Kate Mckean

VP at Morhaim Literary. my colors are blush and bashful. Newsletter here: https://t.co/0bTdJqHYFC

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Book Recommendations:

KM

Recommended by Kate Mckean

THIS BOOK IS A BEAUTY AND A DELIGHT https://t.co/ka96BG6t2K (from X)

A positively ingenious story about a mysterious island, long-lost secrets, and a young girl’s quest in the world of mad science, Linette Moore’s debut middle-grade graphic novel, The Prisoner of Shiverstone, “is a good mix of fantasy, mystery, and action” (Horn Book). Eleven-year-old Helga Sharp is found unconscious in a drifting rowboat near the coast of Utley Island. Utley, as Helga finds out when she awakens in the hospital, is forbidden territory: It’s a prison island to which the Mainland has exiled troublesome mad scientists for generations. Helga is questioned by the island’s guards and though they’re suspicious of her story, they agree to let her stay until they find her family. The truth is, it’s no accident that Helga landed here. She is a keen inventor, but the Mainland is suspicious of all scientists and inventors. While working on her projects in secret, Helga made radio contact with Erasmus Lope, a mad genius who everyone thought had died in a lab experiment gone spectacularly wrong. But Lope is alive, and Helga is on a mission to rescue him from the prison island. Now Helga must find a way to break Lope out, right under the noses of the family of famous heroes that run Utley Island. There’s only one big problem: Lope’s trapped inside a giant crystal in the mad scientists’ museum! Fans of Red’s Planet and Suee and the Shadow are sure to love The Prisoner of Shiverstone, a charismatically illustrated mad science adventure for readers of all ages.

KM

Recommended by Kate Mckean

Happy book birthday to @TerryBlas and @claudiaguirre for their YA GN LIFETIME PASSES, the inaugural title to @AbramsComicArts Surely list!!! This book is hilarious and heartfelt and you will love it. cc @sgtgreenbomb @marikotamaki https://t.co/LMmP2tOWqs (from X)

Lifetime Passes: A Graphic Novel book cover

by Terry Blas, Claudia Aguirre·You?

In this darkly comedic YA graphic novel, a group of teens starts a program to bring senior citizens to a local theme park to take advantage of the unofficial park policy: If someone dies on the property, the rest of their party is given Lifetime Passes! Sixteen-year-old Jackie Chavez loves her local amusement park, Kingdom Adventure, maybe more than anything else in the world. The park is all she and her friends Nikki, Daniel, and Berke—although they aren’t always the greatest friends—talk about. Kingdom Adventure is where all Jackie’s best memories are, and it’s where she feels safe and happy. This carries even more weight now that Jackie’s parents have been deported and forced to go back to Mexico, leaving Jackie in the United States with her Tía Gina, who she works with at the Valley Care Living seniors’ home. When Gina tells Jackie that they can’t afford a season pass for next summer, Jackie is crushed. But on her next trip to Kingdom Adventure, she discovers a strictly protected secret: If a member of their party dies at the park, the rest of their group gets free lifetime passes. Jackie and her friends hatch a plot to bring seniors from Valley Care Living to the park using a fake volunteer program, with the hopes that one of the residents will croak during their visit. The ruse quickly gets its first volunteer—a feisty resident named Phyllis. What starts off as a macabre plan turns into a revelation for Jackie as Phyllis and the other seniors reveal their own complex histories and connections to Kingdom Adventure, as well as some tough-to-swallow truths about Jackie, her friends, and their future. With artist Claudia Aguirre, Terry Blas has crafted a graphic novel that is dark and deeply moving. This book is Cocoon meets Heathers—a twisted satire about a magical land and the people who love it, even to the point of obsession. Jackie’s summer is about to turn into a wild ride filled with gallows humor, friendship, and fun—or is it?

KM

Recommended by Kate Mckean

And there are pretty much none! We’re slightly surprised but figured it’s just not big here. @joshlandon finds one book at @BookPeople called Poop-di-Doop. Poop in the title? She’ll love it. (from X)

Poop-di-doop! book cover

by Stephanie Blake·You?

Stephanie Blake’s hilarious and irreverent little bunny will tickle kids’ funny bones! Little bunny dear only says one thing: Poop-di-doop! He says it in the morning, he says it at lunchtime, he says it in the evening. . . . What will he say when he meets a hungry wolf? Blake’s books about this big-eared little bunny have delighted children around with world with their bold, bright colors and offbeat humor!

