Review: "The Tyranny of Thinness" by Céline Leboeuf

The Tyranny of Thinness by Céline Leboeuf
Published October 2026 via North Atlantic Books
★★★

Part memoir, part philosophy: In The Tyranny of Thinness, Leboeuf looks at cultural standards of thinness—and at her own anorexia—through the lens of philosophers.

In its simplest form, my thesis is this: Changing your physique—whether through diet, exercise, cosmetics, or surgeries—to conform with beauty standards will never bring you true pleasure or lasting happiness, despite the false claims by diet culture and the beauty industry. Only alternative ways of thinking about your body, combined with your own suite of practices for being in your body, will deliver the pleasure and happiness you deserve. (loc. 71*)

I went into this knowing that the memoir portion would be more interesting to me than the philosophy portion, and that held true. Leboeuf's background as an academic here shines through, from the format of the book to the philosophers she cites; although she does pull on some contemporary writers, her heavy hitters tend towards big-name philosophers (and feminists). I did appreciate that in her own experience she was describing an illness that was entrenched but not...how do I put this...on the far end of the bell curve; rather, it was something that I think will resonate with a lot of readers who have struggled with body image and/or disordered eating and/or eating disorders. (Though—as always, would have preferred that numbers had not been included.)

This will work best for readers with a bit more of a philosophy background (or a desire to gain a bit more of a philosophy background) who are looking to view weight-loss culture from a broader but different-than-normal-approach lens.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "All That Dies in April" by Mariana Travacio

All That Dies in April by Mariana Travacio
Translated from the Spanish by Will Morningstar and Samantha Schnee
Published October 2026 via World Editions
★★★★

High in the mountains of Argentina, there is very little hope left. Lina and Relicario's son left years ago, looking for work; the region has dried up, and there is little work and little greenery and little hope for anything different in the future. Lina wants to leave, to seek her son and a different future. Relicario cannot imagine leaving their dead behind.

This is the first in the series of translated works, one for each letter of the alphabet. Argentina is A, Belgium is B, China is C, and the rest remains to be seen (as does what the series will do when it gets to W and X! At least with W there's the disputed territory of Western Sahara, but I'm not sure where you'd go with X). I love the concept; I've long liked the idea of doing a round-the-world book tour and reading a book from every country, but unfortunately, I've also met myself and am aware that I'm bad at that sort of challenge. There are just too many other things I want to read to lock myself into ~200 books based on location.

All That Dies in April makes for something of a curiosity of a book, drifting dream-like in places and all too aware of human frailty in others. Lina is too practical to hold on to all that she has ever known, while Relicario carries on soothing conversations with the dead. She's content to adapt to the unknown, I think, while he's content to adapt to a world withering around him, as long as it's the world he is familiar with.

Later in the book, perspectives shift, and I had a harder time holding on to who was speaking and what their content was. This turned the book from a 4-star to a 3.5-star read for me, but still a very engaging read. As the book goes on, the cracks lower down, where the grass is green and the living is relatively easier, start to show. The ending is fairly abrupt, but in a way that is fitting for the book.

I don't want to commit to ~26 unknown books (and am not all that interested in the Belgian or Chinese books picked for the series), but you can bet that I'll be keeping an interested eye on what comes next. (And: If you looked at a list of countries in alphabetical order, which countries would you choose to read books from?)

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Like Glass" by Jen Ferguson

Like Glass by Jen Ferguson
Published October 2026 via Heartdrum
★★★★

Just over a year ago, Tatum's sister died—suddenly, unexpectedly. Her parents went to Chamonix to bring her body home, but her father hasn't been home since, and now Tatum is determined that she won't lose him too—that it's time to go bring him home.

