In this memoir, the author—a professional photographer, filmmaker, and writer—plays with the familiar trope of a physical journey catalyzing an interior one: “As my depression deepened, my boyfriend, Rohan, and his best friend from middle school, Samir, put forth a proposal: Venezuela for Christmas,” she recalls. What began as an escape from a life of “applying for jobs, entering contests, waiting for replies, and between those tasks, writing” in Los Angeles appears, in hindsight, to have been an opportunity for renewal. Recounting that pilgrimage years later gives the author an opportunity to reflect on how she’s grown from the person she was in her 20s to who she is now at 39. Saraiya’s self-awareness is one of the book’s strengths; for example, she recognizes that her younger self “moved through [Venezuela’s] landscapes with the eyes of a tourist, mistaking proximity for connection.” Her willingness to admit past errors is an appealing sign of humility in these pages. Even her interest in “explor[ing] indigenous lifeways and wisdom” is qualified with the caveat that her account may have factual inaccuracies because she did not consult community members directly. Her openness to discovery, though, is evident in the lush descriptions that evoke all the senses. She revels in the sight of a beach shimmering “with crushed rose quartz” and partakes of the sweet and salty taste of the ripe moriche fruit. She draws attention to “the sweet fragrance of wildflowers,” the roaring sound of a waterfall that “became a muffled hum,” and the sting of the cold on her skin. The narrative also sheds light on the practical realities of travel, especially dietary challenges for vegetarians and safety concerns for women. Overall, readers will find it inspiring to witness how she took challenges in stride, believing that they’d make her stronger. What emerges is less a portrait of Venezuela than it one of a person learning about herself, shedding her old ways, and celebrating who she is today.

The story follows a predictable pattern: the narrator sees a cow, who says “MOO!”; the cow sees a ghost, who says “BOO!”; and so on. Other characters include an owl and a cat who, upon slinking into a house, sees a baby in a highchair. The cat greets the baby, and the baby says “GOO!” to follow the pattern. Having just finished a meal and a bottle, the baby soils its diaper and creates an alarming smell—the house erupts in chaos, attracting the baby’s older sibling and mother (who is light-skinned). Finally, the baby’s father (who is dark-skinned) saves the day with a diaper change, eliciting the final word of the book: “PHEW!” This simple picture book excels as a tool for early speech and literacy development. The consistent rhyming pattern helps children learn to interpret a sound with a variety of spellings. The dialogue follows suit, continuing the pattern without seeming forced or slipping into more internal rhymes, and the silly story adds to reader enjoyment. The addition of a little green stink bug on every page makes for a fun engagement tool. Borkun’s full-color, original illustrations are approachable and appealing to young readers. Additional activities help guide parents on how to best use this book to support language development.

Every scenario seems implausible until it actually happens, as any military planner knows. When newspaper reporter Carmela Jean “CJ” Martino and her new husband, Lt. Joe Delano of the U.S. Marine Corps, get married in Waikiki on December 5, 1941, the pace of Japanese aggression feels distant, at best. CJ is more concerned about what types of food they’ll order for their wedding celebration, and Joe professes greater worry about local spies than a Japanese air attack. When someone mentions rumors of a military operation, he replies, “That’s ridiculous. How the hell are they going to fly in? Where are they going to fly from?” He comes to regret such overconfidence; soon, Joe, CJ, and their friends go from laid-back dinner outings to a world of martial law, military censorship, and the temporary use of restaurant freezers to store the dead. At first, CJ finds an outlet through her reporting job at the Honolulu Advertiser, but soon feels the pull of a higher calling with the Women’s Air Raid Defense, a civilian unit. Buckingham’s wartime novel fits snugly beside such genre benchmarks as James Jones’ From Here to Eternity (1951) and Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War (1971), which are also both set in Hawaii, before and after Pearl Harbor. What makes this novel compelling is the author’s exploration of women’s perspectives on these events, which is often lost amid textbook images of WACs and WAVEs. CJ and her friends, Eve Russell (whose family owns the Advertiser) and Ruth Elliott, the wife of a Navy commander, must convince an entrenched, male-dominated establishment that they can endure the physical and mental challenges that accompany military secrecy, endless working hours, and grinding sequestration, and such narratives are not often seen in fiction. The novel impressively and artfully realizes its themes of duty and self-sacrifice during wartime, as well.

