Subways are few and far between in North America, but those who’ve ridden them find doing so a visceral experience—the close quarters and unique tableaux of subterranean travel. It’s a thrill, a feast for the senses, a uniquely strange assembly of people of all ages and many walks of life. Gladstone captures the unflagging, ever-moving hum of a subway journey with the refrain of “my subway runs”—it runs under the city; it runs fast; it runs “straight out through the sky!” The train stops at Union Station (presumably in Toronto), where the brown-skinned young protagonist’s mother applies for jobs at the station’s many restaurants. Still, the child knows, the train runs even after the pair have disembarked, even after the little one is fast asleep. In addition to evoking the little one’s affectionate ownership of this mode of transportation, Gladstone aptly conveys the physical sensations of subway travel: the sounds of wind from the tunnels and screeching train wheels, the crush of bodies as passengers shove their way on board. Pratt’s painterly illustrations, expanding upon the experiences detailed in Gladstone’s text, depict a rich parade of humanity: tall, short, impeccably dressed, fast asleep, aboard a busy train line—a vibrant vision of city life.

Jess Cole is struggling to find investors for her startup, Wyst, a company that focuses on women’s physical- and mental-health issues and access to care. She suspects the problem has more to do with the fact that she’s a woman rather than her business plans. To complicate matters, she was previously at the heart of a workplace scandal when a colleague she was dating spread around intimate photos, and the tech world has proven to be a rather small community. In a last-ditch effort to make her dreams come true, Jess enters TechRumble, a competition to fund budding startups—and convinces her twin brother, Spencer, to pose as the company’s founder while she goes undercover as Violet, his assistant. While things start to look up for the future of Wyst, Jess has a hard time reining Spencer in, and she worries that he’s inadvertently jeopardizing everything by courting the competition judges with promises she can’t possibly fulfill. Oliver Kavanagh works as the assistant to the competition’s wealthy host. He and Jess (as Violet) bond rather quickly and cutely morph from friends to lovers. Working as his cousin’s assistant isn’t the career he wants, and he eventually comes to realize what his professional dreams actually are. Jess’ deception hangs over the story, as she’s potentially sabotaged the sole reason she entered TechRumble in the first place, creating wonderful tension that drives most of the book’s momentum. Jess and Oliver’s romance is simply fine. It’s sweet but slow, and Oliver lacks extra oomph as the leading man.

Grandpa is an artist who makes flutes, whistles, pot drums, and other instruments while young Meadow assists. Clay, Grandpa explains, “comes from the body of our Earth” and “artists can turn it into song.” His most precious item is a hawk-shaped ocarina that his own grandfather gave him when he was a boy; its beautiful sound spurred the forest animals to dance. But during a harsh winter storm, lightning strikes the barn that houses the art studio, and it catches fire. The hawk ocarina disappears; Meadow imagines Red Fox taking it. It isn’t until Meadow finds a broken piece of the original hawk instrument that Grandpa is able to remake the heirloom so that its wondrous sounds can be heard once more. Hellner’s text has a lilt that matches its melodious subject matter as the author explains that because clay comes from the earth, the instruments made from it are in turn rooted in nature. Both Meadow and Grandpa share a reverence for the art they create and the music that comes from it. Tous’ illustrations are a lovely complement, featuring idyllic, neatly composed scenes of grassland and mountains, animals, and streams. An especially noteworthy spread depicts the fire that devastates the barn, snow whipping and flames blazing against a lightning sky. Meadow and Grandpa are light-skinned and dark-haired.

Following Scribners: Five Generations in Publishing (2023), Scribner offers 18 essays on literature, art history, and music. It’s easy to settle into them like a lush, comfortable chair. Scribner writes that F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed “more of me than any living author.” Gatsby is “pure fiction and pure Fitzgerald: the hopeful, romantic outsider looking in.” An art historian, Scribner is excellent at discussing The Great Gatsby’s iconic cover painting, Celestial Eyes, by Francis Cugat. Among Scribner’s endearing recollections is an exchange between the author’s father and Ernest Hemingway: “My dad commented that at the age of eighteen months I had taken to pulling out all the books from the bottom shelves at home. Hemingway wrote back, ‘What young Charlie is doing is trying to remove all the dead wood from publishing; make a note of it for his biographers.’” In one chapter, Scribner riffs on the “five best books on family businesses,” among them Robert Graves’ I, Claudius (“the stuttering bookworm Claudius…survived to rule the business next since no one took him seriously enough to murder.”) and Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (“A family business need not be legal to thrive.”). In addition to sprightly chapters on singers Mary Costa and Frederica von Stade and masters Michelangelo, Rubens, and Velázquez, Scribner ponders the story behind the making of Bernini’s 17th-century Cristo Vivo. It doesn’t hurt that he was able to buy the sculpture. He writes, “In the dog days of August 1975, a month after starting my first job as an editorial assistant at Scribners, I decided to reward myself extravagantly for my modest paychecks: I bought the Bernini crucifix….I liquidated some savings and arranged to have it shipped to the office. It arrived in a crate that looked like a small coffin, much to the bemusement of my publishing colleagues.”

Thomas Willing, writes Vague, author of The Paradox of Debt (2023), was America’s dominant merchant. Robert Morris, the better-known “financier of the Revolution,” was his employee and later his business partner. Willing was perhaps the richest man in the Colonies, widely respected but colorless, with few interests besides work. He protested British actions, which hurt business, but voted to oppose independence in 1776, although he later supported the war. Armies fight wars, but money wins them, and Vague points out that the only sources of ready money in the Colonies were rich men. Willing immediately accepted supply orders from the Congress, a risky tactic because Congress was slow in paying—when it paid at all. In this unregulated free market, profits could be spectacular, but so were risks. Willing grew richer, but others (Morris included) were ruined. Willing soon headed the nation’s first bank, which helped finance the war, yet victory left a huge debt. More than most scholars, Vague emphasizes debt as a motivation for the 1787 Constitutional Convention, and the Constitution as “a triumph for the money system advocated by the conservative elite.” President Washington’s approval of treasury secretary Hamilton’s plan to pay off the entire debt at full value produced widespread outrage because almost all was held by wealthy men and speculators who had bought it at a fraction of its value, often from soldiers. Few historians praise Hamilton’s defense, and Vague states bluntly that this was a corrupt bargain that benefited the wealthy and exerted a malign influence on subsequent American history. Appointed director of the First Bank of the United States, Willing served for 15 of its 20-year existence, remaining untouched by the fraud, speculation, bubbles, and crashes that occurred while America’s GDP nearly tripled.