Early Readers
Witchycakes #4: Full Moon Magic by Kara LeReau and Ariane Moreira
Welcome to the most magical bakery — Witchycakes! Little Blue, a witch-in-training, uses magic to help their mama set up for the most magical time of year.
In a magical bakery called Witchycakes there’s a young witch-to-be named Blue. Blue’s Mama bakes with magic and Blue makes the deliveries! It’s a full moon at the most magical time of year — Remembering Time. The celebration is a moment for looking back and sharing with friends and family. Who will show up to the party? What surprises will there be? Blue is about to find out!
Cook up some love with Blue as they use magic and problem-solving to be the best helper they can be in their whimsical little town. And there’s a special magical recipe at the end of each book!
Young Adult
Where We Go at Night by Ikto Ntekim
To name a thing is to see it, and no one can see the folk if they don’t want to be seen.
As far as seventeen-year-old Trixie Godfrey is concerned, her hometown of Woods Crossing would be perfect —if not for the dark world of fae and magic lurking in the shadows. Growing up, her grandfather, Pops, never allowed her to get close to them—those aberrations, Mama used to say.
But on graduation night, when Trixie sneaks home past curfew she witnesses Pops’ brutal murder in a moment so sudden, so inhuman she can no longer avoid the fae. Those without the Sight will blame wild animals, calling Pops’ death an accident, a tragedy, but Trixie knows the truth because she has the Sight. She spent years burying her “gift”, but she needs to revive it now.
Determined to get justice for Pops and rid Woods Crossing of its monsters, Trixie ventures into the intriguing but deceitful world of the fae—only to find herself caught in a power struggle between ancient families more terrible and crueler than hers could ever be. Or so she thinks….
From Square One by A.M. Woody
After an accident leaves Riley Wilson with amnesia to deal with on top of his chronic pain, he can recall everything except for: the crash that landed him in the hospital, the last year of his life, and having a boyfriend. Who happens to be his older brother’s best friend. And the guy he resents more than anyone . . .
Learning this information sends Riley spiraling. In what world, then, could someone as sensible and meticulous as Riley have ever willingly agree to go out with Aaron—an arrogant prick who screwed up his brother’s life?
Riley would love nothing more than to use his amnesia as an excuse to start fresh and snip Aaron out of his life. But with his family being cagey about the past, and his memories far out of reach, he realizes that this troublemaker is the only person willing to help him remember the last year. And teaming up with him despite his brother’s protests may be the only path to finding the missing memories—even if it means starting from square one and reenacting every date, every kiss, every “first” they’ve ever had in the hopes of rediscovering them.
All Riley has to do is not make the same mistake by falling in love twice.
Sun Chasers by Kacen Callender
You stood still. Stared out at the ocean. Like you were searching for something. Maybe the same thing I was searching for, too. Something that belongs in my chest. Warm and bright.
Kole has mastered the art of deflection. He explains away the real reason why he had to move to St. Thomas to live with his father and his new family. He makes excuses for any bruises or limps people notice. He starts dating a girl at his new school to avoid questions about who he’s really attracted to.
But he can’t seem to hide how drawn he is to Gabriel.
Gabriel wishes he could disappear. But everywhere he goes on the island he calls home, he can’t escape the people who misgender him, who threaten him. He’s haunted by the memories of a painful past. And with his single mother barely making ends meet, he knows there’s no hope for a better life after high school.
As Kole and Gabriel slowly start to share their struggles with each other, their connection becomes a lifeline. But can a young love survive in a world determined to tear them down? Are there some wounds that can never be healed?
Fleet of Wonders by Erin Hanyu Lynch
Gold. Power. Glory. Love. Four prizes that eighteen-year-old, mixed-race factory workers Eliza and Jules—barely scraping by in Ikaria’s slums—can imagine only in their wildest dreams. When Jules’s deteriorating health takes a turn for the worse and Eliza is thrown to the streets by her abusive mother and stepfather, Eliza hatches a plan.
She sets her sights on the Ikarian Empire’s inaugural Fleet of Wonders: a brutal naval competition where fifty fantastical battleships crewed by the nation’s greatest young minds race to invent a weapon deadly enough to fend off a brewing war with Ikaria’s neighbor. The victors win life-changing riches…if they can survive their rivals’ cutthroat attacks.
Impersonating foreign nobility, Eliza and Jules steal aboard the Belladonna, the crown vessel of the Fleet. Among their crew is none other than Pierre, the imperious, alluring heir to the very factory Eliza and Jules escaped—and a powerful smith who can bend metal to his will. Finally embracing her own darkly magical abilities, Eliza agrees to train with Pierre to give their crew an added advantage—all while the seductive push and pull energy between them becomes irresistible …even as Eliza catches the eye of Charlotte, a dangerous, enigmatic aristocrat, whose deadly charm is only outmatched by her lethal way with a sabre.
