Food for thought – Page 2

‘Alchemy’ Is As Sweet As Its Flowers

The cover of The Alchemy of Flowers, featuring a large keyhole containing the title and author name, which is surrounded by dark florals.

Resau’s descriptions are lush, making the scent of jasmine or lavender, the feel of a refreshing stream, or the taste of a character’s cooking almost come off the page (or the phone screen).

A Son Grieves and Reflects in ‘Adrift’

Adrift is a story about getting to know another part of someone after they’ve passed on, about discovering more about someone you thought you knew through and through and being unable to ask them about it.

‘Call Me Emma’ a Journey of Self-Discovery Amid Tougher Teenage Years

Call Me Emma is ultimately a story about identity, both who we choose to be and who the world will supposedly accept. It’s one of those apparently universal parts of growing up, but here, it’s more obvious than most.

‘Bat Eater’ Brings New Fears to Pandemic Lockdown

A realistic-looking bat with flowers on its back and its wings outstretched flies diagonally across a black backdrop. The title, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, is in large white font in front of the image. Smaller and at the bottom in green text is the author, Kylie Lee Baker.

Bat Eater is a marvelous friendship bracelet of plot threads that sometimes take turns and sometimes work in tandem but are always engrossing, and all feel like facets of a terrifying and claustrophobic world.

‘Birth Canal’ a Kaleidoscopic View of Obsession, Trauma

The cover of Birth Canal, which features an untidy rectangular border of vines and flowers entangled around the title and author at the bottom of the cover on a background of orange in the center and purple at the edges.

The most fascinating thing with Birth Canal as a whole is its dizzying range of vibes that can be pulled out of a narrow cast of characters in a handful of places and only a couple of eras in history.

‘Heartwood’ Explores Questions Behind Headline

This is not a story of tricky plot devices and big reveals. Instead, it’s a portrait of a search for a missing person, and how it takes a community of professionals and amateurs, friends and strangers, to locate them.

‘Antidote’ Offers Dreamlike Path to Cure for Hard Times

A rainbow gradient cascades over a black-and-white photograph of an old farmhouse with a weather vane and farming equipment. The image is fuzzy, as though in the middle of a dust storm. The title and author (The Antidote, Karen Russell) are superimposed upon it.

As The Antidote reminds us, there’s no understanding a place, or its people, if there is no reconciliation with the most difficult parts of that person or place.

‘Grief’ a Multifaceted Examination of Sorrow

Upon a light orange background, the title and author are in underlined purple all-caps text that looks as though it has crumbled all to one corner.

Crosley’s writing brings the events, and her emotions, to life, and helps make her every action and reaction reasonable, even, and especially, when she knows they’re not. It is that prose-level finesse, not the subject matter, that helps keep this slim volume feeling relevant even when it occasionally strays into self-indulgence.

The Apocalypse Grows Strangely in ‘The Garden’

Flowers and greenery splay across a bubbled surface of glass or thin ice as a background to the title and author of Nick Newman's novel The Garden.

The Garden is as much about the testing, and mending, of a sisterly relationship as anything else. The apocalypse is merely a reason for their cloistering, and the reckoning they face with each other.

‘First Love’ Considers Friendship in its Many Forms

The title of the book (First Love: Essays on Friendship) and author name are superimposed on a photograph of three young fair-skinned girls, one of whom is the author, smoking and laughing on a fire escape.

While her takes on friendship may come from places of personal specificity, they nonetheless find broad resonance in how I think most of us have thought of friendship, even if unconsciously.