Hachette Library – Starred Reviews
★ SALT BONES
By: Jennifer Givhan
Library Journal – Starred Review
Set on the edge of California’s Salton Sea, the latest novel from poet and novelist Givhan (River Woman, River Demon) is hard-to-put-down literary suspense about families living through the unexplained generational disappearances of their daughters. The sister of Malamar “Mal” Veracruz was one such disappearance, and it tore their family apart. Now, 20 years later, Mal begins to have dreams of a horse-headed woman, blurring the lines between reality and the supernatural. Shortly after, Mal’s own teenage daughter goes missing. Mal is determined to find her daughter before it’s too late, but to do so requires digging up the secrets in her close community, her family, and even her own past. Steeped in the Mexican and Indigenous folklore of the shapeshifter La Siguanaba, the novel deftly creates an atmosphere creeping with dread, plus unexpected twists and family drama. Givhan perfectly balances the supernatural with human themes of grief and love.
VERDICT A timely novel that deals with the treatment of Latina women. For fans of character-driven suspense and the magical realism of Isabel Allende, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Victor LaValle.
Mulholland Books: July 22 , 2025; ISBN: 9780316581523, Hardcover
★ COLD CANNING: THE EASY WAY TO PRESERVE THE SEASONS WITHOUT HOT WATER PROCESSING
By: Bruce Weinstein & Mark Scarbrough
Library Journal – Starred Review
For readers who have held back from home canning because of fears of exploding pressure cookers and giving their nearest and dearest botulism, Weinstein and Scarbrough, culinary social media stars and coauthors of more than 35 cookbooks (including the “Instant Pot Bible” series), are coming to the rescue. The culinary duo’s latest effort contains 425 recipes for cold canning everything from jams and jellies to kimchi and ketchups. In a thorough, don’t-skip introduction, the authors detail the advantages of cold canning—it’s easier, preserves fresh flavors better, and saves time—while also covering the basic tools and ingredients it requires. The recipes themselves are laid out in a clean, concise, and easily understandable format that practically guarantees success. They run the sweet-to-savory gamut, from classic strawberry jam, salted caramel sauce, and apricot gochujang jam to jalapeño sauerkraut and maple mustard. The authors’ lively writing style adds a layer of fun and humor to the canning process.
VERDICT There are a number of excellent guides to traditional canning available, including Ball Canning Back to Basics and Marisa McClellan’s Preserving by the Pint, but Weinstein and Scarbrough’s superb book opens the world of canning and preserving to a whole new crop of cooks
Mulholland Books: July 29 , 2025; ISBN: 9780316577977, Paperback
★ A DOG IN GEORGIA
By: Lauren Grodstein
Library Journal – Starred Review
With her marriage in crisis and her career on hold, Amy West turns to what gives her the most comfort—animal videos on YouTube. There she hears about Angel, a dog that has gone missing in the country of Georgia. Angel is technically a stray but has become beloved by her community for escorting young children as they cross a busy street on their way to school. Amy begins to make regular contributions to the search for Angel, and in so doing, she connects with Irine, who heads the “Justice for Angel” fund. When her husband’s latest indiscretion comes to light, Amy decides to fly off to Georgia to physically join in the search for the missing dog. She has been invited to stay with Irine, whose chaotic household includes Irine’s teenage daughter Maia, three grannies, 11 dogs, and one handsome Russian boarder. In between looking for Angel, Amy joins Maia’s friends for delicious meals and political discussions about Georgia’s authoritarian government. More politics arise in her talks with Andrei, the boarder, who has left Russia to avoid fighting in the war against Ukraine.
VERDICT In Grodstein’s (We Must Not Think of Ourselves) latest, Amy’s journey is less about finding a dog and more about finding herself, though dog lovers (and all others) will find much pleasure in this charming story.
Algonquil: August 5, 2025; ISBN: 9781643752358, Hardcover
★ READY FOR MY CLOSEUP: THE MAKING OF SUNSET BOULEVARD AND THE DARK SIDE OF THE HOLLYWOOD DREAM
By: David M Lubin
Library Journal – Starred Review
Lubin (Grand Illusions: American Art & the First World War) delves into the creation of the classic 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, exploring how director Billy Wilder and his screenwriting partner, Charles Brackett, took the theme of fleeting fame and wealth and produced a deeply critical masterpiece about the corrupting influence of Hollywood’s obsession with youth and stardom. Lubin introduces readers to the early careers of Wilder and Brackett, as well as the film’s stars, Gloria Swanson, William Holden, and Erich von Stroheim, showing the professional experiences of each enhanced their contributions to the film. Lubin posits that Swanson’s bravura performance as Norma Desmond was grounded in her ability to recognize Desmond’s thirst for renewed fame, even though Swanson was, unlike her character, a pragmatist resigned to having aged out of starlet status. Despite Sunset Boulevard’s grim outlook on the movie industry, Lubin demonstrates how the score, set design, and cinematography drew upon well-established Hollywood motifs to create an ingenious combo of noir thriller, gothic horror, and sardonic comedy.
