A lifelong resident of Palm Beach County, Florida, Ryles experienced discrimination firsthand growing up in the segregated city. Telling his story with autobiographical vignettes that jump across multiple timelines, the author emphasizes both the pervasiveness of racism and the resilience and determination of the city’s Black residents. He notes, for instance, that when the integrated Atlanta Braves Major League Baseball team trained in South Florida, the Black players were not allowed to stay in segregated hotels. This situation prompted Palm Beach’s Black community, including Ryles’ parents, to offer lodgings to all-stars like Dusty Baker, who wrote the book’s foreword. The author discusses the influence of his grandparents’ neighbor, Edward Rodgers, who served a pivotal role in advocating for civil rights reforms before becoming the county’s first Black judge. The author would follow in Rodgers’ footsteps as a lawyer whose legal work overlapped with his activism. (Ryles would serve on the West Palm Beach City Commission and as president of the city’s Housing Authority.) The author combines his fascinating and deeply personal history of the Black experience in Palm Beach with a broader commentary on how slavery and the legacy of Jim Crow continue to reverberate into the present. “Jim Crow never fully went away,” he writes, adding that he believes that the era of segregation and legalized discrimination has “metastasized into more heinous and covert methods of racial subjugation.” He connects his son’s 2019 interaction with police—who arrived on the scene of a car accident with guns drawn rather than focusing on rendering aid to the stranded motorist—to other episodes of police hostility toward young, Black males, such as the 2016 killing of Philando Castile. The book’s narrative is often interrupted by “Did You Know” segments that include trivia about Black history, where Ryles shares his insights on topics that span from the Trump administration’s anti-diversity campaigns to the white savior trope often found in movies about slavery.

More than a year has passed since Aurelia Lyndham assumed ownership of her Aunt Marigold’s bookshop, On the Square Books, and discovered the shop’s remarkable secret: Every night, characters from the store’s Recommended Reads table step out of the pages of the books and socialize with one another. This unique situation provided the inspiration for Aurelia’s debut novel, which was about Count Vronsky’s life after Anna Karenina; she now begins outlining a novel about art forgery. Aurelia is deeply in love with Oliver, a book editor (“Their teasing and bickering over edits to her book had morphed into something real and playful”), and she asks him to move in with her, though she wonders how she can keep the secrets of the bookshop under wraps. When she puts the novels of Charles Dickens on the Recommended Reads table, she’s particularly touched to meet Harriet from Little Dorrit. Saddened by Harriet’s solitude, Aurelia resolves to put her planned novel on hold and write a happy ending for Harriet’s story. Despite her best efforts, Aurelia struggles to write the story, frustrating Harriet. Can Aurelia find the right conclusion for the character, or will Harriet write the ending that’s best for her? In this second installment of Andersen’s Midnights on the Square series, Aurelia’s nascent career as an author is the central focus, with her attempts to write a satisfying ending for Harriet echoing her own struggle to pen a second novel. The supporting characters have a chance to shine, especially Aurelia’s boyfriend, Oliver. As Aurelia’s relationship with Oliver deepens, she meets his family, including his younger brother, Jack; although the brothers live close to each other, their relationship is strained, a dynamic that Andersen fruitfully explores throughout the novel. But the heart of the project continues to be Aurelia’s love of classic literature and the characters who make the stories come to life.

Nakamura, a University of Michigan scholar and author, begins her treatise with a striking image: a group of Kenyan women who are paid “two dollars an hour to train and clean ChatGPT by reading and labeling snippets of violent, racist, and sexist remarks.” These women “feed” developing AI models the consistent stream of data needed to help the models learn and grow. According to Nakamura, the invisibility of these workers exemplifies the vital but unrecognized labor that women of color have long invested into the modern internet. She writes, “[T]he technological horizon that marks the beginning of technologies that feel like a new epoch of machine intelligence is enabled and marked by the labor of women of color—labor that is strategically erased in some moments and hypervisible in others.” To support her thesis, Nakamura profiles Navajo women in Shiprock, New Mexico, who created “chips for calculators, transistor radios, and other early media devices [that] was understood as creative cultural labor, and thus not labor….This enables its marginalization from capital—it doesn’t pay to do this work, though it should.” Nakamura also profiles Tila Tequila, a queer, Vietnamese refugee who Nakamura calls “the first influencer.” Despite Tequila’s accomplishments, she was never credited as being a social media pioneer; instead, she was met with condescension and cruelty. Using examples like these, the author convincingly argues that the internet (in particular, social media) would not exist without the underpaid or unpaid invisible labor of women of color. The book’s prose can be dry, but its thesis is fascinating. As Nakamura writes, “If you are holding a digital device in your hands, it was almost certainly touched by a woman of color before you, most likely the Southeast Asian woman or women who built it.”

Sixteen-year-old Julia Anderson is unhappy about moving across the country from Toronto to Campbell River, a small town on Vancouver Island dubbed “the Salmon Capital of the World.” Following an ugly divorce that was hard on both mother and daughter, Jules’ lawyer mother got a new job as executive director of the environmental organization Eco-Guardians. Her father has married a much younger woman whose dislike for Jules is clear. In Campbell River, Jules meets 17-year-old Cody Romano, and they quickly connect. After some informal encounters, the two finally make plans to go out—and that’s when they figure out that Cody’s father owns the lumber mill that Eco-Guardians is trying to protect against logging. Once the teens become aware of the bitter rivalry between their parents, they hide their relationship, which is hard in such a small town. Can they keep their secret while the court case rages? Readers looking for a feel-good version of Romeo and Juliet—with a little bit of danger and suspense related to the legal battle and an anonymous donor’s support of the Eco-Guardians—will enjoy Cody and Julia’s journey. While the story follows familiar genre beats, it still contains enough surprises to sustain readers’ interest. Characters are largely cued white.

The kingdoms of Masor and Pavoline have long been allies, and both are surrounded by the Infinite Wood, a mystical place that’s populated by fairies. The alliance is jeopardized, however, when Masor’s king and queen are found murdered in the forest. The fairies are initially suspected, but the true killer is Prince Guiomar of Pavoline, who blames a Masorian for his mother’s death. Stoman, a fairy warrior, delivers this news to two servants, Esta and Byrdon, bound to the Masor and Pavoline royal families, respectively. They pass the message along to their employers, but the King of Pavoline and the Princess of Masor have their own theories of the crime. Byrdon is bound to Guiomar’s personal service, so he and Esta decide to raise their child in a cave in the Infinite Wood. Stoman and his partner, Alizren, must also raise their child in secret, because when a fairy child’s color doesn’t match their parents’, the Council of Elders takes the youngster away. Defying norms, the human Leanna and the fairy Kennedy grow up together. There are early signs that Leanna may possess unusual magical abilities and a grand destiny—one in which she may wield the powerful Jewel of Nebulous—and Kennedy is born purple, the color of fairy royalty. Flyte’s well-paced story is full of creative worldbuilding concepts and intriguing characters, and it features some thoughtfully timed twists and turns along the way. The author has crafted much of the dialogue in an old-fashioned style, which some readers are likely to find distracting at times (“This is naught but a dream, and I do naught to keep you hither, wake up if you in truth despise me so,” says Leanna at one point). However, the narrative as a whole—in which Leanna and Kennedy grow and explore their world and work to encourage peace and understanding among their respective peoples and kingdoms—is exciting and skillfully delivered, and it’s sure to keep aficionados of the genre invested.