In her debut memoir, transgender influencer, actor, and author Rose memorializes events and details during a particularly difficult decade of discovery and desire. Writing with flair and panache, she effortlessly escorts readers across frenetic pages of Grindr app conversation extracts, text exchanges, thoughts about identity (“when does my gender stop being a “gotcha!!!”), and the obsessively portrayed, PTSD-inducive trajectory of her relationship with ex-boyfriend Finnegan. Rose isn’t shy about sex, either, as she presents an exhaustively detailed series of (numbered) sex hookups, some followed by post-sex crying jags, and all grounded with confessions about intimacy, connection, and “the distance between how I want to be cared for and what’s actually happening.” There are numerous themed lists, which are alternately entertaining and illuminating. Not all is lightheartedly frank, frenzied, or superficially queer, however: Most of Rose’s prose is poetic, heartfelt, and explicitly unfettered, particularly when describing the rape ordeal that forever changed her worldview and social outlook. Also heart-wrenching are episodes of caregiving for her wheelchair-bound grandfather, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Rose lays bare the traumas that haunt her, yet she remains upbeat and proactive, leaving room for future joy and unexpected connection. Frank musings on sexual desire, gender identity, and emotional fulfillment saturate these chapters, which won’t appeal to every reader; an example is her detailed playbook on her own “funeral pregame”—a self-hosted life celebration preceding a medically assisted suicide, should she ever be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The book can feel disjointed, but taken as a whole, it’s a moving account of pain and personal growth.

When Giuffre first fell into the orbit of Epstein and his partner/aide de camp, Ghislaine Maxwell, she was a teenager who’d already had long experience with sexual abuse. Her father and a family friend molested her, she writes; later, after escaping an abusive rehab facility, she was raped by a man proffering false promises of modeling gigs. In 2000, her father was working at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida and helped her get a job at the spa there. That’s where, she writes, she met Maxwell and Epstein, who, offering promises of massage training, forced her into a two-year hell of sexual service. The first half of Giuffre’s memoir, chronicling this experience, is at once highly disturbing and compelling reading; with the assistance of collaborator Amy Wallace, she’s delivered a composed yet righteously infuriated account of how Epstein manipulated and abused her, then shared her with others. Psychological conflicts abound—she appreciated the money and some of the creature comforts, but she needed to block out the abuses to appreciate them. Giuffre is careful about naming which of Epstein’s famous friends she was trafficked to—one “well-known Prime Minister” goes unnamed, and she admits being afraid to name powerful men. “First and foremost, I am a parent,” she writes, “and I won’t put my family at risk if I can help it.” Giuffre, however, is open about her experiences with Epstein, Prince Andrew, and the late MIT professor Marvin Minsky. The second half of the book chronicles how she balances marriage and raising a family while pursuing legal recompense for herself and other victims following Epstein’s death and Maxwell’s conviction. That material is less bracing, but it helps underscore the importance of the stakes for her. In light of her suicide in April 2025, it makes the story all the more tragic. She was just getting started as an activist, and her voice here is resolute and clear.

Poliquin’s epic journey opens, naturally, with an orange. Fast facts and anecdotes follow; though presented seemingly randomly, they coalesce into a rich exploration of the color through the lenses of culture, history, and nature. The rooster from The Canterbury Tales, “dreaming of a fox whose ‘colour was betwixe yellow and reed,’” precedes a spread about how oranges originated in India and southern China, accompanied by an illustration of the fruits traveling to Europe. Next, the author tracks the evolution of the word orange from the Tamil word naru, which means “fragrant.” The tidbits in this quirky “field trip” bounce around, referencing Mark Rothko’s painting Orange and Yellow, the “International Orange” of American astronauts’ space suits, the orange T-shirts Canadian youngsters wear annually to remember Indigenous children sent to government schools, Buddhist monks’ robes, monarch butterflies, and marigolds in an Indian market. The coda to this tale culminates in a page of color theory, with Morstad providing a painterly palette of variations on the hue. Her artwork, relying on watercolor, chalk pastel, and digital rendering, has a vintage, painterly feel that visually binds this series of postcardlike vignettes. Poliquin’s charmingly conversational prose is rife with asides that betray the author’s genuine enthusiasm for her subject (“This mineral is called crocoite. Isn’t it magnificently orange?”); readers will eagerly heed her advice to “find orange in your world.”

Knowing that he only gets a few more kid birthdays before the gifts start turning from cool stuff into things like dress shirts and nose-hair trimmers, Greg is determined to make his upcoming celebration something special. Unfortunately, due to a household mishap, his mom forgot to mark his birthday on the family calendar—and his dad “depends on Mom to remind him about stuff, just like the rest of us.” This incident is neither the first nor the last time that Greg’s narrative will have readers wincing and laughing at the same time—and the do-over bash Mom remorsefully agrees to organize winds up collapsing in chaos. Still, what cloud doesn’t have its silver lining? So notorious does the party become that requests from other parents to plan similar celebrations for their kids pour in, and Greg, seeing big bucks in his future, closes not with sour grapes but a philosophical shrug: “Sometimes you just gotta roll with it.” Subplots skewer social media and the mania for trading cards. Kinney dishes up a rich mixture of deadpan monologue and cartoons laden with gags and punchlines for this 20th series entry. His dot-eyed, rubbery-nosed figures are the color of the paper.

In this first installment of The Erynvor Cycle, Elorah’s home of Eolemar is dying. She sees no way to save it—until she receives a dream vision from a Founding Dragon that names Elorah as “Erynvor,” the one true Uniter who will lead her people “from Destruction to Revival.” To do this, she must embark on a perilous journey to revive the legendary city of Therrania. Elorah assembles a ragtag group of comrades with varying abilities to accompany her, including Mierrle, her loyal best friend; the dreamwalker Rachmyn and his trusty wolf, Elgre; and Rachmyn’s best friend, Haedyn, who longs for adventure and finds himself falling for Elorah. Along the way, they encounter horrific enemies like the Zenzae, whose grudges are known to follow their targets “both here and beyond.” As the group fends off enemies in both the waking world and the one found in dreams, Elorah will eventually discover that some ancient myths and legends are actually true—and that she may be just the one to save them all. Three Scribes (the pen name of Miller, Bender, and Hungria) largely stick to an old-fashioned, almost poetic, narrative voice: “She shooed the bird-thoughts back to their hiding places and prepared to cast her soul once again into the hidden realm of thought and dream.” The sheer amount of world-specific vocabulary may prove daunting to casual fantasy readers (“The Ushoku said it was the fiery breath of the grogakee that made the mud boil. And it was the grogakee’s chuulzu trapped inside the mud that made the Xetili beeka”), but fans of more complex stories—in which the history, laws, and lore of a fantasy universe are explored in granular detail—will find this immersive yarn a welcome addition to their reading list.