Grizelda the Green loathes the trick-or-treaters who knock on her door each year, scaring her spiders, her pet dragon, and her cauldron. So she cooks up a plan to take the joy out of the holiday. As she casts spells, pumpkins explode and streetlights shatter. Undeterred, the children persist; after all, they have flashlights! The kids aren’t bothered even when Grizelda makes their candy horribly unappetizing (worms and slime, anyone?). Instead, they’re thrilled at the prospect of meeting a real live witch. “Your magic gave us the best Halloween ever!” a young girl declares. Grizelda is moved; turns out, even witches love helping others and being appreciated in return. The rhyming text results in an ideal preschool read-aloud, with the bouncing stanzas keeping a snappy pace. The children’s unflagging optimism in the face of setbacks is an excellent lesson in making lemonade out of lemons, while Grizelda’s change of heart emphasizes the rewards of generosity. Longhi’s cheery cartoonish illustrations complement the storytelling; a palette of deep aquas with accents of purple, gold, and orange reflects the night sky and sets an appropriately spooky tone. The kids are racially diverse; Grizelda has gray-tinged skin and ombré green hair.

Having helped youngsters learn to read an analogue clock and pick up the basics of geometry, Wise and Lynch return to the farm, where Chicken, Goat, and Sheep are attempting to share a hexagonal cake that looks scrumptious, if a bit improbable (hexagonal baking pans?). Chicken is eager to eat, but Goat’s impetuous initial attempts at cutting the cake result in unequal portions. Thankfully, Sheep turns to the chalkboard before the dessert is destroyed. Colorful drawings illustrate the proper division as Sheep demonstrates that two-sixths is the same as one-third—just as Farmer Ed arrives with a triangular apple pie to split among them (a formidable problem, not solved here). The final pages dispense with the jokes and baked goods and simply explain equivalent fractions and simplified fractions, providing a page of more challenging practice examples (without answers) for each concept. Readers who can stomach the outrageously antique Dad jokes will find this a tasty treat. Comiclike illustrations, with panels and speech bubbles, are as zany as those in the earlier books, and the concepts are once more clearly explained, though suitably more advanced. Eye-catching endpapers featuring yummy desserts would make perfect pastry-shop wallpaper.

This is the third installment of a thought-provoking New Age fiction series, an exploration of love, loss, enlightenment, and self-discovery written by self-described “intuitive medium” Zani. Readers new to the series will find it more rewarding (and less confusing) to start with volumes 1 and 2 (Piper, Once and Again, 2016, and Waiting for Grace, 2020). The author assumes familiarity with the series’ multiple characters and their backstories, among them Eli Cranston, a lawyer-turned-psychotherapist, father to manipulative, hate-filled Grace and adoptive daughter, Hope, the 18-year-old title character here; and Piper Corcoran, who runs an intuition development group and an equine therapy program. (Horses—their personalities, care, and importance to the humans in their lives—are a significant and well-integrated presence in the story.) Jumping from one character to another in the initial chapters, the narrative suggests, but never fully clarifies all that has gone before. The prologue, which for some time appears to be an unrelated, stand-alone vignette, describes a Marine sergeant under fire in Iraq as he tries to save a grievously wounded “grunt from podunk Massachusetts.” Chapter 1 shifts to Hope, targeted by her sister, Grace (broadly written as an unredeemable mean girl for reasons presumably to be found in Book 2). Chapter 2 introduces Eli, grieving over his mentor and father figure, a Holocaust survivor. Chapters 3 and 4 belong to Piper, returning to her farm in Massachusetts, alluding to a lost love in her past 19th-century life, not explained here. Other characters remain mysteries. How did Piper’s husband, John, save “her life on many levels”? Why did handyman Clem need to find “a place to call home without the weight of the past around his neck”? The narrative gains necessary immediacy when it returns to and sustains Hope’s story—her attempt to have a relationship with her biological mother, a one-dimensional, manipulative addict; her growth toward independence and self-realization; and her moving acceptance of love as a universal continuum.

Wiencek dexterously chronicles the fruitful 30-year friendship of architect Stanford White and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who designed grand buildings and public art and ignored sexual taboos, leading to lurid tragedy. White’s Madison Square Garden, topped in 1891 with a Saint-Gaudens sculpture, was the tallest building in a modernizing Manhattan. In 1906, the venue became an infamous crime scene when the architect was murdered in the Garden’s rooftop theater. Wiencek toggles between ateliers and late-night clubs, detailing the duo’s creative output—their projects included, most enduringly, memorials to presidents and war heroes still displayed in New York, Boston, and elsewhere—and their apparently intertwined love lives. White’s design of a tower for Boston’s Trinity Church was, per a colleague, the work of “an artist of extreme talent and power amounting to genius.” He was a fop befitting a city on the rise, with “flamboyant, spiky red hair” and “see-through silk shirts of pale blue and green.” Saint-Gaudens wasn’t so fancy. Sometimes “dressed like a factory worker” and often battling deep depression, he’d spend months on a sculpture, then angrily destroy it. Saint-Gaudens and White had complicated sex lives and what the author calls “an erotic relationship” with one another. White, nearing 50, courted and then raped a teen girl, Wiencek writes, and in 1906 the man she’d subsequently married shot the architect to death, setting off a newspaper frenzy. Though Wiencek sometimes fixates on the tiring minutiae of his subjects’ sexual couplings, he effectively contextualizes their work and depicts Saint-Gaudens in particularly memorable detail. While making a large altarpiece featuring reliefs of angels, he filled his studio with lit candles, giving the sculpture’s angels “an unreal appearance, as if they floated.”

When Irish singer-songwriter O’Connor died in 2023 at age 56, the music world was thrown into a state of shock. O’Connor was a global celebrity, and had been since the 1990 release of her hit single “Nothing Compares 2 U”—a cover of a previously obscure Prince song—two years before she would memorably tear up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. Huber and Bayne’s book collects essays by women and nonbinary authors reflecting on the singer’s influence on their own lives. The anthology kicks off with a foreword by fellow musician Neko Case, well written but a bit unfocused. The essays that follow, each tied to a specific O’Connor song, are a mixed bag. Standouts include Sarah Viren, who examines “Black Boys on Mopeds,” and May-lee Chai, who uses “Jump in the River” as a starting point to explore her relationship with her mother. Madhushree Ghosh does a good job writing about discovering O’Connor’s music as a 20-year-old whose Indian peers can’t quite relate, while Brooke Champagne writes a stunning piece about abortion inspired by “Three Babies.” In an essay tied to “Jackie,” Zoe Zolbrod, recalling the time she and a group of friends listened to the song at a gathering, successfully captures the effect O’Connor had on her fans: “We didn’t care if the whole building came tumbling down. We wanted it to. In those first moments, she made us feel powerful enough not just to stand our ground, but to fly.” There are some gems here, but too many of the essays lack focus and descend into the maudlin.