This visual essay book, featuring full-color photographs taken by National Geographic photojournalist Yüyan, documents conservation practices by Indigenous communities in nine different parts of the world: Alaska, Palau, Ecuador, Mongolia, Australia, Greenland, California, Alberta–Montana, and Vancouver Island. Each location corresponds with a specific conservation effort—such as the Iñupiats’ efforts to restore the bowhead whale population in Alaska or the Cofáns’ attempts to preserve the rainforest in Ecuador—and is addressed in an essay by one of a group of writers (including an activist, a politician, and a bestselling author) detailing the work being done. These brief essays introduce terms like “traditional ecological knowledge” (which is essentially “the fine-grained, practical understanding that comes from centuries of experience in a specific landscape”) and include quotes from the people directly involved in the conservation efforts. The majority of the book consists of Yüyan’s photographs, which reflect the experiences of those who tirelessly work to protect their corner of the Earth and celebrate the breathtaking places and animals that need protecting. The text brims with fascinating facts and insights, from the “lemony taste” of the green tree ants in Wujal Wujal, Queensland, to 500-year-old Siberian larch trees that show no signs of aging. Yüyan’s stunning photographs evoke the essences of his human and animal subjects with a sense of profound respect. Whether depicting a shaman with hands outstretched toward the sky, parents pushing baby strollers across sea ice, or spotted jellyfish dancing underwater, the photographs capture the wonder that exists in the natural world—if only we take a moment to stop and look. The perfectly balanced combination of photos and text makes for a breathtaking expression of awe for the beautiful planet we all call home.

Gren Moritz is the newly elected Chief Minister for the Nations of Rivennia, and the first from Varcega. Varcegians believe in tradition; they eat farmed meat and practice arranged marriages (Gren’s wife, Lorelei, was carefully chosen by his grandparents). Gren’s main platform is “protecting humanity from the rise of ultrahumanism,” but his initial bill may prove controversial—it proposes sterilization for anyone planning gene enhancement treatments, ensuring that unwanted mutations can’t spread. Gren’s not the only one in charge. Rivennia has a monarch, but the science-worshipping Human Order, with its Supreme Leader Igor Voychenko, appears to wield the real power. At a dinner Gren reluctantly attends, he’s introduced to the Liffdom Lodges, Voychenko’s amoral secret society. Gren’s pressured to play a game, wagering on the date of Queen Brynhilda’s death. His competitors are also newcomers: washed-up supermodel Primula Zhang, now the face of fast-fashion brand Skitto, and a low-level government resource analyst, Sam Rosendale. Sharing painful personal secrets, Primula and Sam closely bond. When the date Primula chose passes without the queen’s demise, Primula disappears, and Sam, with the chief minister’s help, attempts to expose the dangerous truth of where she went, and why. In a self-assured debut, Urencio creates an inventive, fascinating world. Lacunfort, the metropolis Gren and Lorelei inhabit in the Year 500, contains wonders; a screen overhead mimics a sky, with more layers of the city stacked on top—as surprised country-girl Lorelei notes, “like a pile of pancakes!” Bots are fully incorporated into the society, performing hospital work, extinguishing fires, even powdering Gren’s face before his talk-show appearance. For transportation, capsulas speed through vacuum pneuducts. The characters, major and minor, are as carefully crafted as the setting. Urencio has a particularly deft and empathetic touch with those often overlooked, whether they’re a marginalized trans man; or aging, like Gren’s hardworking, self-effacing assistant; or the frail queen, though a “living relic,” who also elicits respect. The queen’s advice to Gren is wise: “The single most important trait [for a politician] is detachment.”

In the far future—after the waters have risen and then frozen—a smaller civilization (one with little understanding of the ancient technology entombed beneath its feet) has inherited an icier Earth. Olivia and her parents have just moved to the scenic town of June, built on a steep hillside above an icy expanse. They’ve come so that her father—a scholar of ancient tech—can take up a scientific residency at the centuries-old Wardenclyffe lighthouse that stands at the edge of town. Olivia is impressed by the town’s massive library, and also by its population of functioning androids (the ones in her old community stopped working long ago), but the best thing by far about June is Ava, the pretty girl in Olivia’s art class. The two quickly become best friends and explore the forbidden tunnels under their school. They soon find evidence of a mysterious Institute buried beneath the town, as well as indications that someone—perhaps the woman in the red coat who arrived in June on the same day as Olivia—has been sabotaging the local androids. What begins as a lark between friends soon turns into a high-stakes adventure replete with kidnappings, explosions, and the lost secrets of June. Hall’s prose, as narrated by Olivia, has a naive directness that, paired with the striking illustrations by Ollikainen, recalls the work of L. Frank Baum. “He’s wearing a nice-looking outfit,” Olivia notes of one decommissioned android she finds, “although despite its pristine condition it looks about a century or two out of date, like something you’d see in a history book.” The pacing is a bit slow, and readers will not find the urgent melodrama that characterizes much dystopian YA (though there is a bit of romance). For those nostalgic for an earlier era of young people’s literature, however, Hall’s yarn offers enormous delight.

