In a gathering of 30 essays and talks from 2016 to early 2025, Smith reflects on arts and politics, aging and craft. Several pieces were informed by dismaying political events: Receiving a literary award from Kenyon College three days after the 2024 American election, Smith talked about the need to protect vulnerable people; in Austria, in 2018, when that country was turning to the political right, she spoke about multiculturalism, exemplified by the makeup of the British World Cup team. At a rally in London, she spoke about climate change denialism; and in an essay written before the July 4, 2024, British election, she reminded her readers about what the Labour Party should stand for, in light of increasing inequality. Politics and history infuse an essay on Kara Walker’s “mode of relating to the ruins of the past” and her forewords to reissues of Gretchen Gerzina’s Black England and James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan. Smith offers moving obituaries for writers she admires and has learned from: Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and Hilary Mantel. The movie Tar inspires Smith to think about artistic monsters; artist Celia Paul’s memoir of her relationship with Lucien Freud elicits an essay about being, or resisting being, a muse. Smith reflects on her own writing in her foreword to her novel The Fraud, in an interview with a Spanish journalist, and in a talk on craft for a fiction workshop. She extols her beloved Kilburn, in London, and pays homage to New York, where she observes an unexpected sense of community when diverse New Yorkers jump in—silently and efficiently—to help a young mother whose baby carriage suddenly breaks. In that essay and others, Smith seems cautiously optimistic that “moral intelligence” will prevail in hard times.

López’s deceptively simple premise unfolds with perfect pacing as a snake suggests that Croco wrap his body around a tree trunk, birds recommend that he flap his (nonexistent) wings, and monkeys encourage him to leap out—all techniques that work brilliantly for the advisers but prove useless for a crocodile. Translated from Spanish by Maude, this Mexican import builds suspense through repetition and escalating frustration until Croco’s tears become the key to his salvation. The visual storytelling is extraordinary; López employs compositional dynamics that create tension and release. Croco’s position at the bottom of each spread emphasizes his predicament, while the helpful animals perch safely above, creating a clear visual hierarchy between the trapped and the free. The palette—dominated by jungle greens, vibrant oranges, and sunny yellows—practically pulses with tropical energy. The scaly orange endpapers immediately establish texture and tone, while brushy, organic illustrations give weight to every leaf and blade of grass. The tactile quality of the vegetation contrasts beautifully with Croco’s red scales. The story captures both individual character and collective community effort, showing failed collaboration giving way to successful self-reliance without undermining the value of the friends’ attempts to help. This is picture-book creation at its finest—creators who understand their audience completely, crafting a tale that works equally well for storytime groups and one-on-one sharing. Publishes simultaneously in Spanish.

Joey Carpenter is an insular, gay teenager navigating life in a homophobic town. After a friend’s uncle grooms him, leading him into a creeping relationship that culminates in sexual assault, Joey is eager to escape the explosive aftermath that hangs over him at school and home. As an attendee of the summer getaway Kamp Kromwell, Joey comes out of his shell to defend twins DJ and Lily Foster from bullies alongside newfound friends Kenny Louve and brothers Paul and Asia Demarco. The six misfits form the Kromwell Krew, “bound together, joined like links in a chain.” But as the burgeoning friendships solidify, a frightening local legend surfaces on Folklore Night: The murderous John Tate, “who had butchered countless women” in the 1960s, buried his unfortunate victims on the grounds of the then under-construction Kamp Kromwell. When “bodies began to spring up like dandelions” and a mistrial set Tate free, the townsfolk of Jasper Mill took justice into their own hands, bringing the story to a horrifying conclusion. The arrival of Jasper Mill exile Floppy Mossy (accompanied by “a flood of ravens”) interrupts a talent show performance; her prophetic dreams signify the return of a terrible spirit that the Kromwell Krew must confront before the night is over.  The chapters alternate between third- and first-person perspectives, with Joey’s narrative unfolding alongside the dark history of Jasper Mill and its inhabitants. Grea crafts a twisty page-turner populated with characters that feel well drawn, no matter how small their parts in the overall plot. (Even those who tip the story’s delicate balance of good and evil toward darkness are given detailed biographies contextualizing their actions.) While summer camp-themed slashers are familiar territory to horror readers, Grea’s twist on the typical tropes and LGBTQ+ characters refresh the genre with compelling ease.

