Nehrig, a psychologist and avid knitter, makes her book debut with a sweeping investigation of the role of textile work in women’s lives. Drawing on archaeological, anthropological, historical, literary, and personal accounts, Nehrig argues persuasively for the centrality of this work—spinning, weaving, knitting, embroidering, quilting—in many cultures, from prehistory to the present. In addition to scholarly research, Nehrig has conducted in-depth interviews with artists, designers, and textile makers working in many media: a weaver in the Andes of Peru, a textile designer in Lisbon, a Nigerian woman who turned to sewing as a way to heal from spousal abuse. Nehrig discusses how textile work serves to transmit cultural and familial knowledge and to inspire creative problem-solving. Rather than slavishly following a pattern, knitting creatively can open up possibilities for a woman to follow her own desires and make her own decisions. For art therapists, textile techniques “can serve as rich and useful metaphors for psychological processes” such as facilitating “identity integration and disintegration” through the “doing and undoing” involved in knitting, unraveling, and reworking. Letting yarn spill out on a table and creating story cloths and memorial quilts offer opportunities for healing. For the artist Louise Bourgeois, who worked in many media, sewing promoted “emotional repair.” When women gather to produce textiles together, they foster social bonds and community. Just as textiles themselves may offer comfort—think baby blanket—so do connections made by working together. Nehrig examines textile workers’ impact on politics, feminist movements, and economic independence; today, she has found, handcraft is the leading source of employment for women worldwide. Illustrated with color plates of women’s creations.

While playing in the woods, Ghouldilocks, a wide-eyed, wild-haired, yellow-skinned creature, discovers an abandoned mansion. Inside she finds three chairs of differing degrees of hardness, three bowls of—what else?—“ghoulash” of varying temperatures, and three beds of disparate sizes. The tale matches “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” beat for beat as our protagonist sits in every chair and breaks the littlest one, samples all the ghoulash and devours the smallest bowl’s contents, then falls asleep in the smallest bed. When the mansion’s ghostly residents return, they discover Ghouldilocks still slumbering. Mistaking her for a mummy, they’re terrified, and the hubbub awakens the interloper, who, in turn, becomes scared of them. Everyone scrambles for the door. Outdoors, the ghosts realize their error and explain that they’re friendly but that they believed Ghouldilocks wanted their sheets for her wrapping. Mistaken identities are now resolved—with a couple of funny visual and textual puns thrown in—and new relationships are forged. Ghouldilocks is invited to stay, learns to cook ghoulash, becomes besties with Baby Ghost, and promises never to enter anyone’s house uninvited. Children who enjoy the source material will giggle over this humorous take, which emphasizes friendship and goofy antics rather than scares; they’ll pore over the comedically energetic cartoon illustrations and appreciate the satisfying ending.

San Jose, California, known as “the Garden City,” is struggling during the Great Depression. The fruit and vegetable processing industry serves as the area’s main economic driver, but recent wage cuts have cannery workers poised to go on strike. Best friends Amelia and Victoria work on a cannery assembly line, thanks to Amelia’s well-connected bar-manager father, Angelo Gumina—the second-in-command to mob boss Gaetano Ferrone—who used his influence to secure them summer jobs. They soon find themselves fired up by activism, attending meetings and demonstrations to protest unfair wages and poor treatment at work. To evade police after a demonstration turns ugly, the girls seek refuge in the Rosen Department Store, owned by Alexander Rosen; Victoria meets Alexander’s son and heir, Michael, who’s known as “the scion of San Jose,” and their association leads to Michael being kidnapped and held for $40,000 ransom. The pressure to solve the case increases when Bureau of Investigation agent Louis Cooper gets involved, sue to rumors of mob involvement, and conflicting accounts of what really happened to Michael emerge. The apparent lack of progress in the case brings things to a fever pitch. Meanwhile, influential real estate magnate Thomas Ripley, who has the ears of both the mayor and governor, has his own agenda that involves obtaining more power, more land, and more money. Over the course of this intricate tale of politics, corruption, and shifting alliances, Doll delivers a fast-paced work of historical fiction that takes full advantage of its Prohibition-era California setting. The farming community is effectively shown to be beset by unrest, greed, and scandal, and the shifting plot will keep readers on their toes. Overall, the work has a cinematic quality, but it’s always firmly grounded in elements of real-life history; as such, it serves as a cautionary tale on how social disparities and anti-immigrant bias can be manipulated to fuel the evil plans of powerful people.

Like many girls in the 1960s, the author was spellbound by Warren Beatty and obsessed with meeting him in real life. Unlike many girls, Nash grew up in Tarzana, California, with eccentric parents whose social circle included radical left-wing politicians and minor Hollywood stars. For her, Warren Beatty would be—in some ways—attainable. By 1974, the author was working at the Sunset Strip’s Old World Restaurant (where she knew Beatty was a patron) and trying to get her acting career off the ground. It was there that she began a decades-long, on-and-off relationship with Beatty, which would endure for the rest of her career as an actor, comedian, and associate director working in television production. Nash uses Beatty as the throughline as she fleshes out wonderfully outlandish stories from her madcap childhood (which featured “typical family stuff” like Black Panther fundraisers and dressing up like a nun to be able to buy liquor underage) and her time as an adventurous young woman in 1970s Los Angeles. The author spent her days on movie sets or skydiving before attending parties at Jack Nicholson’s Mulholland mansion, all while slowly feeling the pull toward addictions to alcohol, quaaludes, and binge-eating. Nash takes readers through the ’80s, ’90s, and up to the current day, chronicling her experiences with recovery and the healing potential of comedy, which led her to finally call out the big star that had been stringing her along for years. The author’s skill as a comedian is on full display here—she peppers every page with perfectly timed punchlines that communicate her quirky personality. (When a producer’s call catches her off guard, she breezily responds that she’s painting, but explains, “I was eating—but I wanted to sound interesting and busy.”) Although she writes with deep emotion about her addiction issues, it may feel that Nash sometimes waves the darker aspects of Hollywood away with jokes; still, her consistent, irreverent voice makes the memoir delightful. Just as she describes one of her encounters with Warren, her wonderful stories feel like “remnant[s] of stardust mixed in with a cozy blanket of nostalgia.”

The Rebeccas—one a doctoral student, the other a cashier at an organic grocery store—have been separated for six months. Theirs was a volatile marriage, marred by student Rebecca’s alcoholism, but now she is sober, on her medication, and eager to become a foster parent. But in order to get approved, student Rebecca needs cashier Rebecca, who herself grew up in foster care, to pretend they are still happily married. Cashier Rebecca isn’t entirely opposed—she desperately wants her wife back if she is stable—but she has her own entanglements to manage. Despite her precarious personal financials, she has presented herself as a “provider” on an app that pairs sugar babies with sugar mamas and connected with the pregnant Charlotte. But little does she know that Charlotte isn’t expecting and isn’t in need of a romantic benefactor—Charlotte likes wearing a prosthetic pregnancy belly and is using her inheritance money to serve as student Rebecca’s (“her Rebecca”) sugar mama. The novel’s premise smacks of screwball, but the bleak interior lives of her cast keep comedy on the sidelines. Chapters alternate focus between Charlotte and cashier Rebecca, and in both, we hear how much they hate themselves and watch as myopia blinds them to the needs and experiences of others. Higgins’ prose has moments of evocative wit, such as, “Her voice sounds strained and controlled, like she is giving boarding announcements for a rocket designated to explode for the pleasure of the rich and perverse.” But she allows her characters so many flights of fancy that the line between imagination and reality is blurred, and in some scenes it’s difficult to tell what is actually happening.