KM

Recommended by Kate Mckean

@meaghano The Best of Everything and My Salinger Year are an amazing publishing book one-two punch. Two of my faves. (from X)

"Sixty years later, Jaffe’s classic still strikes a chord, this time eerily prescient regarding so many of the circumstances surrounding sexual harassment that paved the way toward the #MeToo movement." -Buzzfeed When Rona Jaffe’s superb page-turner was first published in 1958, it changed contemporary fiction forever. Some readers were shocked, but millions more were electrified when they saw themselves reflected in its story of five young employees of a New York publishing company. Almost sixty years later, The Best of Everything remains touchingly—and sometimes hilariously—true to the personal and professional struggles women face in the city. There’s Ivy League Caroline, who dreams of graduating from the typing pool to an editor’s office; naïve country girl April, who within months of hitting town reinvents herself as the woman every man wants on his arm; and Gregg, the free-spirited actress with a secret yearning for domesticity. Jaffe follows their adventures with intelligence, sympathy, and prose as sharp as a paper cut.

KM

Recommended by Kate Mckean

This book by @thisisEJKoh is amazing. Pre-order it now. https://t.co/nm4M99Slk2 (from X)

Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and the Washington State Book Award in Biography/Memoir Named One of the Best Books by Asian American Writers by Oprah Daily Longlisted for the PEN Open Book AwardThe Magical Language of Others is a powerful and aching love story in letters, from mother to daughter. After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji Koh’s parents return to South Korea for work, leaving fifteen-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in California. Overnight, Eun Ji finds herself abandoned and adrift in a world made strange by her mother’s absence. Her mother writes letters in Korean over the years seeking forgiveness and love―letters Eun Ji cannot fully understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box. As Eun Ji translates the letters, she looks to history―her grandmother Jun’s years as a lovesick wife in Daejeon, the loss and destruction her grandmother Kumiko witnessed during the Jeju Island Massacre―and to poetry, as well as her own lived experience to answer questions inside all of us. Where do the stories of our mothers and grandmothers end and ours begin? How do we find words―in Korean, Japanese, English, or any language―to articulate the profound ways that distance can shape love? The Magical Language of Others weaves a profound tale of hard-won selfhood and our deep bonds to family, place, and language, introducing―in Eun Ji Koh―a singular, incandescent voice.

KM

Recommended by Kate Mckean

I read @EmilyGould's new book PERFECT TUNES over Thanksgiving and it was amazing. When I was done, I was sad not to get to spend more time with these characters. I want to read it again and I almost never reread books. Preorder it now: https://t.co/M0bGSzoY2Y cc: @AvidReaderPress (from X)

Perfect Tunes book cover

by Emily Gould·You?

“Perfect Tunes is an intoxicating blend of music, love, and family from one of the essential writers of the internet generation.” —STEPHANIE DANLER “Perfect Tunes is a zippy and profound story of love, loss, heredity, and par­enthood. I gulped it down, as will all mothers, New Yorkers, music fans, and lovers of quick-moving novels that are both funny and deep. I loved every page.” —EMMA STRAUB “Perfect Tunes is mind-blowing….Full of unspeakable insights, or at least I thought they were unspeakable, but there they are. Now I want everyone I know to read this book and talk about it with me.” —ELIF BATUMAN Have you ever wondered what your mother was like before she became your mother, and what she gave up in order to have you? It’s the early days of the new millennium, and Laura has arrived in New York City’s East Village in the hopes of recording her first album. A songwriter with a one-of-a-kind talent, she’s just beginning to book gigs with her beautiful best friend when she falls hard for a troubled but magnetic musician whose star is on the rise. Their time together is stormy and short-lived—but will reverberate for the rest of Laura’s life. Fifteen years later, Laura’s teenage daughter, Marie, is asking questions about her father, questions that Laura does not want to answer. Laura has built a stable life in Brooklyn that bears little resemblance to the one she envisioned when she left Ohio all those years ago, and she’s taken pains to close the door on what was and what might have been. But neither her best friend, now a famous musician who relies on Laura’s songwriting skills, nor her depressed and searching daughter will let her give up on her dreams. Funny, wise, and tenderhearted, Perfect Tunes explores the fault lines in our most important relationships, and asks whether dreams deferred can ever be reclaimed. It is a delightful and poignant tale of music and motherhood, ambition and com­promise—of life, in all its dissonance and harmony.

KM

Recommended by Kate Mckean

Dr Scutts’ book is amazing and I bet her class is too. (She’s not a client—I wish!—I just genuinely loved her book!) https://t.co/1SXNx4hkTG (from X)

