James Polchin’s "Indecent Advances" extracts more than its title from true-crime press clippings dating back to the 1920s, examining both what appeared in print and what was sanitized or excluded. “Indecent advances” was just one... Read More

James Hawes condenses two millennia into a zippy 256 pages in "The Shortest History of Germany". Breezy yet knowledgeable, the book provides a thorough grounding in the major historical events and religious and regional differences that... Read More

In her novel "The Gifts We Keep", Katie Grindeland layers revelations over misunderstandings to spin a complex and ultimately unsustainable web of secrets between a family, their neighbor, and the ten-year-old girl who comes to stay with... Read More

Children of sometimes difficult parents will find this clear-eyed and cathartic memoir to be sympathetic. More than a memoir, Deborah Burns’s Saturday’s Child is a tribute to her mother Dotty, a powerhouse of a woman whose role in... Read More

"Far-Fetched and Highly Plausible" is a fun and fast science fiction thriller that questions the future of technology. Leandro Faria’s "Far-Fetched and Highly Plausible" is an action-packed science fiction novel that explores... Read More

In Andrea Pyros’s engaging "Pink Hair and Other Terrible Ideas", a young girl dealing with the difficulties of junior high also contends with her mother’s breast cancer diagnosis. Josephine is a normal but shy twelve-year-old girl... Read More

The seemingly improbable friendship between Jack Cowdry, author J. Edward Chamberlin’s grandfather and a white rancher and banker, and Crop Eared Wolf, a warrior and Blackfoot chief, is recalled in the warm historical account, "The... Read More

On a remote island off the coast of Scotland, two young girls navigate the judgement of their peers and the adults in their lives. Angela Readman’s "Something like Breathing" pairs nuanced observations with an atmospheric setting to... Read More