rerun: The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon

Posted on January 26, 2026 by pagesofjulia

I still compare this one, originally reviewed in April of 2021, to YA/coming-of-age romances and will be looking for more from Nicola Yoon. Please enjoy, and stay tuned for some great reviews of books I’m reading and listening to now…

Another great one that threatened to keep me up all night long. Keep ’em coming.

The Sun Is Also a Star is a YA novel of romance, fate, science, race, and more; 98% of it takes place in a single day in New York City. It stars two delightful and very different teenagers. Natasha is a serious science geek and impassioned fan of 90s grunge music, who firmly believes in provable facts and none of that gooey bubblegum stuff about love. She came to the United States when she was eight as an undocumented immigrant, like both her parents; only her little brother was born in the country, and now – thanks to her father’s unbelievable idiocy – the family is just hours away from deportation to Jamaica, a country that definitely does not feel like Natasha’s home.

Daniel is the younger son of Korean immigrants. His high-achieving older brother is their parents’ darling (of course), and a bully, and objectively a serious asshole; he’s just been kicked out of Harvard (Best School), though, so that’s something. Daniel has his Yale interview today (Second Best School), because he’s trying to follow the intended path and become a doctor, but what Daniel really wants to be is a poet. He is all dreams.

You can already see the drama setting up: Natasha and Daniel run into each other on this momentous day, as she attempts a last-minute legal defense against deportation and he approaches the Yale alum he’s meant to impress. They couldn’t be more different, but they’re drawn together nonetheless. Daniel intends that they will fall in love. Natasha, naturally, is having none of it. There are only hours to spare. Chapters shift between the points of view of Natasha and Daniel as well as a handful of others: side characters we’ll see for just glimpses, or a more omniscient view, including ‘future histories’ and etymologies (‘irie’), a ‘history of naming,’ a ‘history of decay.’ The effect is kaleidoscopic, and transcendent. The cumulative tone is frequently hilarious – both teens’ voices are darling, and Daniel especially is a riot; it is poignant in the ways of teenaged love; and, as established by a Carl Sagan-infused prologue, there is an all-encompassing, cosmic-scale sense of gravity and wonder.

This is a pitch-perfect story, lightning-paced as Natasha’s last day in the States and frenzied as young love, but serious as death, too. It’s absorbing, a world to get lost in. On one level it’s very much about race, racism, immigration and culture. Daniel’s father owns a Black beauty shop, like so many Korean-Americans do, and the book pauses to discuss the global forces that have set up this odd truth. Natasha wears her hair natural – which for some is a political statement, but (again the novel pauses to note, in one of those neat asides) it can also be simpler than that. “In the future, she may make it straight again. She does it because she wants to try something new. She does it simply because it looks beautiful.” I love this narrative voice: here is “an African American history” of hair; here is some of the weighty meaning that accrues; and also, here is a young woman who just wears her hair like she likes it. All of these at once.

The romance story that is the heart of this novel is very sweet and engaging. The topical content is well done and not preachy. The conversation between hyperrationality (Natasha) and dreaminess (Daniel) could have been cutesy and pat, but it’s not: it’s thought-provoking, expansive, and smart. I am, again, impressed with what YA can be. And I am therefore now interested in Yoon’s previous novel, Everything, Everything. I really think there’s something in this book for everyone. I am completely charmed. What a beautiful, book-filled world.

Rating: 8 little notebooks.

What books do you keep thinking of years after the fact?

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

A Power Unbound by Freya Marske

Posted on January 23, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Same disclaimer as last time.

Well, it is early in the year for this, but I have possibly found the best book of the year. I am crazy about this Last Binding trilogy.

Book three, like the two before it, centers around one couple that makes a connection and then sizzles hot. But it also advances the world-level plot that’s been building in all three books: a group of powerful and power-hungry magicians, of the sort who hold enormous social capital, titles, and wealth as well as magic, aim to monopolize still further, stealing power from the bulk of magical humankind. It’s egregious, but very human of them. Our motley crew, which now comprises Violet, Maud, Robin, Edwin, Addie, Jack, and Alan, aims to stop them. But despite their combined riches in titles, wealth, magical power and expertise, smarts and pure scrappiness, our group pales in comparison to the established power of magical England. It’s grim, in fact.

Alongside the trilogy’s thread about magical power and threat to the world – with a growing sense of social justice, thanks not least of all to Alan’s contributions – and a delightful romantic-and-sexy thread with our third couple to take center stage, there is a growing sense that these friends are building something beautiful as a group. Several, or nearly all, of these protagonists considered themselves loners when the story began. One important but understated headline to A Power Unbound is that they are no longer alone, but members of the kind of built family that will take care of one another in the most important and profound ways.