Set in the American Midwest, Los Angeles, and Belize, the story follows Terri, a woman whose life has been shaped more by endurance than confidence, as she steps into a world that refuses to conform to her expectations. Drawn by love and circumstance, she travels to Belize with Reynold, a charismatic musician whose ambitions are as expansive as the landscape they traverse. From the moment Terri arrives, the sensory richness of the place—its heat, music, food, and spiritual traditions—begins to unsettle her sense of control. “The heavy air wraps around her, carrying strange, beautiful scents of sea salt and tropical flowers,” she observes early on, already aware that the rules she knows no longer apply. Terri’s marriage to Reynold strains under unspoken resentments, cultural misunderstandings, and power imbalances that surface gradually, often in quiet moments rather than dramatic confrontations. Reynold’s vision of music as salvation—referring to the musical note, “Mi will create music for the world to hear”—runs parallel to Terri’s own search for meaning, though the two are not always in harmony. As Terri encounters Garifuna, Maya, and African diasporic traditions, spiritual guides and rituals enter the narrative—not as spectacles, but as lived realities. One character warns her, “Life is fraught with challenges. Every problem is a sharp blade cutting the path between success and failure,” a line that encapsulates the book’s theme of growth through discomfort. Midway through the narrative, the stakes intensify as motherhood comes into focus. Terri’s identity as a mother—protective, fearful, and fiercely loving—drives the plot in the story’s second half, pushing her into spaces where faith, folklore, and intuition intersect. Music becomes both a map and a language, echoing through scenes of travel, ritual, and memory. Even moments of tenderness carry an undercurrent of unease, as when Terri reflects on belonging and realizes how easily devotion can slide into self-erasure.

The writing leans heavily on imagery and rhythm, often borrowing the cadences of songs and oral storytelling. Lines such as “Stars glitter and stretch across the heavens, scattered diamonds across black velvet” sit beside more grounded observations about marriage, illness, and emotional dependency. This tonal oscillation mirrors Terri’s internal conflict; she’s pulled between skepticism and belief, autonomy and surrender. Later reflections reveal a growing self-awareness as Terri comes to understand that “pain can become her greatest teacher,” not through abstraction but through lived consequence. As a work of magical realism with elements of spiritual fiction and women’s literary drama, the book resists easy categorization. Its supernatural aspects are never fully separated from psychology or culture; instead, they coexist, shaped by ancestry, music, and place. At times, the ambitious narrative—which incorporates Christian symbolism, Indigenous cosmology, and New Age spirituality—can feel dense, but this density is a strength, reflecting a worldview in which meaning is layered rather than singular. Ultimately, this is a story about listening—to music, to our ancestors, to one’s own buried instincts. Terri’s journey is about transformation through reckoning as she learns to name what she wants and what she has ignored.

Joseph “Breeze” Bye, a wheelchair-bound former professional baseball player, is on the cusp of finding major success in his second, post-accident career: painting. Breeze paints portraits of great pitchers—players who are as good as he was, before he was the victim of a hit-and-run. As a major exhibition of his work in New York City approaches, he gets a call from a former associate who confesses to being the person who ran him down. This admission kicks off the protagonist’s examination of his own life, told from a close first-person perspective in a long series of free associations; the narrative manages to maintain a tight focus while touching on a surprising variety of recollections. Breeze slowly unpacks his athletic career, his marriage, his extramarital affairs, his trajectory as an artist, his relationship with his daughter, and the circumstances surrounding his disability. The varied facets merge and dissipate with a flowing, casual logic that never leaves the reader behind. The entire story has a hazy, winding quality to it, which combines well with the complicated, messy events of Breeze’s life. Fechter paints his protagonist with deep sympathy and nuance, but also with unwavering honesty. Breeze’s narration follows his process of trying to make sense of past and present events, as well as his journey from self-pity to an understanding that his self-centeredness has limited his connection to the world and his relationships with those closest to him. At times, the multiple threads might threaten to overwhelm the reader, but Fechter always manages to tie everything back to Breeze’s quest for greater awareness.