Book reviews from Tin House Press — fiction, nonfiction, children’s and independent titles, read and reviewed by our editorial team.
Although it’s “Day,” baby owl wants to “Play.” Mother owl tries to spoon-feed baby owl. “Ahh…” Such is the pattern set in this primer on early speech sounds, which devotes a two-page spread to each of the vowels; the hard vowel sound is exemplified on the left-hand page and the soft vowel sound on the …
June Nakashima, whose working-class Japanese American family lived in a section of Hilo known as Kimiville, lost her parents in the 1960 tsunami that devastated the region; when she was a teenager, she also experienced the trauma of being raped by a group of teenage boys. When June and her former classmate Max Nelson meet …
Young people are often the ones to embrace the impulse to speak truth to power, and sometimes they do so before they fully understand the consequences of their actions. This novel, set in California, presents a tale of misunderstanding alongside a story of fierce, self-righteous youth seeking justice. Soon after Hamilton High School student Redmond …
Faraday (a pseudonym) has traveled to over 150 countries throughout his career, and he’s collected a wide array of lovers in each one. In often explicit detail, he recounts his adventures with (to pick two examples) a self-confessed Romanian criminal and an international porn star from Azerbaijan in this work, describing how he’s navigated both …
Nine years before the bulk of the story takes place, New York University student Myra; her future husband, Alfred; and their friends witness the accidental death of Myra’s then-boyfriend Liam after he falls off a fire escape. In the present, Myra and Alfred have a stagnant marriage; things are especially uneasy of late due to …
Tail End Charlie is a 17-year-old Royal Air Force rear gunner from Yorkshire. In the Cotswolds, Marcus, who’s 15, works at Parnall’s, building machine gun turrets. Across the North Sea in Westphalia, Germany, 14-year-old Gisele has a father in the Luftwaffe and a disabled baby brother, who might be taken by the Nazis. Each young …
Fares Hashem’s story begins before his birth, with his father, Mansour, whose friendship with the educated Iskandar Haleem introduces him to science, geography, Western medicine, and the possibilities of education. After witnessing the effectiveness of modern medicine firsthand, Mansour becomes determined that his son will receive a proper education, something Mansour himself never had. Fares …
In this collection, Gedaliah confidently conjures the past, contemplates the future, and connects with the natural world. The first section, “Moods and Musings,” centers on “the heart of memory” and opens with “I Am Becoming,” written from the perspective of a child recently freed from a stroller: “I am locomotion. / I am wind. / …
In the summer of 2003, the author, a NICU nurse, traveled to California after leaving an unhealthy relationship. A routine trip to the Santa Monica Farmers Market turned into a life-altering tragedy when 86-year-old Russell Weller’s “pedal error” caused his Buick to speed through the crowd, killing 10 and injuring many more. Cronin was hospitalized …
In a world filled with people possessing fantastic powers, 15-year-old Alé Aragón was once deemed a Deficient, lacking an “accelerated ability” that many others have. But he survived a brutal fight, marking him as a Feral, a designation that means his ability—to come back from the dead—is outside the Common Six (such as the telekinesis …