I cannot understate how devastated I was to finish this book. I don’t remember the last time I was this sad about there being no more. I’m relieved to learn that Marske has two other novels, which you’ll hear from me about soon. But gosh. The Last Binding. I can’t believe I’m going to live without this group of funny, plucky, curious, hard-loving young people. Here in the first month of the year, I think this is the one to beat. All hail.

Rating: 10 cufflinks.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger (audio)

Posted on January 19, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Liz was right. This was beautiful and worth it, even though I was a little bit leery of the dystopia. A gorgeous book, and gorgeously read for us by David Aaron Baker. Glorious.

The novel is set in a world very like our own, maybe just a little further down the road to ruin. The narrator, Rainy, lives in town of Icebridge, which I think is on the American side of the border with Canada, on the Great Lakes. Political, economic and environmental collapse have advanced beyond our current situation. Rainy lives in a leaning but charming three-story house with his wife Lark, who is a golden person and one of the town’s most beloved. She runs a bookshop, possesses a great and contagious love of art and literature, and holds wisdom and appealing beliefs. At the story’s beginning, they take in a lodger, Kellan, who eventually admits to being on the run from the ‘astronauts’ he was pledged to as indentured worker. (‘Astronauts’ are not literal, but simply the astronomically privileged and wealthy in an increasingly divided world.) Rainy likes Kellan; but it is true that, as predicted, he brings devastation upon the household. In its wake, Rainy is forced to take to Lake Superior, that great inland ocean, in an ancient sailboat imperfectly restored by hand. He has it in mind that he might find what he is looking for if he can reach the Slate Islands, where he and Lark once sailed, fifteen years ago, on Rainy’s only sailing venture ever until this point. His voyage – really, his quest – will be circuitous, at the mercy of weather patterns and storms, and beset by people who mean him harm. There will also be friendlies along the way. He will pick up a most fascinating passenger, a nine-year-old girl named Sol.

This story is compared to the Orpheus myth, but I don’t see how we can miss Odysseus in it, too, or any quest you choose. It has large, nearly all-encompassing scope, and beautiful ideas about how we make the world around us and what friendship looks like. It considers literature and art and music, and offers hope where it seems unlikely. It is lovely at the sentence level. The lake “was a blackboard to the send of sight, and any story might be written on its surface.” “There’s something in romance if it puts you on a boat with the one you adore in a harbor no storm can penetrate with an affable ghost anchored nearby.” Its events are often horrifying, but I’m left with the weird sense that I’d still be satisfied to follow Rainy anywhere within his world.

This is one of those I’d happily take a high-level lit course in. Solid rec, Liz. Thank you.

Rating: 9 steaming mugs of coffee.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

I Am Agatha by Nancy Foley

Posted on January 16, 2026 by pagesofjulia

A solitary aging painter rages against the slow loss of her partner to dementia in this spare, feeling first novel.

Wrestling with grief, love, and creation, a reclusive painter struggles to navigate the decline of her beloved with the help of a loyal 13-year-old neighbor, a trusty pickup truck, and a couple of shovels. Nancy Foley’s I Am Agatha is a striking first novel, jumping off from scant details of the life of a true historical figure to follow the author’s imagination beyond. Like its protagonist, this story is sure-footed and occasionally, markedly vulnerable.

Based upon the painter Agnes Martin, Foley’s Agatha Smithson leaves 1960s New York City to resurface in New Mexico, where she builds an adobe house on a high mesa, lives mostly apart from society, and creates her life’s finest works. She’s passionate about her home and her “ocean canyon”: “It’s ridiculous that anything goes on anywhere other than Mesa Portales, that one can isolate oneself from the world but still it goes about its business.” She is prickly, domineering, capable of grim humor. “You’d sure make my job easier if you could give a straight answer now and then,” comments a local lawyer. “But I guess it’s not in your character.”

Agatha is peremptory, “quick to recognize the correct path forward in all situations.” She is given to strong allegiances but demands great loyalty and holds long grudges; her friends are few and precious. Thirteen-year-old Josey is, like Agatha, obstinate, free-willed, and given to few words. He is her ally, a valued hard worker, and a vital human connection. Agatha has one great love, found later in life: a widow named Alice, who lives alone with a secret buried in her backyard. As Alice’s dementia worsens, Agatha will be late to learn what secrets have been kept from her, too. Fierce and indomitable, Agatha is also overwhelmed by love and grief.