Now. Yes please to travel books and books with indigenous main characters (especially ones interacting with their identities in interesting ways) and the unexpected. France is not an unusual place for a YA main character to visit (I mean, to be fair, it's not an unusual place for your average North American to want to visit, either), but the way Chamonix is approached is unusual: Tatum is there as a tourist, to some degree, but her father is there to work, and Tatum does not have the slightest interest in the classic touristy things or perfect Instagram shots. Tatum's father is Métis, and he knows what that means for his life and his work, but Tatum is still figuring out what that means for herself and her art...and how much other people get to define that.

Fundamentally of course this is a story about grief: Tatum's grief over the loss of her sister, her father's grief over the same, Tatum's grief over the emotional loss (for lack of a better term) of her father in the past year. They're past the rawest of it all, but they also know that things can't be and won't be the same again, and all there is to do is tromp through the murky tomorrows. Mixed in with that is friendship—Tatum is not shy about meeting new people—and some wee hints of romance, and, unexpectedly, ski jumping, which I will not ever complain about finding in books. (The only other ski-jumping book I've read, as far as I can remember, is The Finnish Line, and even then I think that's a different type of ski jumping.) There are some definite bad decisions, but those fall shy of catastrophe, which I appreciated; it would have been pretty easy for those decisions to derail the plot, and it got to go in more interesting directions because that didn't happen.

I particularly loved the author's note at the end about labels, and why this particular book doesn't contain a lot of them—namely, that Tatum is not a person who needs or necessarily wants a lot of labels, and so they're appropriate for some characters but not so much here. A lot to think about, both in the book itself and in that note.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Children's books: Deutsch II: "Ein Herz für Elefanten", "Sturmgefühle, Schattenbilder", und "Bagger Bens Tag am Meer"

Ein Herz für Elefanten von R.G. de Rouen
Sturmgefühle, Schattenbilder von Michelle Müller-Nagy (Verlag Monika Fuchs)
Bagger Bens Tag am Meer von Dörthe Horn (Lingen Verlag)

Kinderbücher...nochmal auf Deutsch!

Ein Herz für Elefanten ist die Geschichte von Daphne Seldrick, eine Frau, die als Kind ein Herz für Tiere entwickelt hat...und als Erwachsene hat sie ihr Leben den Elefanten gewidmet.

Ich habe dieses Bilderbuch zuerst auf Englisch gelesen, und natürlich wollte ich die Geschichte auf Deutsch probieren. Es gibt hier nichts zu kompliziert: einfache Wörter, einfache Bilder, am Ende interessante "Elefakten" (ich liebe ein gutes Wortspiel). Ich hätte gern ein bisschen mehr zum Thema Kenia (die 50er und 60er waren interessante Jahre!), aber das Buch ist kurz, und es gibt viel Information, besonders am Ende, für Kinder zum Thema Elefanten.

Sheldrick ist 2018 gestorben, aber sie hat auch ein paar Bücher geschrieben. Vielleicht wurde Ein Herz für Elefanten ein gutes Geschenk für ein Kind sein...und Eine afrikanische Liebesgeschichte (von Sheldrick) ein Geschenk für die Eltern sein.

Sturmgefühle, Schattenbilder ist ein nachdenkliches, informatives Buch für junge Kinder, die entweder starke Gefühle oder Eltern mit starken Gefühle haben. Sammy liebt seine Mutter...aber sie darf nicht mit Sammy und seinen Großeltern wohnen, weil ihre innerer Drache manchmal zu laut ist. Sammy hat ein gutes Leben mit vielen Leuten, die ihn lieben, und trotzdem gibt es auch komplizierte Dinge. Schön zu sehen, dass seine Mutter nie die Bösewichtin ist—und Sammy kann auch erkennen, dass der Drache auch nicht so böse ist.

Die Illustrationen passen gut zu der Geschichte: nicht sehr detailliert, aber evokativ. Außerdem ist es sehr schön, dass das Buch bewusst inklusiv ist.

