Eleanor Newton wasn’t able to be with her grandmother three years ago, when she died alone in the hospital during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. The loss lingers, especially because Grandma’s ghost appeared to Eleanor soon after her death, cryptically declaring “I’m early.” Trapped at home in lockdown and anticipating Grandma’s return, Eleanor recalls that “The world outside shrank. The world inside grew to fill the space that remained.” New neighbor Justin Fletcher, an 11-year-old from Greenwich who reads Black, helps white-presenting Eleanor break out of her shell. One day, while visiting a newly uncovered Roman mosaic of Orpheus and Eurydice beneath the London Bridge Tube station, Eleanor and Justin are alone when a wall gives way, water fills the tunnel, and they drown. They find themselves in a forested underworld, facing a forked path. Eleanor’s route ends at Eventide House, a seemingly idyllic boarding school that’s shrouded in mystery. Her efforts to uncover Eventide’s secrets only lead her deeper into the afterlife’s many-layered strangeness. While the story imagines one child’s encounter with death, it also powerfully captures the existential feeling of loss and unreality associated with the pandemic isolation. The dreamlike settings and Eleanor’s expressive narration lend the story a gentleness that makes its challenging premise memorable and emotionally manageable.

Set in 2014, the story begins in Marquette, Michigan, after a small meteor falls to Earth. When advertising exec Carole Veilleux—unknowingly infected by a tick days earlier—bites bakery owner Booker, she begins a chain reaction that spreads the strange contamination (the “mind-merge thing”) throughout Marquette and eventually all over the world. Billions of people become part of the hive mind: Booker’s preteen child, Layla, who wants to transition to a boy; autistic cop Lana Lannister; 61-year-old Jewish doctor Evelyn Schlapp, who’s having an affair with her rabbi; and more. Within weeks, the people of Marquette were “reindeer herders in Sápmi, Scandinavian furries with mixed fursonas. They were the Bajau Darat, forced out of the sea to live a sedentary life, they were Lego designers, Maasai, Kazakhs, Swiss bankers and snake milkers. They were David Bowie. That was really… cool.” Even hate-filled people like neo-Nazi thug William Willoughby find themselves seeing the world through more compassionate and accepting eyes. Suddenly, everyone knows everything about everyone else. Humankind becomes collectively more intelligent, more understanding. Months pass and humans make jaw-dropping scientific and societal advances. But what would happen if the hive mind suddenly disappeared and the world’s populace was forced to return to living with only their individual thoughts and limited knowledge? The speculation surrounding the planet’s organisms (humans, animals, plants, etc.) being part of a massive hive mind is intriguing, particularly as it deals with issues like racism, sexism, and systemic discrimination. The potential is there for some brass knuckles-to-the-skull revelations, but the payoff is decidedly underwhelming: “The best people could do was to try and make [the world] a tiny bit better.”

Professors Amelia Tarrant and Caleb Sterling have been soulmates since they met as children at boarding school—he an orphan, she the neglected child of indifferent academics. They grew up together and became historians together. But double standards plague even the zany magical universe they inhabit and a stray moment of platonic touching sets tongues wagging. With Amelia’s job always at risk in a sexist academic environment, she and Caleb decided to act like enemies so no one realizes the strength of their attachment. Pretending to hate each other is wearing on them, however, and the magical disruptions that accompany their “spats” increase when they’re assigned to visit a country house to catalog antique enchanted objects. Accompanied by a giggly secretary and a hulking security officer, Amelia and Caleb try to discover why artifacts keep disappearing and what precise power lies in the ordinary-looking spoon that keeps appearing in Amelia’s vicinity. As in Holton’s earlier novels set in a fantastical 19th-century Britain, the book is replete with Oscar Wilde- and Alexander Pope–style irony and goofball scenes with comic characters in a faux-gothic setting. This is also a satire of university culture, highlighting the emotional and professional labor forced on women in academia who are mocked for being both too competent to be likable and too feminine for true intellectual work. The dual points of view, Caleb’s consistent support for Amelia, and a secret society of exasperated older women all help counter some of the bitterness of that inequality. The couple’s abiding love and their fake fighting complicates the usual enemies-to-lovers narrative and might appeal to fans of Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry. There’s no explicit sex, but some passages are steamy enough to show that even professional thinkers do more than lecture.

The Margini can’t afford the fees required for them to become apprentices in one of the guilds that dictate access to skilled work and education in the city. When clockmaker Maestro Giuseppi, who refuses to join a guild, arrives in town with his daughter, Stella, Vale at last has the opportunity to learn a trade. But violence against the guildless grows, until the only option is for Vale and their community to begin fighting back. The community of the Margini is aspirational and supportive, full of aid amid their hardship. But the story, while providing a worthwhile lesson in the importance of organizing, lacks engaging character development. Vale and Stella form a fast friendship, but readers learn little about them beyond their desire to fight for what’s right. The world of Siannerra remains a highlight, however: It’s rich, lived-in, plausible, and filled with culture. Bi’s artwork is detailed, vibrant, and immensely visually appealing. Seeing the ways in which the underclass gets by, an element that’s often forgotten in fantasy stories, is worthwhile. Vale is nonbinary and has light brown skin and a mop of black hair with an undercut. Stella is pale-skinned and freckled with red hair. The supporting cast is diverse in appearance.

It may seem an impossible task to convince white Southerners living in poverty—without adequate health care or affordable housing—that they benefit from white privilege, but Howard has spent a lifetime challenging entrenched fallacies and formidable foes. A lifelong activist and professional community organizer, Howard feels a deep connection with the working poor, the chemically addicted, and the chronically ill because, she writes, “I am a working-class white Appalachian.” This compassionately told memoir traces the author’s trajectory from a chaotic childhood in a struggling working-class family in rural Kentucky to a career spent fighting for racial and social change in leadership roles with community organizing groups. The story is most vivid in her account of growing up on her grandparents’ tobacco farm with a mother who worked as a grocery clerk and a father who was a strip miner with weaknesses for alcohol and cocaine. He could turn violent on a dime. “Seeing men with guns in their hands was as common as seeing the sun rise and set each day,” Howard writes. “It was just another way we marked time.” But her father had a keen mind, was a voracious reader and had strong liberal leanings, which informed Howard’s moral compass. She was in the seventh grade when she led her first protest against a school lunchroom monitor who refused students refills of water. Howard’s career took her to Florida, West Virginia, and back to Kentucky with various organizations, and along the way she risked repeating family history by drinking herself into oblivion. A mental health treatment program and AA helped save her from depression after her father’s death.