Driven by commitment to her work, which she takes very seriously, Agatha is moved not at all by the opinions of others. But in Alice, she finds something different and shocking. “Work is not the only thing in life,” Agatha says, to a young disciple’s incredulity, but “I surprise myself by feeling it to be true. I would do anything possible, anything at all, to keep Alice with me.” Agatha’s big, brash personality and determination to grow old with Alice is pitted against more staid forces like Alice’s son, who would rather move his mild-mannered mother into assisted living. An accomplished artist and staunch recluse, Agatha does not easily brook resistance, but the end of Alice’s life will be one of her greatest struggles. I Am Agatha is an arresting, darkly funny, and heartrending consideration of life, love, and endings.

This review originally ran in the January 12, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 peanut-butter-and-tomato sandwiches.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a comment »

A Restless Truth by Freya Marske

Posted on January 12, 2026 by pagesofjulia

As is my more-or-less usual practice, this review will contain spoilers for the book that preceded it in the series, but not so much for this book itself.

Book two was every bit as good as book one.

We’ve made a pretty thorough shift away from that cast of characters. Robin and Edwin are still there, but off-screen. In my review of that first book, I mentioned Robin’s beloved younger sister only as such, without even giving her name: that’s how minor a character she was there, but here, Maud stars. She has been assigned (at her own insistence) the duty of bringing back from America to Britain a most important Mrs. Navenby, member of the Forsythia Club alongside the now deceased (see book one) Flora Sutton. In the novel’s opening scene, we see Mrs. Navenby murdered, onboard the ship Lyric en route to London. This leaves Maud Blyth, under the pseudonym Maud Cutler, alone in her remaining task to bring home, if not the wisdom of Mrs. Navenby, at least her piece of the Last Contract. Unfortunately Maud does not even know what form that piece might take.

In short order, the enterprising if not terribly worldly “Miss Cutler” manages to enlist the help of Lord Hawthorn (who we met in book one) and a new acquaintance, Miss Violet Debenham, a thoroughly disgraced member of a good English family who has been living in New York and acting in the theatre (horrors), although she is now set to inherit from an also somewhat disgraced but very wealthy and now dead relative. Along the way to identifying and protecting or recovering Mrs. Navenby’s magical item (piece of the Last Contract), Maud’s crew will pick up a journalist who is also a jewel thief and pornography dealer. Maud takes a special interest in the pornography; she takes advantage of this voyage to become a little more worldly. The novel’s title comes in when her new lover must confront their own resistance to the vulnerability that comes with honesty – in contrast to Maud’s fanatical unwillingness to tell a lie. Whew.

A Restless Truth, like A Marvellous Light, excels at the fine details of historical setting, the meticulous building of this magical world, and the absolute rush of discovery that comes with good love and/or sex. I am breathless with anticipation for book three.

Rating: 9 parrots.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran

Posted on January 9, 2026 by pagesofjulia

The horrors of coming-of-age meet ectoplasm and spiritual mediums in a boarding-school gothic that confronts fear, longing, authority, and death.

Avery Curran’s Spoiled Milk is a gothic boarding-school tale of suspense filled with small and large horrors, schoolgirl skirmishes, lust, death, and the supernatural.

In the fall of 1928, Emily Locke is settling into her final year at Briarley School for Girls in the English countryside as one of a tight-knit group of seven upper-sixth girls. Emily’s family life is unhappy–not unusual among her year, but perhaps especially so–and Briarley has been her effective home since she was 11. Her very best friend, the girl she loves, is Violet, “next to whom all others paled in comparison. She had always seemed more real, more vivid than the rest of us.” The book opens on Violet’s 18th birthday, when the whole school celebrates and fawns over her. “I hoped that later she might give me one of the silk ribbons that tied the parcels together, pressing it into my hand before bed like a mediaeval lady giving a knight a favour to tuck into his armour.” It is also the night that Violet dies. When the girls gather after the funeral for a midnight feast to honor her in their own way, they find that the freshest milk on the school grounds has inexplicably gone bad. These are the first clues that more change is afoot than the girls’ coming-of-age.

One of Violet’s birthday gifts was a contraband book called Spiritualist Phenomena and Mediumship. “Supernatural exploration was the sort of thing one always hoped might happen at school,” but Briarley has always been staid and safe, if a little boring, until now. With Violet gone, Emily and her remaining classmates determine to find out what happened–who or what killed her, and why the food at the school has begun to taste strange. They contact a medium in the village. They try a séance of their own. The relationships within their small group are strained by jealousies, conflicting priorities, and secret affections. Emily’s chief rival is Evelyn, whom she finds both infuriating and fascinating. “Evelyn’s people were Presbyterians,” and she opposes their spiritualism as unchristian and wrong. But the oddities and accidents at Briarley intensify even as Evelyn’s discomfort grows, and their experiments with the spirit realm feel ever more life-and-death, until it seems that no one will get out of Briarley alive.