VERDICT Insightful and thoroughly entertaining, this is a must-read for all fans of classic Hollywood.—Sara Shreve
Grand Central: August 12, 2025; ISBN: 9781538739297 Hardcover
★ KISS HER GOODBYE
By: Lisa Gardner
Library Journal – Starred Review
Frankie Elkin’s “hobby” is finding missing persons when everyone else has stopped looking. She is in Tucson at the request of refugee resettlement volunteer Aliah, to search for her Afghan refugee friend Sabera, who has been missing for three weeks, leaving behind her four-year-old daughter, Zahra, and her husband, Isaad. Aliah knows Sabera would never willingly leave Zahra. Shortly after Frankie’s investigation begins, Isaad receives a package, the contents of which prompt him to immediately leave Zahra with a neighbor and drive away. He too is now missing. When two Afghan men are found dead near Sabera’s apartment and someone resembling her is seen nearby, Frankie and Aliah wonder what Sabera is up to and whether she is in danger. Their concern increases when they learn that various intelligence agencies are also looking for her.
VERDICT This fourth action-packed Frankie Elkin installment (after Still See You Everywhere) will excite fans and newbies alike. It is filled with an odd assortment of wonderful characters, including a boa constrictor and an iguana. Alongside the mystery, Gardner ably describes the horrors of refugee camps and the trauma facing immigrants fleeing oppression.
Mulholland Books: August 12 , 2025; ISBN: 9781538765104, Hardcover
★ THE HOSPITAL
By: Leslie Wolfe
Library Journal – Starred Review
Heavily sedated, barely able to speak, and feeling helpless, Emma Duncan wakes up to find that her eyes are covered in bandages and her only sense of the world around her is the sounds of a hospital: a beeping heart monitor, the shuffling of rubber-soled shoes, PA announcements summoning a Dr. Jones to ICU. A traumatic brain injury plagues Emma with screaming pain and prevents her from remembering what happened, other than a vague idea that she has been attacked. She must lie still if she is to recover. In time, her vulnerability makes her increasingly fearful, afraid of the people caring for her, convinced she will be attacked again and this time won’t survive. Immobilized, Emma is completely at the mercy of her fears, much like the heroine of Lucille Fletcher’s radio play Sorry, Wrong Number, the intended victim of a murder plot she discovers by accident only too late. Then, inch by inch, Emma begins to fight back. Wolfe (If I Go Missing) will have readers on edge as they ache for Emma to remember and to escape.
VERDICT With her 31st novel, the prolific Wolfe has made a spectacular contribution not just to her own body of work but to the universe of suspense fiction.
Grand Central: August 12 , 2025; ISBN: 9781538772447, Paperback
★WOMEN OF THE FAIRY TALE RESISTANCE: THE FORGOTTEN FOUNDING MOTHERS OF THE FAIRY TALE AND THE STORIES THAT THEY SPUN
By: Jane Harrington
Library Journal – Starred Review
Fabulous French fairy tales and the equally dramatic life stories of their authors shine in this fascinating book by novelist Harrington (In Circling Flight). The seven women featured all lived and wrote in 1690s France during the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV. These highly educated women were members of salons, discussion groups that were their only venue for sharing social commentary on the status of women—but only in ways that would not explicitly run afoul of the laws prohibiting criticism of the crown or the patriarchy. Telling and writing fairy tales became a coded way to offer such commentaries surreptitiously, Harrington says. Each chapter of the book showcases one salon member, via an informative biography and several of her fairy tales translated into English. Many of the fairy tales are precursors to works that would later appear in collections by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm without attribution to the women who thought them up.
VERDICT Written in a creative nonfiction style, this book fills an enormous gap in the history of fairy tales. It belongs on every shelf of literature relating to this art form.
Black Dog & Leventhal: August 19 , 2025; ISBN: 9780762488704, Hardcover
★Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It
By: Jane Leavy
Booklist- Starred Review
Leavy’s biographies of legends Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, and Babe Ruth made her one of the sport’s great historians. In her latest, she shifts her gaze to baseball’s present and its murky future. Leavy is pretty succinct in her ambitions: Make Me Commissioner. A job application, however, this is not. Leavy has crafted a treatise on how baseball has lost its claim to the title of
“America’s game.” As she crisscrosses the country, she visits small-town ballparks, dancing with the entertainment/baseball juggernaut, the Savannah Bananas. She also meets with some of the top mathematical minds forging the glut of stats into a winning formula—truly the new “moneyball.” As baseball wanes slightly in popularity, Leavy also looks at the development pipeline, where expensive travel systems have pushed out many African American players, leading to the historically low percentages of Black players in Major League Baseball (MLB). In many ways, Leavy is preaching to the converted: those who have read her previous books or followed her newspaper writing and those who believe in baseball’s great history and are worried about its future as technology begins to overtake instinct. Jane Leavy may not be MLB’s next commissioner, but readers will come away wishing she would be.
