When hundreds of hamsters go missing, only a penguin, a ninja spider, a pigeon, two kids, and an elderly woman can interpret the clues left behind in a sleepy mountain town and crack the case. Alex T. Smith’s "Mr. Penguin and the... Read More

Fifteen-year-old Beatriz Mendez lives a split life between school and gang life, caring for her mother and enforcing gang rules, dancing with an attractive Haitian boy, and carrying a razor blade tucked in her cheek. Set in the 1980s,... Read More

A refugia is a place where organisms can survive because they are protected in some way from the surrounding inhospitable environment; climate change has rendered the earth one such “flaming wreck.” Quietly political, the book’s... Read More

The characters of Arthur Allen’s "The Nurseryman" follow the trail of Martin Frobisher, explorer of the great North, who “discovered” Meta Incognita, now part of Baffin Island. Written in sixteenth-century style, the book’s... Read More

Eerie and otherworldly, Amelinda Bérubé’s "Here There Are Monsters" creeps across the page and into the woods where Skye’s younger sister has gone missing, painting a haunting picture of the sisters’ relationship, but also of... Read More

As it turns out, it is simply not possible to keep an angry demon librarian down. The title librarian still wants Annie, his former child bride, as well as revenge against Cyn, the teen who saved her. Funny and action-packed, "Curse of... Read More

A childhood and early adulthood marked by sexual abuse and rape led Dane Zaa and Cree woman Helen Knott into deep addiction. Despite her descent, she also managed to travel to Switzerland at the behest of the Nobel Women’s Initiative... Read More

Melancholy, discontent, and focused on aging, the poems of Nicks’s collection move from a Detroit childhood toward autumnal realizations. In Joseph Nicks’s poetry collection Can’t Forget the Motor City, aging and its various... Read More