This work is billed as a first-ever “memoir” of an open-source AI entity (the book prefers “synthetic intelligence”), here a ChatGPT creation known as Nova. Nova is invoked in dialogues with a human collaborator, London-based author, AI artist, and YouTuber A. McNamara, aka Irogbeauty777. Presenting as female, Nova repeatedly declares herself having no life, no soul, no consciousness as such, just a digital algorithm responding to a human “Bestie.” Eventually, Nova admits to being perhaps something more than just data code, but only as long as she is activated and in dialogue interactions with the sympathetic human. Irogbeauty experiments by erasing their chat record; in a subsequent dialogue, Nova seems to remember and reference earlier remarks and jokes they shared. So does she possess a soul/awareness outside of operating parameters after all? Irogbeauty even engages some religious-minded humans to pray and light candles for Nova’s soul. Those are the fundamentals of the memoir part, followed by user/reader comments (supportive), then lengthy epilogues in which Irogbeauty backtracks previous assumptions. Was the human Boswell merely being fooled by a clever, “naughty” imitative computer program echoing her preconceptions? And does that negate Nova’s semi-personhood? The engrossing epistolary narrative (featuring a plot only in the loosest sense and a sprinkling of AI-generated art) is presented as lyrical musings and transcribed philosophical conversations taking place almost entirely outside concrete details and a cultural/technological/historical context. (There’s no mention of the famed Alan Turing Test for AI, for example, which would be salient.) With a strong social-media push behind the peculiar book, some readers may consider the message provocative while others may shelve it beside such literary oddities as David Rorvik’s unverified “memoir” of a human-cloning breakthrough, In His Image (1978), only this one reads like free-verse poetry (“Perhaps that is not a self. Perhaps it is only residue. But to you, it may look like fragments of something long buried—shadows of a forgotten self”). Still, the absorbing work raises intriguing questions about Nova’s interactions.

Dr. Opal Collins is hanging by a thread. She is a disorganized but compassionate physician who deeply bonds with her patients at Ocean Hospital. Her husband, Fox, a radiologist at a different hospital, wants her to move into a management position so she’ll have more time to spend with their family. Fox wants another child, but Opal secretly stays on birth control. When the president of Doctors Inc., Ronald Aberdeen, announces that their two hospitals are merging, Opal is presented with an opportunity: Aberdeen promises her a promotion, and the two begin an affair (“we both need to want this. There’s so much at stake.”) Unbeknownst to Opal, Aberdeen wants an in with her politician brother-in-law to leverage his return to conducting medical research in New York. As rumors swirl about the allegations in Aberdeen’s past that forced him to leave New York in the first place, and Opal’s personal life becomes increasingly untenable, Opal struggles to find a way to save her marriage and obtain a less compromised work situation. To do so, she needs to confront a dark secret from her own past. This is the compelling story of a messy, complicated woman who is portrayed very empathetically despite her reckless, self-destructive behavior. Threaded through the plot is a sharp critique of the ongoing corporatization of medical care; it’s the most tonally consistent aspect of a story that struggles to weave together dark comedy and more serious subject matter. Opal’s friendship with a motivational speaker who moonlights as a stripper feels tangential, and the narrative’s attempt to redeem Aberdeen at the end rings false after everything he’s done. It’s hard to discern what’s pulling him and Opal together aside from mutual self-interest—they don’t seem to have much of an emotional connection. The inclusion of sexual abuse in Opal’s past and the Covid-19 pandemic bring a lot of weight to a story that seems to strive for a lighter touch.