Grand Central: September 9, 2025; ISBN: 9780306834660); Hardcover
★Softly, As I Leave You: Life after Elvis
By Priscilla Beaulieu Presley and Mary Jane Ross
Booklist- Starred Review
This engaging memoir finds Presley just as her first marriage is ending, the new mother and heartbroken 27-year-old terrified of striking out on her own after devoting half of her life to Elvis. Two things become apparent as this multifaceted and accomplished woman, now 80, shares important milestones from the five decades since that time. First, Priscilla will always be a person thrust into unimaginable fame and relentless public scrutiny, and second, she remains fiercely loyal to Elvis and his continuing legacy. She expresses endless gratitude to members of the Presley family and to the many mentors who helped her realize her business enterprises, charities, acting career, and her successful efforts to save Graceland from financial ruin. These warm sentiments turn dark only when she talks about mean-spirited people who wronged her loved ones (she’s especially vocal about Michael Jackson exploiting her daughter, Lisa Marie). Priscilla sets the record straight on many of the seemingly never-ending tabloid stories, candidly discussing her relationships with her kids and grandchildren plus marriages, divorces, substance abuse, Scientology rumors, money squabbles, and legal wranglings. She also weighs in on the depictions of her in recent movies. The King and all things Elvis remain as popular as ever, so expect lots of demand. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: It’s been 40 years since the release of Presley’s best-selling Elvis and Me. Especially on the heels of Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keogh’s blockbuster, From Here to the Great Unknown, readers are primed and ready to hear from Priscilla again.
Grand Central: September 23, 2025; ISBN:9780306836480; Hardcover
★MIDNIGHT TIMETABLE: A NOVEL IN GHOST STORIES
By: Bora Chung. Tr. by Anton Hur
Booklist- Starred Review
Seven chilling, thrilling interlinked stories capture the hair-raising experiences of current and former employees of the mysterious Institute in Booker International Prize and National Book Awards shortlisted Chung’s latest collection, translated by co-shortlisted translator-of-choice Hur. An unnamed first-person narrator new to the night staff shares the (supernatural) research center’s happenings. The opening “You Can’t Come in Here” examines seemingly impossible events that occur in stairwells and tunnels involving a reappearing “nondescript man.” A more experienced colleague tells the newbie, “I have to pretend they’re not there, pretend I don’t know. That’s the only way we can keep working here.” Other tales reveal hostile siblings after a manipulative mother’s death (“Handkerchief”), a thieving social media wannabe hired under false pretenses (“Cursed Sheep”), the deputy director’s tormented past (“Silence of the Sheep”), a rescued infant who avenges her country’s slaughter (“Blue Bird”), and an innocent feline and the consequences of his murder (“Why Does the Cat”). Beyond superb entertainment, Chung’s fiction deftly exposes political abuses, dysfunctional families, conversion therapy, injustice, and (most affectingly) animal testing and torture. Chung’s afterword divulges the intriguing provenance (personal phobias to ancient history) of these frightful narratives. “Midnight Timetable was not a deadline or a chore for me but a really fun amusement park of a book to work on,” she confesses.
Algonquin: September 30, 2025; ISBN: 9781643756639, Paperback
★ THE ILLUMINATED BOOK OF BIRDS
By: Robin Crofut-Brittingham
Library Journal – Starred Review
Birds have been connected to humans through nature for millennia and play roles in mythology, literature, and religions worldwide. This book explores species, both familiar and less so, to ignite a love of birds in budding naturalists and reignite the wonder of birds in seasoned birdwatchers. Each continent gets its chapter, which is then divided into geographical regions. Readers are introduced to the area with an overview of the habitat and its significance to some of the featured birds, as well as to the local people who inhabit it. On the facing page, all the birds are depicted together, reminiscent of a museum habitat diorama. The following page depicts two to three birds each, including a close-up illustration of the bird and a short caption that shares details about them. The watercolor illustrations are beautiful and add a sense of wonder to the book, evoking the beauty of illuminated medieval manuscripts. Crofut-Brittingham acknowledges that she is an artist, not a scientist, and the book is not meant for use as a guide.
VERDICT This will appeal to bird lovers and nature enthusiasts; as an art book, it makes an excellent addition to general-interest collections.
Timber: October 21, 2025; ISBN: 9781643265049 Hardcover