Süß: Bagger Bens Tag am Meer ist ein neues Abenteuer für Bagger Ben, ein (surprise!) Bagger. Ben und seine Freunde haben einen Tag am Strand...ein Tag für Spaß und Spiele und Sonne und vielleicht ein bisschen Arbeit.

Dieses Buch hat viel für Kinder: Maschinen, die Umwelt, ein wenig Zerstörung (und Wiederaufbau). Die Bilder haben viele Farben und Details, und die Baufahrzeuge sind interessant und hilfreich—sie wollen Spaß haben, ja, aber sie wollen auch gute...Leute?...zu sein.

Es gibt andere "Bagger Ben"-Bücher, und ich werde sie definitiv für Kindern, die die Baufahrzeuge mögen, empfehlen.

Thanks to the authors and publishers for providing review copies through NetGalley. Deutsch ist nicht meine Muttersprache, und alle Fehler sind meine eigenen.

Review: "Dan in Green Gables" by Rey Terciero, illustrated by Claudia Aguirre

Dan in Green Gables by Rey Terciero, illustrated by Claudia Aguirre
Published June 2025 via Penguin Workshop
★★★

Dan's life with his mother hasn't been the most stable thing ever—they're on the road, bouncing from place to place, following his mother's whims. But when she takes him to stay with his late father's parents, everything changes.

This is, of course, a play on Anne of Green Gables, one in which a queer boy in the present-enough day finds a new home in Tennessee. Marilla and Matthew's roles are flipped here: Dan's grandmother welcomes Dan and every part of his identity with open arms, while his grandfather is not really prepared to take in an outsider, much less when that outsider is visibly queer and refuses to bow down to the fire-and-brimstone church minister. I had mixed feelings about that—on the one hand, I don't think it's unrealistic for someone of Dan's grandfather's generation and culture and so on to be quite homophobic (and racist) and to have very specific expectations of boys; on the other hand, it's quite a departure from Marilla's hard-but-mostly-fair attitude.

On the whole this is really thoughtful, with both Dan and many of the characters around him needing to do some growth. I think I would have preferred it as a more standalone book rather than a reimagining of something else, but it was an interesting addition to a subgenre.

Review: "Trad Wife" by Sarah Langan

Trad Wife by Sarah Langan
Published September 2026 via Atria Books
★★★★

And we're back on the trad wife book train! In Trad Wife (not to be confused with Tradwife or The Trad Wife), Jenny's writing career has just imploded, and in a last-ditch effort to save it, she takes on a challenge: She'll spend a week with one of the country's most popular trad wives, Mia, and write about the experience. It'll be a close-up view of a life much of the country is desperate to get closer to, and a view that few people get. Under the circumstances, whatever she writes is likely to go viral. What she doesn't know is just how Wrong life at Black Swan Farm is.

Now. This is one in a string of trad wife books that I've read, and I don't want to go into detail on differences just yet, because there are still a few more in my queue (I do love a theme). One thing that has struck me, though, is that a disproportionate number of the protagonists are journalists or journalist-adjacent. I imagine part of this is simply because the world of influencing overlaps with the world of reporting (whether this should be the case is another question entirely), and part of it is because "writer investigating something weird" is a solid way to get someone unconnected with a particular world involved in it...but it's still odd to me.

This is one of those with a journalist, of course, and also one of those where the journalist goes in expecting to write some big exposé. In this case, Jenny thinks that her exposé is going to be partly about abuse—abuse of Mia or abuse of Mia's children or possibly both—but the truth goes far deeper, and far weirder, than she can possibly imagine.

For the most part I like Jenny. Her decisions aren't always the best, but to be fair, she didn't expect to land in a story with supernatural elements. Those supernatural elements are not really my favourite—personal preference, but supernatural stories just aren't as alarming to me as things that can happen in real life (see: trad wives), and so instead of making a story more creepy to me, they make the story rather less creepy. But so far, this is pretty high on my list of this weird and wild subgenre. 3.5 stars and one to read if you've read Yesteryear, of course, or if you haven't but are curious about what might happen if ballerinafarm got...weird. (Or maybe just weirder than it already is.)