Meanwhile, as Jules falls for sweet, bookish Suman, a medical student who has given him a new lease on life, Jules risks revealing his true identity as the two get closer.
As they advance in the competition, sinister revelations leave Eliza and Jules torn between the empire that offers them their dreams and their blood ties to a nation Ikaria once conquered. In the end, they must decide who they are and what price they will pay to change their fortunes—if their hearts don’t betray them first.
Scorpion Deep by CG Drews
The only thing Jonathan Covey wants from the gloomy, moldering isle of Kelcarrow is to leave it. Summer is ending, and his friends are looking forward to college on the mainland, unaware that Jonathan was not accepted to join them. He’ll be left behind with nothing but the ocean’s haunts and a rising dread of being abandoned.
In an act of wild desperation, Jonathan pays a tithe to Scorpion Deep, an eldritch sea god who many of the locals have dismissed as myth. He wants to forget the past, he wants to follow his friends, and most of all he wants to finally escape.
To his shock and horror, the ritual works―Scorpion Deep awakens. And despite his terror, Jonathan can’t help but feel drawn toward the ageless entity that seems just as mutually obsessed with him. As scales start growing down his spine and Scorpion Deep’s adoration of him turns bloody, Jonathan realizes the only way to end the nightmare is to destroy the monster one way or another.
But once a god has awoken, the only way to be free is to pay a price of blood.
Adult Fiction
Chateau Reverie by Natasha Siegel
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon
Serial Killer Wanted by Nika Grace
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon
Our Infinite and Inevitable Ends by A.D. Sui
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon
The Saints We Make by Josie Kallo
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon
Public Access Afterworld by Jane Schoenbrun
Find the receiver. Make it real.
At 5:35pm on September 3rd, 1988, Dallas weatherman Ray “Can You Say Sunshine” Davino makes passing reference to Public Access Afterworld during a rambling monologue, right before he puts a gun to his head on live television and pulls the trigger.
On June 12th, 2009, David Sawyer and Erin Morrison, two lonely, TV-obsessed suburban teens who might be falling in love, gather in Erin’s basement to watch TV’s analog-to-digital transition. But in the static that follows, Erin witnesses surreal broadcasts from a pirate TV network called Public Access Afterworld and their lives are changed forever.
Seventeen years later, Bethany Peters toils through the night shift at megacorp GlobalVill’s bleak Austin campus. A trans content moderator, she spends her evenings reviewing an endless stream of horrific videos. But then a young streamer begins to crop up in her feed calling out to Public Access Afterworld.
But what is Public Access Afterworld?
Code and Codex by Yoon Ha Lee
In the stars-spanning Censorate, languages other than the Republic’s own lingua rubra, which has reality-altering properties, are forbidden. Nevertheless, there are discrepancies. The Censorate’s star forces are called the Athenaeum Navy, and each of its ships is referred to as a codex. Instead of port and starboard, its soldiers refer to verso and recto. The unholy “stigmata” gouged into the ships’ hulls might, to a foreign scholar, bear a resemblance to verboten texts in other languages.
The Censorate is ruled by its Peacock, Aurelia, feared for the power of panopticon: she can look through anyone’s eyes. Moreover, Aurelia’s mastery of lingua rubra lets her force anyone who can understand her to follow her orders. Valentina, sold to Aurelia’s family as a child to be Aurelia’s oath-sister and companion, is its Swan, responsible for extracting useful information from foreign texts, then destroying them as well as entire languages through arcane arts. Valentina is assisted in her work by lower-ranking linguists and AI assistants who accept temporary contamination by foreign languages as a necessity of their work.
But this isn’t enough for Aurelia. She wants to control and deploy the Censorate’s thousand-year traitor and prisoner, the Basilisk, a man with a gaze so lethal that he destroyed its fleet of old through camera feeds. Unfortunately for her, the Basilisk gave himself a form of aphasia that makes him immune to her commands
Upstate by Kim van Alkemade
Thirty-four-year-old writer Audrey Beacon is grieving alone during lockdown when a post about a bookshop for sale in upstate New York pops into her social media feed like a lifeline. Enthralled by the historic house and the massive barn bursting with books, Audrey impulsively makes an offer. Soon, she’s cashing out her savings, loading her possessions into her dead husband’s van, and fleeing Manhattan for the village of Schuywich, determined to outrun the ghosts of her past.
In 1956, it’s love at first sight when Schuywich librarian Hazel McIntyre meets dashing magazine writer Evelyn Cabot at a summer camp in Maine that discreetly promises a “different vacation for professional women.” By summer’s end, Evelyn has left Greenwich Village to move into an old farmhouse she’s bought in Hazel’s hometown. In her new column, “The Upstate Dispatch,” Evelyn writes about her adventures renovating a house, tending to sheep, and opening a bookshop in her barn with help from the woman readers know only as her “roommate.” Privately, Hazel chronicles their six-decade love story in a series of letters that abruptly end when they’re forced to abandon the bookshop in 2015.