From the flapper to The Feminine Mystique, a cultural history of single women in the city through the reclaimed life of glamorous guru Marjorie Hillis. You’ve met the extra woman: she’s sophisticated, she lives comfortably alone, she pursues her passions unabashedly, and―contrary to society’s suspicions―she really is happy. Despite multiple waves of feminist revolution, today’s single woman is still mired in judgment or, worse, pity. But for a brief, exclamatory period in the late 1930s, she was all the rage. A delicious cocktail of cultural history and literary biography, The Extra Woman transports us to the turbulent and transformative years between suffrage and the sixties, when, thanks to the glamorous grit of one Marjorie Hillis, single women boldly claimed and enjoyed their independence. Marjorie Hillis, pragmatic daughter of a Brooklyn preacher, was poised for reinvention when she moved to the big city to start a life of her own. Gone were the days of the flirty flapper; ladies of Depression-era New York embraced a new icon: the independent working woman. Hillis was already a success at Vogue when she published a radical self-help book in 1936: Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman. With Dorothy Parker–esque wit, she urged spinsters, divorcées, and “old maids” to shed derogatory labels and take control of their lives, and her philosophy became a phenomenon. From the importance of a peignoir to the joy of breakfast in bed (alone), Hillis’s tips made single life desirable and chic. In a style as irresistible as Hillis’s own, Joanna Scutts, a leading cultural critic, explores the revolutionary years following the Live-Alone movement, when the status of these “brazen ladies” peaked and then collapsed. Other innovative lifestyle gurus set similar trends that celebrated guiltless female independence and pleasure: Dorothy Draper’s interior design smash, Decorating Is Fun! transformed apartments; Irma Rombauer’s warm and welcoming recipe book, The Joy of Cooking, reassured the nervous home chef that she, too, was capable of decadent culinary feats. By painting the wider picture, Scutts reveals just how influential Hillis’s career was, spanning decades and numerous best sellers. As she refashioned her message with every life experience, Hillis proved that guts, grace, and perseverance would always be in vogue. With this vibrant examination of a remarkable life and profound feminist philosophy, Joanna Scutts at last reclaims Marjorie Hillis as the original queen of a maligned sisterhood. Channeling Hillis’s charm, The Extra Woman is both a brilliant exposé of women who forged their independent paths before the domestic backlash of the 1950s trapped them behind picket fences, and an illuminating excursion into the joys of fashion, mixology, decorating, and other manifestations of shameless self-love. 8 pages of illustrations

KM

Recommended by Kate Mckean

It’s the publication day of @AlixEHarrow’s THE TEN THOUSAND DOORS OF JANUARY!!!!!!!!!! This book is an amazing gem and it will stay with you for years after reading it. You should do that. Read it. https://t.co/vuc35vHCDq (from X)

"A gorgeous, aching love letter to stories, storytellers, and the doors they lead us through...absolutely enchanting."—Christina Henry, bestselling author of Alice and Lost Boys LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER! Finalist for the 2020 Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. In the early 1900s, a young woman embarks on a fantastical journey of self-discovery after finding a mysterious book in this captivating and lyrical debut. In a sprawling mansion filled with peculiar treasures, January Scaller is a curiosity herself. As the ward of the wealthy Mr. Locke, she feels little different from the artifacts that decorate the halls: carefully maintained, largely ignored, and utterly out of place. Then she finds a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds, and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure, and danger. Each page turn reveals impossible truths about the world and January discovers a story increasingly entwined with her own. Lush and richly imagined, a tale of impossible journeys, unforgettable love, and the enduring power of stories await in Alix E. Harrow's spellbinding debut--step inside and discover its magic. Praise for The Ten Thousand Doors of January: "One for the favorites shelf... Here is a book to make you happy when you gently close it. Here you will find wonder and questions and an unceasingly gorgeous love of words which compasses even the shape a letter makes against a page."―NPR Books "Devastatingly good, a sharp, delicate nested tale of worlds within worlds, stories within stories, and the realm-cracking power of words."―Melissa Albert, New York Times bestselling author "A love letter to imagination, adventure, the written word, and the power of many kinds of love."―Kirkus For more from Alix E. Harrow, check out The Once and Future Witches.

KM

Recommended by Kate Mckean

HAPPY BOOK BIRTHDAY TO @Authoroux AND TOMB OF ANCIENTS THIS IS THE SCARY AMAZING BOOK YOU'VE BEEN WAITING FOR! https://t.co/RHLY2Ve88n @andrewasalways @EpicReads @harperteen (from X)

Tomb of Ancients (House of Furies, 3) book cover

by Madeleine Roux, Iris Compiet·You?

From the New York Times bestselling author of Asylum comes the final book in the creepy fantasy series praised as “darkly delightful.”* Fleeing the nightmares of Coldthistle House, Louisa and her friends have taken up in a posh new London residence. But religious zealots from the shepherd’s army are flocking to the city in droves, and ominous warnings are being left on Louisa’s very doorstep. With the evil influence of her father’s spirit growing stronger, Louisa knows she’ll have to pick a side in the coming war between the old gods, whether she’d like to or not. Louisa will do whatever it takes to save herself—even if it means returning to Coldthistle House. And when she strikes another devil’s bargain with Mr. Morningside, she’s forced to join his supernatural staff on a journey to a gateway between worlds, a place of legend: the Tomb of Ancients. But as always, Louisa knows there’s a catch. . . In this epic finale to Madeleine Roux’s gripping House of Furies series, eerie photographs and beautiful illustrations from artist Iris Compiet help bring to life a world where gods and monsters are at war—and no one will escape the battle unscathed. *Publishers Weekly