Desire Lines: A Memoir

by Kristen Millares Young

Accomplished storyteller Kristen Millares Young's communion with an ancient mother goddess and her quest to reconcile the incongruities of her "maddening matriarchs" provide an intriguing thematic framework for her first memoir-in-essays, Desire Lines. The Cuban American author's 15 essays traverse volcanic landscapes and oceanic depths, Spanish villages and Parisian museum archives, in pursuit of "unfettered" joyful mothering and "a version of femininity" she can believe in.

Desire lines, Young (Subduction

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A History of the World in Twelve Beans

by Joël Broekaert, trans. by Michele Hutchison

Intriguing facts and entertaining true stories serve as the lattice of A History of the World in Twelve Beans by Joël Broekaert, translated by Michele Hutchison. Broekaert, a Dutch culinary journalist with a background in history (and judge on his country's Celebrity MasterChef), takes readers on a brisk, friendly tour of world history using beans as a focal point. He begins his bean journey with the biblical story of Jacob and Esau, in which lentils are a key feature, and ends with how the protein-rich

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On Another Planet They Can Save Me

by Lieke Marsman, trans. by Sophie Collins

A person who receives a terminal diagnosis has limited options, most of which boil down to continuing or ceasing medical care. Such choices are knotted with considerations such as health-care access, cost, and personal belief, along with society's expectations and level of tolerance for illness and death. The Dutch poet Lieke Marsman, who died at age 35 in 2026, tackles all of this and more with exceptional frankness in On Another Planet They Can Save Me, translated by Sophie Collins.

Marsman's philosophical

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Children of Owl

by Darcie Little Badger, illus. by Abigail Rajunov

Children of Owl, the fourth solo novel for young readers from Newbery Honor-winning author Darcie Little Badger (A Snake Falls to Earth; Elatsoe) and illustrated by Abigail Rajunov (If I Lived in the Sky), is a fairy tale, a ghost story, and a striking narrative about trauma, community, and what is owed to the dead.

In a desert trailer park in Mockingtown, Tex., three Lipan Apache cousins battle with personal and real ghosts. Sixteen-year-old Maisie's grief over the death of her best friend, Mara, follows

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Second Generation Blues

by Julio Anta, illus. by Red Dryer

The prickly, poignant, slice-of-life YA graphic novel Second Generation Blues depicts the collision of immigrant parents' expectations with their U.S.-born son's big dreams.     

It's summer in New York City and teen Luis Menendez would love nothing more than to spend it going to concerts, reviewing them, and working toward his goal of being a music journalist. Instead, he's stuck working at his family's Cuban restaurant, taking commands from his militant and borderline-cruel father,

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Like Glass

by Jen Ferguson

Like Glass, by YA author and William C. Morris and Stonewall Award Honor winner Jen Ferguson (The Summer of Bitter and Sweet; A Constellation of Minor Bears), paints a passionate portrait of grief through a Métis teen's captivating, chaotic determination to understand her sister's death and why her father refuses to leave the place where it happened.

One year ago, Tate's older sister, Bronwyn, died of an aneurysm while living in a small town in the French Alps. Tate's Métis father and "white

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