Grandpa is an artist who makes flutes, whistles, pot drums, and other instruments while young Meadow assists. Clay, Grandpa explains, “comes from the body of our Earth” and “artists can turn it into song.” His most precious item is a hawk-shaped ocarina that his own grandfather gave him when he was a boy; its beautiful sound spurred the forest animals to dance. But during a harsh winter storm, lightning strikes the barn that houses the art studio, and it catches fire. The hawk ocarina disappears; Meadow imagines Red Fox taking it. It isn’t until Meadow finds a broken piece of the original hawk instrument that Grandpa is able to remake the heirloom so that its wondrous sounds can be heard once more. Hellner’s text has a lilt that matches its melodious subject matter as the author explains that because clay comes from the earth, the instruments made from it are in turn rooted in nature. Both Meadow and Grandpa share a reverence for the art they create and the music that comes from it. Tous’ illustrations are a lovely complement, featuring idyllic, neatly composed scenes of grassland and mountains, animals, and streams. An especially noteworthy spread depicts the fire that devastates the barn, snow whipping and flames blazing against a lightning sky. Meadow and Grandpa are light-skinned and dark-haired.

Following Scribners: Five Generations in Publishing (2023), Scribner offers 18 essays on literature, art history, and music. It’s easy to settle into them like a lush, comfortable chair. Scribner writes that F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed “more of me than any living author.” Gatsby is “pure fiction and pure Fitzgerald: the hopeful, romantic outsider looking in.” An art historian, Scribner is excellent at discussing The Great Gatsby’s iconic cover painting, Celestial Eyes, by Francis Cugat. Among Scribner’s endearing recollections is an exchange between the author’s father and Ernest Hemingway: “My dad commented that at the age of eighteen months I had taken to pulling out all the books from the bottom shelves at home. Hemingway wrote back, ‘What young Charlie is doing is trying to remove all the dead wood from publishing; make a note of it for his biographers.’” In one chapter, Scribner riffs on the “five best books on family businesses,” among them Robert Graves’ I, Claudius (“the stuttering bookworm Claudius…survived to rule the business next since no one took him seriously enough to murder.”) and Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (“A family business need not be legal to thrive.”). In addition to sprightly chapters on singers Mary Costa and Frederica von Stade and masters Michelangelo, Rubens, and Velázquez, Scribner ponders the story behind the making of Bernini’s 17th-century Cristo Vivo. It doesn’t hurt that he was able to buy the sculpture. He writes, “In the dog days of August 1975, a month after starting my first job as an editorial assistant at Scribners, I decided to reward myself extravagantly for my modest paychecks: I bought the Bernini crucifix….I liquidated some savings and arranged to have it shipped to the office. It arrived in a crate that looked like a small coffin, much to the bemusement of my publishing colleagues.”

Thomas Willing, writes Vague, author of The Paradox of Debt (2023), was America’s dominant merchant. Robert Morris, the better-known “financier of the Revolution,” was his employee and later his business partner. Willing was perhaps the richest man in the Colonies, widely respected but colorless, with few interests besides work. He protested British actions, which hurt business, but voted to oppose independence in 1776, although he later supported the war. Armies fight wars, but money wins them, and Vague points out that the only sources of ready money in the Colonies were rich men. Willing immediately accepted supply orders from the Congress, a risky tactic because Congress was slow in paying—when it paid at all. In this unregulated free market, profits could be spectacular, but so were risks. Willing grew richer, but others (Morris included) were ruined. Willing soon headed the nation’s first bank, which helped finance the war, yet victory left a huge debt. More than most scholars, Vague emphasizes debt as a motivation for the 1787 Constitutional Convention, and the Constitution as “a triumph for the money system advocated by the conservative elite.” President Washington’s approval of treasury secretary Hamilton’s plan to pay off the entire debt at full value produced widespread outrage because almost all was held by wealthy men and speculators who had bought it at a fraction of its value, often from soldiers. Few historians praise Hamilton’s defense, and Vague states bluntly that this was a corrupt bargain that benefited the wealthy and exerted a malign influence on subsequent American history. Appointed director of the First Bank of the United States, Willing served for 15 of its 20-year existence, remaining untouched by the fraud, speculation, bubbles, and crashes that occurred while America’s GDP nearly tripled.

“I have always been intimidated by mothers,” says A., the narrator of Bruni’s strange and fascinating second novel. Of an age where she’s contemplating settling down and starting a family, she has a stable if somewhat meager life adjunct teaching a course called “Language Elective for Non-Native Speakers.” Then, during some routine medical tests, doctors discover a precancerous condition that they must treat by removing her reproductive organs. She loses her teaching gig during the long period of convalescence, and when she heals, she begins work as a caretaker for a young high-needs child. She also meets N., an immigrant with whom she dances away long nights in bars. One evening, she comes across a book on N.’s shelf: Field Notes, by Tomas Petritus, a book of testimonies by the mothers of boys who have gone missing in an unnamed country. Written in N.’s native language, the book tells the story of Mothers United, an underground network of women who channel grief over their missing children into political activism designed to raise awareness and demand answers from their government. When A. gets a grant to translate Petritus’ book, she travels to the town at its heart—“a town whose name has become synonymous in the national media with mass disappearances”—and learns that the book is not quite what it seems. In a fragmented, braided style reminiscent of Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (2014), Bruni weaves together explorations of language, borders, and belonging, as well as of the precarious and frequently terrifying state of motherhood. The result is a deeply intelligent, prismatic look at the personal and political facets of maternal care.

Ignoring the party downstairs in her house, Natalie listens to her husband cry across the hall and feels nothing but revulsion. It turns out that James has recently spent 20,000 pounds of their savings, including an inheritance from Nat’s grandmother, that they’d intended to use for IVF. She confronts him; he claims he used the money to pay off his brother, who’d been planning to blackmail Nat because of some letters they found that seemed to suggest she’d murdered several of her exes. Thus begins Darlington’s twisted, twisty thriller. As revealed through a series of flashbacks, three of Natalie’s former boyfriends—real pieces of work, all of them—have ended up dead, seemingly the victims of accidents or self-defense. Each time, Nat suffered a blackout, so she can’t remember actually pushing anyone, or poisoning them, or stabbing them with a kitchen knife. She does remember having fits of uncontrollable rage, triggered by scenarios that echo her traumatic childhood. And James’ decision to pay away their life savings is certainly making her see red…Like many contemporary thrillers, this one plays with a nonlinear timeline as well as a few different points of view; unlike some thriller writers, while she certainly draws on tropes of the genre, Darlington manages to include some genuine surprises, weaving themes of mental illness and family trauma with a sense of mystery. At the center of it all is Natalie herself: flawed, mistreated, and distrustful, but also strong. She, and Darlington, refuse to let bad men get away with doing bad things.