Ever since Emlyn accidentally opened connections between the spheres in the series opener, she’s known she’d have to be the one to put things back to rights. This is no easy task for her and her Novem because one of their members, Laramie, is missing in the storyworlds. Laramie is accompanied by Frank, an injured wyvern who needs to get home for the sake of her health. Meanwhile, Camille, Emlyn’s sister, finds herself held captive as bait in one of the spheres. Working together, Emlyn and her team must break the bridges between worlds in order to build new pathways and set the stories straight. With such high stakes, failure isn’t an option. As readers dive back into the world of Rivenlea, they’re welcomed by familiar characters who help ground them as the action immediately picks up. Since there’s little recap of previous events, readers must be familiar with the earlier book to fully appreciate this one. The well-crafted worldbuilding details and thoughtfully laid out plot points combine to produce an entertaining story. The use of multiple perspectives and a layered narrative structure guides readers through the various reimagined storyworlds. Franklin’s effective use of foreshadowing creates an engaging experience that will particularly resonate with readers who are familiar with the classic stories she draws upon. The central cast presents white.

It’s 1960, and Ormond Basil has mostly retired from the screen to live peacefully in Antibes, on the French Riviera, but he still enjoys an excuse to travel and indulge himself with some shopping. As so often happens among expatriate communities, his travels reunite him with an old friend, Pietro Malerba, a movie producer, and his inamorata, Najat Farjallah, a fading opera diva. The three are stranded on the small island of Utakos by a storm when a fellow guest of their hotel is found dead in a beach cabana, a probable death by suicide. There are details, however, that hint at foul play—the fact that there was only one set of footprints in the sand; a clean threshold; an anomaly with the rope—and so the proprietress and the other guests turn to Basil, who famously portrayed Sherlock Holmes in a number of earlier movies. Together with his Dr. Watson figure, a Spanish mystery writer named Francisco Foxá, Basil leans into the role, drawing on his excellent knowledge of Arthur Conan Doyle as well as his own experiences inhabiting the most famous British detective. As he deduces and observes, alludes and concludes, everyone begins to treat him more and more like a real detective—including the murderer, who not only strikes again, but leaves taunting clues to draw him in. The novel’s tone is clever and entertaining but also somewhat melancholy, poignant—a reflection on a time gone by, a generation now passed. This version of Holmes has a weary dignity, a wry sense of self-awareness—he wants to stretch out the farce as long as possible rather than “return to melancholy afternoons of tedium and fog”—but Pérez-Reverte doesn’t hesitate to comment on places Basil falls short of the legend whom he both admires and resents while cheekily dropping names like shiny coins.

Gina loves to draw, and she has an autistic younger brother, Rob, who has an intellectual disability. She’s stressed about the normal things, like making new friends and starting her period. She’s rarely bothered by a life that revolves around her brother’s safety, with a strict routine and locks on doors and cupboards. As Gina tells her new friend Callie, Rob repeats sounds—echolalia—but only rarely says words to intentionally convey meaning. Rob communicates with his family using idiosyncratic personal sign language. The Chaddertons are a loving household, but Rob’s occasional violent outbursts are nonetheless frightening. Callie, who has light-brown skin, is a wonderful, giving friend who’s great with Rob. This lightly fictionalized memoir is Gina’s story, not her brother’s—she describes her goal as sharing her “experience of being a sibling of someone with high support needs.” Because Rob is minimally speaking, he doesn’t have his own voice in the story, though Gina represents him empathically. The simple, cartoon-style illustrations in a vibrant color palette quietly pay artistic tribute to some classics of comic style. The author’s note, which includes family photos, mentions the author’s adult diagnosis of autism, demonstrating her insider’s view of the subject.

Nisha’s only interacted with her grandparents Ammamma and Appappa over video chat. Now they’re on their way from Kerala, India. The house is bustling with activity as everyone gets ready for the big visit: Nisha’s aunties prepare samosas in the kitchen, while other relatives arrive laden with gifts. They surround Nisha, giving her loud smooches and big squeezes, squishing her cheeks, and swinging her around. Just as Nisha feels hugged out, her grandparents arrive, and the whole family embraces them, peppering them with questions. When someone prompts Nisha to hug Ammamma and Appappa, she feels overwhelmed and runs to her room. Her mother reassures her; after all, there are many ways to express love. Nisha shows her grandparents the new painting she’s been working on and is soon sitting beside them, truly feeling the love. Macias depicts a boisterous yet empathetic South Asian family whose love for one another is palpable as they give their littlest space to deal with big feelings; speech bubbles conveying Nisha’s relatives’ near-constant stream of chatter contrasts effectively with the child’s quieter inner monologue. Joshi’s illustrations, rendered in bright saturated primary colors, are filled with movement and energy, balancing joyful scenes of reunion with Nisha’s need for space and quiet.

The 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, has largely been forgotten. Jennings, the author of Paradise Now (2016), revives the story with the moment that touched off tragedy: Survivalist Randy Weaver had holed up with his family in a mountain retreat, and, having essentially entrapped him in an illegal gun sale, the FBI came looking for him. A dog was killed, then a 14-year-old boy, then an agent, after which Ruby Ridge became the site of a siege in which Randy’s wife died. While the agency never admitted overreach, the FBI quietly settled with the survivors, Randy among them, some years after the standoff. Jennings links this event to the popular “dispensationalist” theology filling the airwaves at the time courtesy of televangelists such as Pat Robertson, which, among other things, promulgated the argument that because Jesus was going to return any day now, there was no need to fret about nuclear war, environmental degradation, and the like—apocalyptic views endorsed by President Reagan and numerous members of his cabinet. “If earthly conditions are supposed to be growing worse,” writes Jennings, “then all the old hopeful schemes for sprucing things up come to resemble schemes of a more sinister nature.” So the Weavers apparently thought, and so did the Branch Davidians who came under siege a year later, and so, Jennings suggests, do subscribers to QAnon mythology today. In any event, as Jennings writes, the Weavers became martyrs to the Christian nationalist cause, the Charlie Kirks of their day, “saints of circumstance, beatified by the calamity that landed upon their heads.” The antigovernment stance of the Weavers and their supporters lives on, too; as Jennings writes, “Three decades on, Ruby Ridge looks more like the start of something than its finale.”