Lower East Side Librarian

Fannie Flagg novels always go down easy and are southern charming as all get-out. All-Girl centers on a 60-year-old woman who finds out she's not southern, at least not in the southern way of knowing who your people are a few generations back. It's also about Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs). Unless you're a real crankypants, you should be moved by protagonist Sookie Poole's evolution, the WASPs accomplishments, or both. I sniffled quite a bit reading about the titular event while riding a New Jersey transit train home from Jewish Christmas.

The publisher is Harlequin MIRA, but it didn't occur to me when I originally read a review of this book that it was a romance. I'm still not sure if that was the intent, because, finding the protagonist and her love interest annoying, I put the book down 200 or so pages in. The MIRA imprint is meant to encompass literary and genres aside from romance, for women.

I'm not much of a foodie, but I do love graphic memoirs, so I was happy to receive Knisley's book from my homie C-Dog as a solstice (or whatever) gift. I found myself envying how Knisley's love of food and cooking shored up her relationships with parents and friends. As you may know, I also have a soft spot for anything period related, so I loved this passage:

A woman's body craved protein and iron.

< copyrighted image I can't reproduce >

I grew into my mother's cravings - the demands of my inherited body chemistry.

< copyrighted image where Lucy says, "Once a month I need spinach." and "Like a were-rabbit." >

Danticat tells a story similar to her own, but set about twenty years later and with plenty of other elements to differentiate it from a fictionalized memoir, about a Haitian girl, Celiane, moving to the US and reuniting her family.

In an alternate history clairvoyance is unnatural and a crime. Clairvoyants have to hide their power or risk being consigned to The Tower. It turns out there's something even worse than The Tower, an alternate government in Oxford, run by Rephaim, which Wikipedia and other sources define as giant spirits from the netherworld.

She was already the daughter of a celebrity; an alumni connection could help only so much more. Why on earth hire an independent consultant, too? But then, there were Anne's clients: the parents who left nothing to chance. They refused to play with a deck that wasn't stacked. They'd raise a child unvaccinated before they'd consider letting him apply to college unaided.

Anne helps privileged (and one unprivileged) students get into college, mostly by working with them on their applications essays, but also a little bit by handling their families.

Carey's new paranormal series has a wide variety of magical creatures, including mermaids, norns (?) and your run-of-the-mill vampires and werewolves. The protagonist is a halfie, herself, a hell-spawn doing her best to not invoke her birthright and thereby destroying the world. She's also a file clerk at the local PD, doing supernatural detective work on the QT.

If you want to know what it's like inside an eating disorder, this is your chance. It's hardcore, but reading it, you understand how it happens. At least I could see it.

De Rossi (not remotely her real/given name) is a serious overachiever from childhood, the kind of kid who goes undefeated in classroom times tables challenges for years because she's drilled them so hard, even though she's not especially adept at math.