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "The Velvet Knife" by Maureen Johnson

The Velvet Knife by Maureen Johnson
Published September 2026 via HarperCollins
★★★★

Stevie's back! And this time she's off to New York to avoid spending the holidays with her parents...and to lick the wounds of her breakup. No murders to solve...until a neighbour in the apartment she's staying in in New York dies, and things get complicated.

I've loved this series, and The Velvet Knife is no exception. Stevie has a knack for getting pulled into strange cold cases, and if this is one where she doesn't really understand until well into the book that there is a cold case at all.

She was Blue now. Helen was gone, her old identity falling away like a feather from a bird's tail. She would try to snatch it back later, but you can't put a bird back together again, feather by feather. (loc. 353*)

The mystery is standalone, though it helps to have read at least some of the earlier books to follow all of the relationship details. I did find myself wishing that I'd done a reread of the earlier books in the series before diving into this one, just because it's been a while. Stevie's personal life is very much the secondary conflict here, though, and I quite enjoyed the past storyline (something to do with me enjoying things set in the 70s, I suppose). So perhaps this is impetus for a reread!

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter" by Katya Suvorova

Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter by Katya Suvorova
Published September 2026 via Alcove Press
★★★★

When Suvorova was three, her mother took her from their home in Russia to Mexico and then across the US border. I will never go back home again, she writes, but I don't know that yet (loc. 135*). What followed was a desperate chase for the elusive green card: men who promised stability; men who said they were looking for love; men who dangled the promise of a green card application as a carrot always just out of reach; men who threatened to turn Suvorova and her mother in to the authorities.

I didn't know it then, but there will be many, many men opening their arms in front of their apartments, town houses, homes, and saying the exact same thing. Have you ever seen anything this nice before? Only Joe will be able to say it in Russian, but we will understand. (loc. 177)

Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter is Suvorova's story of growing up undocumented and on unstable ground, not only with the men who fell in and out of her mother's life but with her mother herself. And it is a gripping story. I read half of it in one day and then slowed down (a bit) so it would last a bit longer. The story is told in two timelines, with the majority taking place during Suvorova's upbringing and a later timeline discussing her finding her biological father in adulthood. But the strongest material, by far, is about Suvorova's relationship with her mother.

With time, I will realize how scared she was. I will realize that my mother knows desperation in a way I never will. (loc. 240)

My grandmother often tells me how she begged my mom to leave me with her, but my mother refused. I think regularly of what a life in Russia would have looked like for me, who I would have become had my mom left me. Would I be someone I like more? I also never got to know the version of my mom who grew up in her home country. [...] I wonder what direction our relationship would have grown if she hadn't taken me with her to this country. (loc. 560)

This is complicated, messy material about complex, real people. It's so clear how many layers Suvorova's understanding of her mother has: someone who was smart and resourceful and determined; someone who missed her own mother; someone who took the limited options available to her and ran as far as she could with them; someone who perhaps never understood and perhaps never tried to understand her daughter; someone who looked the other way when her daughter was abused; someone whose desperation changed her irrevocably. Suvorova sees this, and she loves her mother; she sees this, and she knows that a relationship under these terms cannot be healthy for her. There's both compassion and clear-sightedness here, a difficult and delicate line that Suvorova treads well.

I'll leave out the nitty-gritty of the story, but the subtitle alone should tell you that this is an interesting one, and often a difficult one. A high four stars; recommended to anyone who is interested in complicated families or who has been thinking about immigration lately.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "What the Ancestors Say" by Sierra Biidaaban Nadeau

What the Ancestors Say by Sierra Biidaaban Nadeau
Published September 2026 via Broadleaf Books
★★★★

It strikes me as strange that Indian boarding schools are always referred to as schools. The focus of these institutions was hardly ever education. That word was just a fancy bow, designed to hide the fact that the US government was eager to exterminate Indigenous people in any way possible. (loc. 158*)

Nadeau was working on a news story—the remains of hundreds of children who attended one such school had just been found—when she stumbled across the last thing she expected: the names of family members, ones who had attended one of those schools. Nadeau knew about the Indian residential schools, of course (more detail on them in a moment, if you're not familiar); surely there is nobody in her community who does not know about them. But she didn't know how close to home that history came.