Martin (Taming Spirit, 2024) makes valiant attempts here to pull off a complex blend of historical fiction and psychological thriller. The novel begins in Alberta where Hartman Meyer, the oldest boy in a family of five, obsesses with exploring the lagoon that runs between his family’s farm and the neighbor’s property. When he travels the water, he looks for chert, a hard, opaque rock that the area’s first peoples used to make spearheads. He makes his own spears, but they can’t rival a genuine serrated spearhead that he finds—one that seems oddly familiar to him. In 1974, when Hartman turns 12, the wealthy Barrymore family moves in across from the Meyer farm. Like Hartman’s family, the Barrymore’s have three children, one of whom, Elizabeth, tickles Hartman’s fancy. But her older brother, Tyrone, is a bully. One day, while in a canoe in the lagoon, Tyrone slingshots lead balls at Hartman’s face and then paddles at full speed at him. Hartman holds his spear at the ready, and when the two boys connect, he drives it deep into Tyrone’s “soft belly” then pulls it out, and drops it into the lagoon. Hartman tells investigators it was the pole he used to push his raft that splintered and killed Tyrone by accident, but he knows it was murder, and he’s haunted by nightmares.  Eventually, Elizabeth convinces him to go to a hypnotherapist to learn more about his nightmares, and then the book takes a dramatic shift back into the past. (Hartman’s therapist tells him he’s lived past lives.) Martin’s prose is elegant throughout and features well-developed characters and believable conversations. The author’s sense of humor also cuts through, such as when Hartman and his brother christen their watercraft “the Piss Cutter” and “relished the vulgarity that rolled off our tongues.” The descriptions of western Canada’s landscape will make readers want to pack their bags and head north. The therapy sections of the book also benefit from Martin’s many years as a psychotherapist.

In a prologue set in Wisconsin, 51-year-old Robert Charles Landsness is at his mother’s deathbed, urging her to “tell me the God-damn truth.” He has “never quite been comfortable” in his military family, and he has visions of happier, distant past in a “beautiful suburban home.” His mother muses to herself about the “the night Robert had come to her” in 1955 Panama City, but she dies before answering his plea. The novel then jumps back to 1955 to unfurl a tale of young Long Island mom Colleen Goodson, who briefly leaves her 3-year-old son Bobby, along with his baby sister, outside an IGA supermarket, then returns to find them gone. The daughter is quickly found, but Bobby remains missing, resulting in “the largest search in the young history of Nassau County” in New York state. Local police pursue various false leads, at one point questioning a Black family whose car was seen in the area around the time of the disappearance. An ambitious young reporter scores an interview with Colleen, who, like her Air Force-base employee husband, appears strained and oddly detached. The Goodsons receive several ransom notes, but these prove to be the work of at least one opportunistic prankster. As years go by, the Goodsons divorce and move back to their native Kansas. When Landsness later claims to be Bobby Goodson, a new team of detectives reopens the case. By novel’s end, the mystery is solved after heading a surprising new direction.

Nine-time Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Valenti, whose verse is included in the anthology 13 Poets from Long Island (2023), provides In Cold Blood-like depth to this fictionalized account of what this book’s subtitle notes is “One of the Oldest Unsolved Missing Child Cases in U.S. History.” In real life, 2-year-old Steven Damman disappeared while left unattended in front of a Long Island bakery in 1955, and he was never found. Valenti’s depiction of Colleen is particularly nuanced and multifaceted, noting her flaws and limitations while also the addressing emotional consequences of her abusive childhood; it also effectively explores how she was suspected of killing her own child. Valenti also dramatizes the scope and painstaking work of the police investigation, which grimly included scrutiny of area parents who recently lost children and may have been looking for a replacement. However, Valenti’s conclusion to the story is unbelievably convoluted, necessitating a rather complicated backstory. Many other elements of the story, however, are close to those of the actual case, which had many strange turns, including someone claiming 50 years later that he may have been the kidnapped child. An afterword separating fact from fiction would have been welcome, though, and readers will want to know how much Valenti reported on this fascinating case. Still, the book strikingly captures the angst of its well-sketched character, resulting in an often compelling read.