This is the third installment of a thought-provoking New Age fiction series, an exploration of love, loss, enlightenment, and self-discovery written by self-described “intuitive medium” Zani. Readers new to the series will find it more rewarding (and less confusing) to start with volumes 1 and 2 (Piper, Once and Again, 2016, and Waiting for Grace, 2020). The author assumes familiarity with the series’ multiple characters and their backstories, among them Eli Cranston, a lawyer-turned-psychotherapist, father to manipulative, hate-filled Grace and adoptive daughter, Hope, the 18-year-old title character here; and Piper Corcoran, who runs an intuition development group and an equine therapy program. (Horses—their personalities, care, and importance to the humans in their lives—are a significant and well-integrated presence in the story.) Jumping from one character to another in the initial chapters, the narrative suggests, but never fully clarifies all that has gone before. The prologue, which for some time appears to be an unrelated, stand-alone vignette, describes a Marine sergeant under fire in Iraq as he tries to save a grievously wounded “grunt from podunk Massachusetts.” Chapter 1 shifts to Hope, targeted by her sister, Grace (broadly written as an unredeemable mean girl for reasons presumably to be found in Book 2). Chapter 2 introduces Eli, grieving over his mentor and father figure, a Holocaust survivor. Chapters 3 and 4 belong to Piper, returning to her farm in Massachusetts, alluding to a lost love in her past 19th-century life, not explained here. Other characters remain mysteries. How did Piper’s husband, John, save “her life on many levels”? Why did handyman Clem need to find “a place to call home without the weight of the past around his neck”? The narrative gains necessary immediacy when it returns to and sustains Hope’s story—her attempt to have a relationship with her biological mother, a one-dimensional, manipulative addict; her growth toward independence and self-realization; and her moving acceptance of love as a universal continuum.

Wiencek dexterously chronicles the fruitful 30-year friendship of architect Stanford White and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who designed grand buildings and public art and ignored sexual taboos, leading to lurid tragedy. White’s Madison Square Garden, topped in 1891 with a Saint-Gaudens sculpture, was the tallest building in a modernizing Manhattan. In 1906, the venue became an infamous crime scene when the architect was murdered in the Garden’s rooftop theater. Wiencek toggles between ateliers and late-night clubs, detailing the duo’s creative output—their projects included, most enduringly, memorials to presidents and war heroes still displayed in New York, Boston, and elsewhere—and their apparently intertwined love lives. White’s design of a tower for Boston’s Trinity Church was, per a colleague, the work of “an artist of extreme talent and power amounting to genius.” He was a fop befitting a city on the rise, with “flamboyant, spiky red hair” and “see-through silk shirts of pale blue and green.” Saint-Gaudens wasn’t so fancy. Sometimes “dressed like a factory worker” and often battling deep depression, he’d spend months on a sculpture, then angrily destroy it. Saint-Gaudens and White had complicated sex lives and what the author calls “an erotic relationship” with one another. White, nearing 50, courted and then raped a teen girl, Wiencek writes, and in 1906 the man she’d subsequently married shot the architect to death, setting off a newspaper frenzy. Though Wiencek sometimes fixates on the tiring minutiae of his subjects’ sexual couplings, he effectively contextualizes their work and depicts Saint-Gaudens in particularly memorable detail. While making a large altarpiece featuring reliefs of angels, he filled his studio with lit candles, giving the sculpture’s angels “an unreal appearance, as if they floated.”

When Irish singer-songwriter O’Connor died in 2023 at age 56, the music world was thrown into a state of shock. O’Connor was a global celebrity, and had been since the 1990 release of her hit single “Nothing Compares 2 U”—a cover of a previously obscure Prince song—two years before she would memorably tear up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. Huber and Bayne’s book collects essays by women and nonbinary authors reflecting on the singer’s influence on their own lives. The anthology kicks off with a foreword by fellow musician Neko Case, well written but a bit unfocused. The essays that follow, each tied to a specific O’Connor song, are a mixed bag. Standouts include Sarah Viren, who examines “Black Boys on Mopeds,” and May-lee Chai, who uses “Jump in the River” as a starting point to explore her relationship with her mother. Madhushree Ghosh does a good job writing about discovering O’Connor’s music as a 20-year-old whose Indian peers can’t quite relate, while Brooke Champagne writes a stunning piece about abortion inspired by “Three Babies.” In an essay tied to “Jackie,” Zoe Zolbrod, recalling the time she and a group of friends listened to the song at a gathering, successfully captures the effect O’Connor had on her fans: “We didn’t care if the whole building came tumbling down. We wanted it to. In those first moments, she made us feel powerful enough not just to stand our ground, but to fly.” There are some gems here, but too many of the essays lack focus and descend into the maudlin.

Osunde’s second book shares some similarities with their acclaimed debut, Vagabonds! (2022). Like its predecessor, this one is billed as a novel but takes the structure of a short story collection, and follows a sprawling cast of queer characters living in Nigeria. The new book opens with a character who proclaims, “For me, blood family doesn’t mean shit….You, reading this, you’re here, alive, because your parents synced and you showed up. That’s it. Even if they planned for a child, it was still a raffle draw. A hand went in a bowl and picked you.” This introduces the novel’s predominant theme of found family—the characters in the book, who orbit around one another, grew up with varying degrees of parental support, but fiercely care for their fellow outcast friends, “messy motherfuckers,” as one of them puts it. There’s Akin, a panromantic and asexual musician who has recently exited a polycule; Maro, mourning the death of his closeted queer father; and Awele, Yemisi, and May, “angry at the world, angry at how angry [she is] as a person, angry at what [she] can’t unsee.” The characters spend their days making art, navigating their relationships, and at times convening in a “truth circle,” which acts as something like a group-therapy session. Osunde’s prose is beautiful, if at times a bit overwrought, and they have clearly put a lot of thought into their characters, whom they treat with tenderness and compassion. But there’s not much in the way of a plot, and the novel tends toward the scattered and shambolic. This is a tone poem of a book, a novel that relies on connections, but never fully connects.

When she was 9 years old in 1957, Beeaff fell in love with her family’s 16-acre tract along the Conestoga River in Southern Ontario, Canada. Now caring for the property with her husband, Beeaff shares the subtle shifts and major changes that occur there from season to season. The book comprises four parts, one for each season, which are then further separated into a handful of days per month. The chapters introduce a variety of different subjects: Historical (Paleo-Indians are believed to have lived in the area beginning from 9,000 B.C.E.); scientific (the end product of “sugaring” (aka maple syrup) has a sugar/water ratio of 2-to-1); and personal (Beeaff’s many childhood memories include one of her father rafting down the river to deliver piles of cut wood). But it’s the lush descriptions and observations of flora and fauna that form the heart of the book. Whether enjoying the silence of a moonlit night or reveling in the sightings of a local beaver (who they name Archibald Beaudelaire XXII, or “Beau” for short), Beeaff homes in on the minutiae of life in the forest by combining memoir-style musings with methodical observations of nature. The eloquent, expressive prose limns the beauty of the changing seasons as they unfold: “Early morning’s solid, ash-bottomed overcast holds the heaviness of winter.” While some narrative threads can wander (a lengthy discussion about the traditional meanings of various gemstones seems out of place, for example), the book as a whole hearkens back to a Walden-like simplicity that feels both refreshing and restorative. Beeaff’s testament to the Canadian woodlands through writing and color photographs reminds readers to step outside and take a breath.