Spoiled Milk contains echoes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in Curran’s intimate, first-person, reflective voice for Emily, among other similarities. Tensions rise for the small group of girls in this closed-room thriller, as petty rifts give way to serious terrors, and readers will keep guessing until the final pages. Classic, but still surprising, Curran’s first novel will satisfy gothic fans.

This review originally ran in the January 5, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 satsumas.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Haven by Ani Katz

Posted on January 5, 2026 by pagesofjulia

In a masterpiece of tension, set within a lavish island community for the corporate select, a disappeared infant calls into question everything one mother thought she knew.

Ani Katz’s Haven is a chilling story about an apparent utopia that is anything but. As Caroline boards a ferry with husband Adam and infant son Gabriel for an exclusive getaway on a lovely island enclave, she is, first of all, relieved. After a trying period of his unemployment, Adam’s job with corporate giant Corridor gives him the means to join an elite group of friends and coworkers in a spaceship (Caroline’s description) of a house on the outskirts of Haven, a longtime home of the rich.

Caroline has never quite understood what it is that Corridor does–something with “infrastructure”–but she’s grateful that Adam is employed and seemingly less depressed. Now she hopes to relax, get to know Adam’s friends a little better, perhaps strengthen her bond with Gabriel, maybe even get some artistic inspiration back. Ever since becoming a mother, her photography has suffered. She attempted a project about motherhood, but “was getting bored with her baby as a subject.” Even on the island, seeking subjects, she worries: “What if she never made an interesting photograph again?” But in Katz’s tautly plotted psychological thriller, it turns out that photography may be the least of Caroline’s concerns.

Caroline’s roommates for the summer, Adam’s Corridor colleagues, indulge in eating and drinking to excess and unfamiliar, unnamed drugs, but they also coo over Gabriel and give Caroline the occasional break for a proper shower. She is trying to lean into the novel, luxury experience. The island’s wider inhabitants, however, strike her as being just a little off. Tinkly laughter, choreographed dance, and uncanny children degrade into shadowy threats: angry islanders, old rituals and sacrifice, and corporate surveillance. Then comes the nightmarish morning when Caroline wakes up and Gabriel is gone. As she searches for her son and the truth of what happens in Haven, she will come to question even the rules, and the people, she thinks she knows best.

If Haven ever begins to feel like it might trend toward the formulaic, be assured that Katz (A Good Man) is about to twist her tricky narrative again, always catching Caroline, and readers, unawares. This masterpiece of tension turns absolutely terrifying by its finish. Technology, hubris, deception, and mistrust combine in an unsettling corporate dystopia that asks what ends would justify which means. Riveting, thought-provoking, and ever surprising, Haven is not for the easily unnerved.

This review originally ran in the December 23, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 hats.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a comment »

2025: A Year in Review

Posted on January 2, 2026 by pagesofjulia

It’s time for the annual year-in-review, folks. (You can view past years here.) As ever, if these numbers are yawn-inducing, come back on Monday and we’ll review books again!

In 2025, I read 94 books (100 in 2024).

Of those I read this year:

  • 88% were fiction (Last year, 84%). Boy, has this ever changed since I was a nonfiction writing student!
  • 75% were written by female authors (69% last year). That’s a big one over the long stretch, too, although not a huge change from last year. I definitely used to read more men than women. I’m not even trying.
  • Genre-wise, we are still guided by ‘contemporary’ at nearly 45% of the fiction I read. Next is fantasy/speculative fiction at 31%, historical at 18%, and LGBTQ fiction at 17%. Children’s/YA was 14% of my fiction reading, and it’s all single digits from there, led by mysteries, thrillers, coming-of-age stories, noir/gothic and dystopian. Last year the largest chunk was of course contemporary (24%), followed by double digits in fantasy, historical, LGBTQ, sci fi, and speculative. Larger single-digit groups included children’s/YA, mystery, and thriller. It looks like children’s/YA made a bit of leap, maybe because of the growing importance of a couple of younger folks in my life.
  • Because of a big road trip and the addition of a bike trainer to my garage, I listened to four audiobooks, all late in the year (none last year). And one of them made the best-of-the-year list!
  • Nearly matching last year (at 48%), 47% of the books I read this year were for my own pleasure. The rest were for assigned review.
  • I purchased more than a third of the books I read in 2025, and more than half came to me for assignments, mostly from my lovely editors at Shelf Awareness. I’m buying a hair less since last when, when I purchased 49% of my reading.
  • Last year I reread a whopping seven books. This year? Zero.
  • I did 46% of this year’s reading via e-books (last year, 43%). Not a big change but gosh I wish it were a little fewer than that.
  • I read 74% white authors this year, and just 12% Black authors (an aggregate 25% nonwhite). Last year 69% of the books I read this year were by white authors, but the Black authors numbered in the single digits. Still and always work to do. I continue to feel dismayed at how overwhelming the numbers remain unless I make a pretty hard effort. Part of this has got to be my own thoughtless selections, but I know part of it is still at the level of the publishing industry, too.
  • 23% of the books I read were authored by people who publicly identify as queer (last year, 19%.) That one, by contrast, feels like a number that’s creeping upward through no conscious effort of my own.

