new releases

KWAN’S LAST MISSION

As World War II winds down in 1945, Commander M.T. Kwan returns from serving with the British to his war-ravaged hometown of Guilin, China. As the Japanese pull back, Kwan—aka The Dragon—hopes to retrieve his family from where they’ve taken refuge farther inland. Colonel Lindsay Ride, his commandant with the British Army Aid Group, shows …

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THE DOLL HOUSE

When Burke Weathers, Garrett Weathers’ rich and famous author grandfather, dies, his will includes an unusual stipulation: Garrett and his mother will only inherit if they spend a week at Inkwell Point, Burke’s home. When they arrive, 13-year-old Garrett soon learns why locals call it “the Doll House.” Eccentric Burke spent his solitary later years …

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EVIE AND HER NIGHTMARES

Between her autism and her fury at Alissa for the suicide, Evie knows she’s not expressing grief in the ways everyone around her expects. Only Alissa’s brother, Ash, seems to understand what Evie needs. He doesn’t mind that she’s skipping track practices and checking out at school. When Ash talks to her about Alissa’s favorite …

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ANOMALIES 53

Ramping up the fighting with artful references to dangling eyeballs and similar rousingly gruesome notes, while adding a horde of zombified ogres to her opener’s cast of golems, dragons, predatory mermaids, and other dangerous Mythicals, Cervantes dishes up a second action-packed crowd pleaser. Struggling both to awaken his own powers as a shape-shifting gilgemish and …

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THE BIG BOOK OF USELESS HISTORY KNOWLEDGE

The term useless is, of course, provocative, particularly when applied to knowledge—but here five researchers have worked hard to separate historical wheat from chaff and in general done a creditable job of dispensing with the former. Some of the anecdotal entries aren’t exactly trivial, such as a reference to how over 60% of the military …

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THE KNIGHT WITH NO BOTTOM

Picture books often tackle the hard questions: How are babies made? What happens when a loved one dies? And now: What should you do if a dragon bites off your butt? Such is the fate of the knight at the heart of this rhyming romp: “Bereft and bumless, the knight cried and cried. / For …

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HAND-ME-DOWN

In this graphic memoir, white-presenting gay boy Damian and his older brother live with their grandmother Nanny; their mother died when they were toddlers. Nanny cared for the boys, trying “really hard to fill the mom-shaped hole” in their lives and to “be the mother who had never been there for her.” Now in eighth …

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BLACK GIRLS DON’T CRY

Seventeen-year-old Ida Carter, who’s Black and bisexual, understands that beauty is currency. As the vice president of Banneker High’s Black Student Union, Ida is “Black popular.” She’s earned respect among the few Black students at her predominantly white school, but she’s nowhere near the top of the overall social hierarchy, and she’s not considered desirable …

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COMPANIONSHIP

In Tallinn, a man named Toomas begins a new gig working as a paid companion for a company that has very strict rules. He’s not a sex worker; his job is to accompany women who are lonely, unsure, or maybe need a date for a company function. There are women contractors who are making a …

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THE BREAST

German art historian Zimmerman examines ways that the breast—“an overdetermined body part”—has been highly politicized, evoking contradictory and impassioned responses across many areas of Western culture throughout history. Translated by Barfoot, Zimmerman’s well-researched study draws on a wide-range of disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, theology, feminist theory, gender studies, and art history, to illuminate the connection …

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