birthday because the family couldn’t afford a cake. Forty-five years later, Fairbanks celebrates her birthday with that same snack.
Fairbanks’s special relationship with her grandmother even sustained her after her parents’ divorce. Contrasting city living with her vivid experiences on Cecilia’s homestead, Fairbanks notes that wildflowers and lake scenes still remind her of her grandmother, who had an intimate connection with nature and spotted the sacred in the everyday. Memories of the steps of doing laundry in the washtub pair with a bevy of black-and-white family photographs, piquing interest as they depict family members in Native regalia and at powwows. One photograph, of the interior of Cecilia’s three-room tar paper shack, vivifies the “little palace,” which Cecilia preferred living in even after her tribe built her a new house with running water and electricity.
A spirited and tender memoir, Sugar Bush Babies is about a midcentury Native American girlhood and the beloved grandmother who illuminated its spaces.
REBECCA FOSTER (August 25, 2025)
The Witch of Willow Sound
Vanessa F. Penney
ECW Press
Softcover $19.95 (288pp)
978-1-77041-842-4
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Vanessa F. Penney’s magical novel The Witch of Willow Sound is about rural prejudice, the wounds of the past, and forgiveness.
Pulled from her perambulatory routines by an emergency phone call from her mother, Phaedra travels to Willow Sound in search of her estranged Aunt Madeline. She finds her aunt’s seaside cottage in outward disrepair, though its insides are protected; she steps “in the door and travel[s] back twenty-four years in a second.” But the treasure-packed witch’s cabinet that fascinated her when she was a girl also holds clues to her aunt’s alienation from the locals: they considered her presence an ongoing curse, and would rather she not be found.
As Phaedra unravels the mystery of her aunt’s disappearance with limited help—an English researcher, Nish, is delighted to assist, and she receives kindnesses from the local shopkeep, Rita—she also uncovers dark family secrets and damning local sins. Indeed, under the shadow of a teetering, mountain-sized boulder and with the threat of a hurricane upon them, the intractable townspeople expose their inherited, vicious prejudices.
Even as it deals with tough topics, including the institutionalization and ostracization of mentally ill people and inconvenient women, the stains of residential schools, and other instances of systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism, the novel proves rich and involving. It is electric with earthy enchantments, from Madeline’s spells to the vibrant, dangerous landscape itself. Indeed, it thrills in uncovering the sorcery of nature, from falling buttercups greeting a newcomer to “cold rain [that] spits Cenezoic rock dust down.” References to gleaming apples, ghosts, wolves, and giants flesh out its gothic fairy tale atmosphere as it winds its way toward a devastating, revelatory conclusion.
Part mystery, part tragedy, and all feminine ferocity, The Witch of Willow Sound is a spellbinding debut novel.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (August 25, 2025)
The Life of Violet
Three Early Stories
Virginia Woolf
Urmila Seshagiri, editor
Princeton University Press
Hardcover $19.95 (144pp)
978-0-691-26313-7
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The interconnected early stories in Virginia Woolf’s The Life of Violet have radical perspectives on women’s friendships, independence, and places in society.
Violet, a giantess inspired by Woolf’s lifelong friend Violet Dickinson, is centered in the first two stories, mock biographies of Violet’s adolescence as she attempts and fails to enter the world of aristocracy through marriage. When Violet discovers that her virtue lies not in beauty and piety but in her kindness, intelligence, and remarkable ability to inspire laughter and transformation in those around her, she opts to settle in a magical and mysterious “cottage of one’s own.”
Positioning Violet both as a participant in and a deviation from the ideals of her social world, the stories satirize the strict bounds of English society, presenting an alternate vision organized around invention, gaiety, and friendship. This sense of transgression is mirrored by the work’s literary ingenuity, as evidenced by its sudden jumps in time, long self-reflective asides, and elements of magical realism. This radical approach is most evident in the final chapter, which places Violet within a fairy-tale setting in ancient Japan, where two colossal female deities turn the social and religious systems of “Tokio” on their heads.
This rich volume, complete with an afterword and comprehensive textual notes, offers a fresh perspective on Woolf’s early “literary experiments,” treating The Life of Violet not as a tale written to entertain family and friends but as “evidence of a career shaped from the outset by feminist commitments, humor, and determination to breathe new life into literary forms.”
Suffused with delicate magic and penetrating wit, the stories in The Life of Violet foreground a radical world structured by laughter, magic, women’s friendships, and egalitarian social relations.
BELLA MOSES (August 25, 2025)
Flora and the Jazzers
Astrid Sheckels
Waxwing Books
Hardcover $18.99 (40pp)
978-1-956393-18-7
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Gorgeous watercolor illustrations and a motley band of creatures hit all the right notes in this Jazz Age take on a Cinderella story. Flora is a scullery maid in a grand hotel; she loves music, but can’t afford to attend the concerts she dreams of. When her favorite band is performing at the hotel, she begs to watch from the shadows, but the hotel manager forbids it. A chance encounter with the band brings Flora out of the shadows and into the spotlight.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (August 25, 2025)
Riverine Dreams
Away to the Glorious and Forgotten Grassland Rivers of America
George Frazier
University of Chicago Press
Hardcover $26.00 (296pp)
978-0-226-83879-3
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In his excellent travel memoir Riverine Dreams, George Frazier visits eight grassland rivers “where fifty million people go about their lives in the ruins of North America’s once vast interior grassland.”
Before European settlement, the book notes, the middle of the United States was covered in grasslands and the rivers that fed them. To honor these spaces, Frazier began traveling the extant waterways, beginning with the Missouri River, which flows through Montana, and wrapping up with the lower Missouri. He covers thousands of miles across several states in the process, capturing the vastness of grassland waters. He describes the scenery and wildlife along the way, demonstrating that these natural spaces are still vibrant and showing the variety of habitats and landscapes fed by grassland rivers.
The book includes a wealth of historical and modern context, as with legislative battles in several states over protecting the American wilderness along the rivers; stories of violent attacks on Mormon settlements in Missouri; and tales of underground catfish poaching. All shaped the lives of people living near the rivers. These bits of cultural history are involving, telling an evolving story about the US and its relationships to its physical land.
Throughout his travels, Frazier interviews a range of people: those with ancestral ties to the rivers, the rare folks who travel the waterways, those working to save and rebuild the wilderness, and even some opponents of conservation efforts. These voices provide hope for a true revival of the grassland rivers and show some of the ways that rewilding is underway.
Riverine Dreams is an engaging travelogue packed with a wealth of history and reverence for the US’s unique ecosystems.
JEFF FLEISCHER (August 25, 2025)
Kathy Young