Reopening the bookshop in the summer of 2020 attracts a quirky community of villagers who continuously interrupt Audrey’s solitude: An unemployed Broadway set designer. An ambitious teenage entrepreneur. A story-telling Adirondack grandmother. Then there’s Sam Rensselaer, the distractingly handsome representative of the agriculture extension. Past and present begin to converge when Audrey finds “The Upstate Dispatch” in a stack of old magazines, but it’s the discovery of Hazel’s letters that brings hidden love and long-buried family secrets to light. Will Audrey find the courage to heal the wounds of the past—including her own?
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | Northshire
The Killing of a Chestnut Tree by Oliver K. Langmead
Be gay, solve crimes! The Killing of a Chestnut Tree introduces Havelock Harper, an all-new queer gentleman detective in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes, with a cozy, fantastical mystery.
“I loved this book! Havelock and Sebastian are such great company, brilliant, approachable, fascinating, their relationship is real and touching and relatable. And the mystery is riveting.” ―#1 New York Times bestselling author LOUISE PENNY
Everyone in England knows Havelock Harper, the celebrated consulting detective, from the cases published in the papers. If any of them read his secret files, they would discover a very different man. His most fantastical cases must never reach the public eye, and nor must the love he shares with his stalwart companion, the formidable Major Sebastian Wright.
The Duke of Farleigh has been killed, and Havelock Harper summoned to the secluded Farleigh Forest to solve his murder. When he and Sebastian arrive, they discover a greater mystery. The trees of Farleigh have begun to speak, writing words into their leaves and bark. The victim is one of those trees: an ancient chestnut, cruelly chopped down.
Why has the forest begun to speak? Why would anyone cut down the Duke? And how can Farleigh’s gentle, quiet paradise survive this crime?
The Stolen Women by Alysandra Dutton
A case of missing noble women and a determined young warrior who sets out to bring them home in this new and exciting ancient historical set just before the founding of Rome, for fans of The Song of Achilles, Circe, and A Thousand Ships.
Safinia is fine to focus on her training as a warrior, providing for her sisters, and minding her own business. She feels no great need to meddle in anyone else’s, until women in her town, including her former lover, begin disappearing. Quietly, at first, but disappearing just the same. All of the missing women have vanished from powerful households, but their formidable fathers are in utter denial, claiming their daughters are off on trips, sure to be back shortly, with perfectly reasonable explanations for their absences.
Dissatisfied with the half-hearted attempts to hand wave away the alarming and mysterious cases of the vanishing women, Safinia takes matters into her own hands, embarking on a journey to a neighboring village in search of answers or at the very least clues that might unearth threads she can begin to pull at. Along the way, she meets an unlikely yet helpful search partner, a historian who calls himself Livy. But despite his eerie sense of knowledge, Safinia is unable to uncover to missing women, thwarted more often than not by the girls’ fathers themselves. As war with Rome looms on the horizon, Safinia must face the reality that the only one she can trust to bring them home is herself.
Venus Vanishing by Rebecca Birrell
In raucous 1928 Berlin, Hannah Sherman has deviated from the traditional narrative arc of a woman’s life. After rejecting an arranged marriage, she leaves home to join the city’s underground art scene, reveling in its clubs and galleries with newfound friends and lovers. Working as a tailor while studying art in every spare moment, Hannah comes to know women and their bodies, first with measuring tape and silk, and later through sensuous layers of paint.
Hannah feels like she can finally call herself an artist when a wealthy female art collector commissions her to make an elaborate series of nude portraits. But after Hannah finishes the acclaimed Venus paintings, she discovers that her work is being tampered with and exhibited under a man’s name. When lines between artist and muse are crossed in an intoxicating but perilous affair, Hannah transforms her art into an act of revenge, finding herself caught up in a devastating game of survival.
Backwoods Banshee by David R. Slayton
This is the fifth book in the Adam Binder series
As Adam copes with fresh trauma, he must investigate how Banshees are getting into our world, and who is trying to erase history from the books …
Adam, Vic, and their friends are attending a concert, enjoying a rare moment of peace, when a man suddenly rushes the stage and screams, killing the musician and rendering many of the audience members unconscious. Adam quickly learns this is a banshee which has somehow slipped into this world from The Between, a realm outside of everything.
While Adam tries to solve one mystery, the tension builds between him and his boyfriend, Vic, as Adam struggles to heal from the torture he suffered at the hands of a vicious cult. Still not comfortable with being touched, can their relationship survive Banshees and betrayal?
