The table is where this loving Black family enjoys the first meal of the day; it’s where the children do homework and make cookies and where everyone prepares for fish fry Fridays. Extended family shares space here during somber moments, such as deaths, and on happier occasions, including birthdays, Kwanzaa, and other holidays. Grandpa regales the young protagonist (who narrates) with stories of Mom and Dad’s past as the child listens intently. And when it’s time for Mom to braid the youngster’s hair, this, too, happens at the table. “The process is exhausting for both of us, and I sometimes struggle to sit still,” but “when she is finished, I feel so pretty—and thankful that it’s done.” In her authorial debut, Washington relies on the cut-paper collage technique that won her a Caldecott Honor for Choosing Brave (2022), written by Angela Joy. Her images boast bright colors, rich textures (the grain of the wooden table is particularly eye-catching), and a level of detail so intricate, it’s hard to believe the artist relied on cut paper alone. Her straightforward prose often ripples across the page, conveying warmth and visual verve. Photos of Washington’s own family table close out the work.

“Four acres, steel fence, two warehouses, three forklifts, one-thousand cars, and a junkyard dog”; for the temperamental, uneducated Harry Saunders, his new wrecking yard in the desert was an empire to command. His 9-year-old daughter, Robyn, wrenched from suburban life in Laguna Beach, California, warmed up to it more slowly. She began working the junkyard counter as a tween, operating phone lines and locating parts despite knowing little about cars. Robyn was befriended by a rough posse of men, and Harry even let her drive a forklift once. But her little brother, Ryan, failed to thrive—he was savaged by the resident pack of guard dogs as a small child and later bonded with the ever-present tweakers selling scrap metal for meth funds. When the teenage Robyn salvaged a battered but stylish 1983 Honda Civic, her world opened. She listened to cool music on the radio and visited the ocean instead of attending school; away from the junkyard’s chaotic orbit, she explored a more creative path. But as the business lost money, her father became increasingly aggrieved, Ryan veered off course, and Robyn discovered that she could never fully escape her past. Saunders Wilson’s “memoirella” is brief, but even when lightly touching on subjects like familial sexual abuse and drug addiction, her story has impact. The author’s examination of her family and community grants grace and understanding to all. At restaurants, Harry harassed waitstaff, and the wrong word could cause him to flip over the dinner table at home—but his savagery obscured the early wound of abandonment. Ryan is a nemesis but also a confidant, wilding out with Robyn through the night and eating biscuits and gravy with her at dawn. The setting plays a pivotal role: Robyn left a safe “walled fortress” for a land of “misshapen” houses where the sky loses its “coastal blue tint,” and nature—in the form of the Pacific Ocean and Cal State San Bernardino’s forests—helped enable Robyn’s eventual escape.

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.”