New to last year’s accounting was an unusually high number of books I chose not to review because I did not like them enough. This year, there were six of them to 2024’s twelve. Improvement there, I guess.

And in the overall… nothing new that I feel I need to work on. Still chasing more diversity in the authors I read. That’s the world, friends. Any reading goals for y’all?

Filed under: musings | Tagged: , | Leave a comment »

best of 2025: year’s end

Posted on December 29, 2025 by pagesofjulia

My year-in-review post will be up on Friday, with reading stats. As ever, I want to first share the list of my favorite things I read this year. (You can see past years’ best-of lists at this tag.)

I gave two books this year ratings of 10:

And a rather longer list received ratings of 9:

And I reserve the right to a few honorable mentions:

I rarely do this any more, ha, but I did watch a couple of movies this year, and just in the last few days I really enjoyed Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. No review, but it deserves mention here in the mostly-defunct ‘other media’ category. I’ll be looking for more of those ‘Knives Out’ films.

What did you read (or otherwise take in) this year that you loved? What did I miss??

See you in a few days for the big stats crunch, and thanks as always for being here, friendly reader. Happy New Year.

Filed under: musings | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

Little One by Olivia Muenter

Posted on December 26, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A young woman’s troubled past resurfaces in this novel of psychological suspense and secrets.

Olivia Muenter’s Little One chills and entertains with the story of a young woman whose fresh start is interrupted.

Since leaving the intentional community run by her father in rural Florida, Catharine West has built herself a life from scratch in New York City. She has a successful copywriting career, visits the public library at least once a week, runs daily, and enjoys a snarky friendship over drinks with the disarming Stella, who says of Catharine’s library habit, “You do realize this isn’t actually a Nora Ephron film.” She doesn’t date much, which Stella attributes to a bad breakup or fear of change. Catharine holds people at arm’s length, privately enforcing upon herself some of the same obsessive standards she learned back at the farm, including extreme fasting and self-deprivation. She has shared her past with no one, which is why it’s so alarming when a journalist e-mails out of the blue with questions about “a little-known, now-defunct cult in central Florida.” Catharine’s carefully crafted, tightly controlled existence is threatened. But in balance with that risk hangs the chance that she might recover the one part of her past that she never meant to lose: her sister.

Little One, Muenter’s second novel (following Such a Bad Influence), follows Catharine in alternating chapters marked “Then” and “Now.” Catharine’s remembered Florida begins as idyllic, sunny, verdant, a childhood spent “chasing the coolest parts of the day, picking tomatoes at dawn, bringing each to my nose and marveling at the smell, all at once familiar and astounding.” But what began as a close-knit community with back-to-the-land ethics gradually became something sinister, sticky, and alligator-ridden in the oppressive heat.

In the present-day timeline, Catharine becomes increasingly involved with the journalist, Reese, whom she finds both attractive and off-putting. As she strings him along, giving him just enough to get back the information she needs from his unnamed source, it may be that she’s met her match. Meanwhile, readers recognize past Catharine (in her father’s steely grip) in the present one (wielding an ironclad control over her own life). Fasting becomes exercise compulsion and an obsession with willpower; the concept of hunger, in its various meanings, is central to the plot. Muenter’s expertly moody, creepy-crawly narrative is precisely paced. Secrets as off-balance as Catharine herself are released at a tantalizing rate that might just keep the reader up all night, as the novel accelerates toward a satisfyingly surprising conclusion.

This review originally ran in the November 21, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 car keys.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

Next Page »