I must be missing something, I think. No one in my family has ever spoken of Indian boarding schools. No one has mentioned that entire generations of our family attended one of the largest institutions that operated in Michigan. For decades. (loc. 233)

I've been making an effort to read more from Indigenous authors lately, for a number of reasons but not least because these are voices that (still) too often go unheard. As Nadeau notes (loc. 570), the Indian boarding schools are not really about Native history; rather, they're about the history of colonization and colonizers. And yet they're part of a history that had (has) a devastating and ongoing effect across generations. These schools operated across the US and Canada, and the aim was simple: take Native children away from their culture and instruct them in the ways of the White people; teach them to be maids and cleaners and laborers so as to build a servant class while erasing entire civilizations. Some parents sent their children to these schools voluntarily (or more or less voluntarily), hoping they'd get an education, but authorities also forcibly removed many others. Mortality rates at the schools were shockingly high (I read a report recently that referenced one school, in Canada, that had a mortality rate of 47%), and those children who survived were often not allowed to go home for years at a time.

What Nadeau was able to find out about her own family's history with the residential schools is limited. Most of what she finds is then more general; some stories of individuals who survived these schools or whose family did, but much of this is broader history. I cannot fault her or the book for not including more about her family, because erasing stories was one of the things the boarding schools did well, and anyway, even if they hadn't, nobody should be required to trade on their family's pain. Personal stories do tend to resonate best with me, and because I recently did quite a bit of fact-checking on Indian boarding schools for a work project, much of the general history was familiar to me already. So...didn't learn quite as much as I might have hoped, but I'd very much recommend this to those looking to learn more on the subject.

I think of the homesick ones, the traumatized and terrorized ones, the angry ones, and those who longed to burn it all down. (loc. 1826)

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

Review: "From Beijing, with Love" by Bei Lin

From Beijing, with Love by Bei Lin
Published September 2026 via Alcove Press
★★★★

Daniel's trying to push back against his instincts and be spontaneous—except, spontaneity lands him in China at the exact time that his best friend isn't around, and frankly, changes in plans are not really Daniel's forte. Luckily, his friend has booked him a local tour guide...

I do love a travel book, so this felt like an obvious fit. There's a lot going on here: Daniel is way out of his comfort zone in China, and neurodivergence impacts his experience in ways that people around him might not consider. Meanwhile, Yang—a PhD student making some extra cash as a tour guide—is putting everything he has into advancing his career, though he's hampered by the fact that what he's really passionate about does not quite align with his advisor's interests. Add to that that Daniel, a Canadian living in Amsterdam, is used to being out and proud about his sexuality, but Yang does not feel the same freedom (legal is one thing; socially accepted is another). There are a lot of reasons they shouldn't work...and yet.

Altogether, this made for a super solid read. I loved the travel details; Daniel manages to see a fair amount (and eat delicious-sounding food) while working to balance his discomfort with the unknown with his desire to go outside his comfort zone. What I liked best, though, was the way that Yang, upon registering some of the things that make navigating the unknown more difficult for Daniel than for the average traveler, adapts accordingly—figuring out the small things that can make situations a bit easier for Daniel and then treating those small things as a matter-of-fact attitude. (Honestly something that is underrepresented in romance.) I didn't really need the academic mystery in the book, but it ended up being a smaller part of the conflict than I had feared, so it worked out. I want more books like this—where the characters are fundamentally good people who are figuring things out...and where there's a bit of travel to boot.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.