Book reviews from Tin House Press — fiction, nonfiction, children’s and independent titles, read and reviewed by our editorial team.
Larkspur Lee, a first-year American student on scholarship, is well aware of the precariousness of her situation at Université Meurdrac. Without social standing or family connections, Lark must use her fierce ambition and hard-earned knowledge of alchemy to survive. When the opportunity arises for a coveted apprenticeship with the immortal Petronelle Flamel, she grabs the …
Bored with life in Toronto, attractive young Priscilla Tempest left Canada for London, where she’s serving as press officer at the famed Savoy Hotel. Her title might as well be Miss Fix-it, since she’s the one who’s called to deal with all sorts of problems, from hungover guests to temperamental actors who refuse to rehearse. …
Dishing up a lighter-than-air confection replete with homages to classic holiday tales, Grabenstein pits bookish 12-year-old Eloise Dobyns against spiteful failed author Roger Scobeenzee—who, having gained access to the source code for all the Christmas stories in existence, aims to overwrite them with his own dour vision of a Christmas Eve Martian invasion. Fortunately, Eloise …
In distinct contrast to the general run of introductions to volcanoes, which tend to be full of melodramatic images and tales of widespread disaster, this survey goes for cute. Wagstaffe does acknowledge the perils of being anywhere near an erupting volcano’s gigantic emissions of gas and flows of lava and ash, pyroclastic or otherwise, but …
Hannah Kabbah loves working in child care, but due to that time she destroyed a man’s car with a cricket bat after he hurt her sister, she has a criminal record, making it hard to find a desirable job in the small English town of Ravenswood. When her teenage crush, Nathaniel Davis, now a tattooed …
When the muckraking journalist Barbara Ehrenreich died in 2022, her author son, Ben, decided to write a story every day to work through his emotions. The 85 pieces collected here all roughly qualify as flash fiction, though a few are ultrabrief wisps of ideas. (Complete text of one piece: “Again, it was supposed to rain, …
This collective biography/alphabet book defines a hero as “someone who tries to be their best self, who helps others, who makes the world a better place.” One Jewish hero is included for each letter of the alphabet. The 14 women and 12 men featured vary in terms of race and ability, as well as occupation. …
Twelve-year-old Rowdy Buckner, who has dark eyes and hair and “the same brown skin passed down from ancestors who called this kingdom home long before it was a kingdom at all,” is sick of his pampered lifestyle as the future monarch of the Kingdom of Texas in the Allied Lands, a magical version of the …
Carlos Smith grows up between cultures as the U.S.-born son of a Black American-Chinese father and a Colombian mother with Palestinian roots. His childhood in Bolivia is shattered when his friend Manny is murdered, leaving Carlos furious at the injustice of a world in which the innocent suffer. After moving to Missouri, he discovers a …
In the fifth book of Ellis’ Matt Jones thriller series, the 30-year-old LA homicide detective is called to the Brentwood home of A-list entertainment attorney Eli Stone and his partner, Dana Thatcher. Both Stone and Thatcher have been murdered but curiously met their demise in different ways: Thatcher was strangled, and Stone was shot three …
