Peter Grant is the ultimate child of London – a black kid who grew up in council flats with a cheerfully cheeky outlook. He’s brand new to the metropolitan police when, in the course of a murder investigation, he gathers intel from a ghost. Soon Peter is whisked away to a secret branch of the MP known as The Folly – and discovers a magical underworld as rich and complex as the city itself.

The small, secluded 19th century town of Amity Falls gets along well with small town bustle and subsistence farming. Things begin to fall apart when one day, a supply wagon is ravaged in the forbidding forest outside town. 18-year-old-Ellerie Downing finds herself thrust quickly into growing up. Then, there’s the matter of the handsome stranger who appeared around the time it all started. Craig produces real fear, doubt, and chaos in her narrative. The ending is set up perfectly for a sequel.

I got chills when I read the classic opening line, “Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderly again.” A young woman hungry for adventure compulsively marries a wealthy, banal, widower. She quickly discovers that his lush estate (Manderly) is still in the grips of the memory of his former wife, Rebecca’s, tragic death. The whole book is laced with the perfect dose of unsettled atmosphere.

11-year-old Ellie is about to start 6th grade without her best friend. As a fat girl, she’s developed a “Fat Girl Code” – rules of conduct that help her avoid the attention of school bullies and her emotionally abusive mother. Fipps masterfully grapples with the big things in a preteen’s life – race, class, body image, bullies. It’s a must for anyone, including preteens

A woman whose parents abandon she and her siblings to fight a Canadian winter in the wilderness alone. A man who experienced horrific racism and abuse at an Indian residential school. Before she was an author, Catherine Gildiner was a therapist, and in the course of her career, she treated some individuals whose growth and recovery in the wake of astonishing trauma will humble and encourage you.

Promising young lawyer Samantha Kofer is laid off unceremoniously from her prestigious Wall Street firm in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. She takes the only option presented to her: work for a rural legal aid firm for a year, and you might be rehired. So, Samantha takes off for Brady, Virginia. Soon, she finds herself in the crosshairs of a greedy coal corporation. Grisham captures both the depth of atrocities, and the resilience of the people.

Rainn Wilson’s reading takes this book to a whole new level. As one reviewer said, “He nails every bit of wordplay and oddity as if it is completely natural for him.” This book is so fun and silly for kids of all ages. It follows a cynical young boy named Milo who discovers a mysterious toll booth in his room one day, and takes it on a journey to a magical, topsy-turvy world. I highly recommend listening on audio with your kids.

Willowdean Dixon is fine with who she is. However, ever since the death of her aunt, her relationship to her pageant queen mother has only grown more distant. So, she enters the local beauty pageant – her mother’s life’s work. Armed with help from drag queens, Dolly Parton, and fellow misfits, Willowdean sheds her tough exterior to truly shine. Murphy perfectly captured what it’s like to grow up in a small West Texas town in this wonderful book.

For Lent in 2022, I wanted to spend some time each day in reflection, and poetry felt like a natural place to reflect. This book of roughly 200 of Mary Oliver’s best poems was perfect. Oliver explores despair, heartbreak, and finding a source of strength so beautifully in this comprehensive anthology of her life’s works.

Paterson reimagined St. Francis’s Canticle of the Creatures into a lovely, gentle bedtime story. But this would be simply a very pleasant book without Pamela Dalton’s stunning illustrations. Each page is beautifully realized in exquisite detail. Every single illustration could be hung as art on its own.

In the 1970s, a shadowy institution known as The Museum assembled an all-female squad of elite assassins. For over 40 years these women travel the globe to track and kill marks (usually former Nazis or evil crime bosses). In present day, The Museum sends them all on a cruise as a not-so-subtle sign to retire. But this is no ordinary cruise – for it turns out that the women are now the marks.

This book is based on the legend of Chang’e and Houyi told to Chinese children at the mid-autumn lunar festival every year. Xingyin was raised on the moon. In her mother’s palace, her life is comfortable and sumptuous, but heavily secretive and guarded, for Xingyin is not supposed to exist. But when Xingyin accidentally makes herself known to the powerful Celestial Emperor, she must flee the only home she’s ever known and make a life for herself in a world she could previously only imagine.

Lillian is aimless. After being kicked out of boarding school as a teen, she’s been coasting for the last decade. One day, her former best friend sends a letter begging Lillian to come and nanny her two pre-teen step children. The catch? The kids spontaneously combust. This book is so tender, so irreverent, and so thought-provoking. It’s hard to write kids that sound like kids, and Wilson absolutely nails it in this silly, serious, tender little book.

When they are students at Harvard and MIT, respectively, Sam Masur and Sadie Green design a game based on “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” by Katsushika Hokusai. But the story actually begins 10 years earlier with a lonely boy and an angry girl at a hospital in Los Angeles. Tomorrow follows Masur and Green through all the ups and downs of their working relationship, creative journey, and deep friendship. It’s a long treatise on art and friendship and community and falling apart and coming back together.