Ask a Bookseller

This week, Riley Rennhack of Deep Vellum Books in Dallas, Texas recommends Ann Carson’s classic nonfiction work “Eros, the Bittersweet,” which was republished this summer by Dalkey Archive Press.  The book explores the idea that love is bittersweet and that desire is not about having, but wanting. This, Carson says, is the source of poetry. Reworked from Carson’s 1981 PhD thesis, “Eros, the Bitter...

All September, Ask a Bookseller has featured recommendations for kids, and we wrap up this series with a picture book to get you ready for October. “A Spoonful of Frogs” was written by Casey Lyall and illustrated by Caldecott Honor artist Vera Brosgol. Angela Whited says she’s already read this book at story time at Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul , and the book was a hit with listeners of all ag...

Jennifer Murvin of Pagination Bookshop in Springfield, Missouri loves the YA graphic novel "American Born Chinese" by prolific cartoonist Gene Luen Yang. It was the first graphic novel to be nominated for a National Book Award back in 2006, and just this week Disney released a first look at an 8-episode series based on the novel, starring Michelle Yeoh, among other big-name actors. The series will...

Think about it: how often do you find a book that has both magical creatures and modern technology? Hannah Amrollahi of The Bookworm in Omaha, Nebraska, has a theory that for kids who've grown up around cell phones and laptops, the presence of technology in a story makes the world seem familiar, even if that world happens to include mermaids, yetis and weredragons. That's part of what she loves ab...

All this month, to celebrate the start of school, Ask a Bookseller will focus on great reads for kids and teens. Sara Groves of Longfellow Books in Portland, Maine, recommends "The Civil War of Amos Abernathy," a middle grades novel by debut author Michael Leali. Here's the story: 13-year-old Amos is a volunteer at a living history museum, but lately he's noticed that he and his friends aren't ref...

This feature was originally published on June 3, 2022. Ginger Kautz of Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, North Carolina recommends Joseph Han’s debut novel “Nuclear Family,” which comes out Tuesday, June 7. Kautz calls the stylistically innovative novel “part family drama, part ghost story, part coming-of-age and critique of American imperialism in the Pacific.”   The story is set in 2018, during the...

Sarah Brown of Zenith Bookstore in Duluth recommends that fans of literary fiction, mystery, and noir search out the work of Dorothy Hughes, whose crime novels were mostly published in the 1940s and early 50s. After falling out of print, her work has seen a resurgence in recent years. Hughes published 14 crime and detective novels, and she also worked as a professional crime-fiction reviewer, so s...

Angie Tally of The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines, N.C., has been on the lookout for interesting books that aren’t teen coming-of-age stories nor end-of-life remembrances but have protagonists who are in the middle of life. One of her favorite examples comes from an often genre-defying North Carolina author: T. Kingfisher. Tally describes her novel “Nettle and Bone” as “a deeply satisfying and...

Angela Kircher of River Lights Bookstore in Dubuque, Iowa, loved immersing herself in the New York book industry world in Emily Henry's latest romance, "Book Lovers." It's a plot that sounds like a Hallmark movie, but the narrator handles it with a knowing wink and a nod, both celebrating and challenges the tropes of romance. When they first meet in New York, editor Charlie and literary agent Nora...

Bookseller Jason Hong didn't expect to like "Little Rabbit" by Alyssa Songsiridej as much as he did, and now he’s a fan. When he recommends the novel at Yu and Me Books in New York City , he tells people the novel is "ultimately about sex, power, and female desire." The main character, referred to as Rabbit, is a 30-something Asian-American writer who finds herself igniting a relationship with a c...

Jean Anne Pugh of Four Seasons Books in Shepardstown , West Virginia, just loves the title of Elena Ferrante’s novel, “The Lying Life of Adults.” Like Ferrante’s famed Neapolitan novels, this one is set in Naples and translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein. Pugh calls the novel an excellent portrait of a teenager “in conflict with her culture and her family.” The story is set in ‘90s Naples, a ci...

Part of the fun of the Ask a Bookseller series is getting the local scoop from bookstores across the country. Heather Gudenkauf is both a New York Times Bestselling Novelist and a local favorite at the River Lights Bookstore in Dubuque, Iowa. Gudenkauf worked for years in the Dubuque school system. River Lights bookseller Angela Kircher heartily recommends Gudenkauf’s newest thriller/mystery, “ Th...

Jennifer Jubenville of the Bookstore at Fitger’s in Duluth says there’s nothing like a good thriller for a summer read, and she recommends checking out Joshua Moehling’s debut, “And There He Kept Her.” There are familiar elements to this thriller: A small (fictional) Minnesota town. A sheriff’s deputy who has left police work in Minneapolis due to personal tragedy, seeking a quieter life — only to...

Brooklyn Lindsey of Crash Books in Lakeland, Florida calls “This is How You Lose the Time War” a time-traveling love letter. The novel by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone follows a series of letters exchanged between Red and Blue, who are on opposite sides of a massive time war. Part of what makes this star-crossed-lovers novel interesting, Brooklyn says, is that the authors take care not to place...

Jenny Chou of Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee, Wis., recommends the new YA novel “See You Yesterday” by Rachel Lynn Solomon, which came out May 17. Barrett Bloom is a freshman in college having a terrible day. She shows up at her Physics 101 class only to be put on the spot in front of everyone for no reason by her unbearably annoying classmate, Miles. She’s never even seen him before! Or has sh...

Mika Tuzon of Scrawl Books in Reston, Virginia recommends the novel “Brown Girls” by Daphne Palasi Andreades. Tuzon says two aspects of this debut novel made it stand out as unique. First was the form: it's told in a series of vignettes and written in the first-person plural, which means the women in this novel speak together as "we," like a modern chorus. Second, all of the narrators are women of...

Alden Graves of Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vt., recommends " Vigil Harbor ," a new novel by National Book Award winner Julia Glass. The environment and climate change are key elements of this novel set in the near-future. Vigil Harbor is a former working-class fishing village on the Massachusetts coast that has been "transformed by the magic wand of prosperity into an upscale haven...

Saturday, April 30, was National Independent Bookstore Day. Many bookstores across the state and the country offered events or specials in-person or online. Katy Herbold of Sidekick Coffee & Books in Iowa City, Iowa, took a few moments out of her bookstore's preparations for the special day to recommend the novel “The Ogress and the Orphans” by Minneapolis writer Kelly Barnhill. Herbold called...

How do you make sure the person you met through a matchmaking app is who they say they are? In Jane Pek's novel "The Verifiers," you'd hire an amateur detective like protagonist Claudia Lin to do a little digging. Pek's novel is this week's book recommendation from Angela Schwesnedl of Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis. Lin's family doesn't know what she does for work. They don't know she's queer,...

Emily Crowe of "An Unlikely Story" in Plainville, Massachusetts was excited to recommend the novel "Lessons in Chemistry" by Bonnie Garmus. The novel by the debut author in her 60s launched this week to great fanfare. Apple TV+ has already optioned the rights to turn the book into a TV series that will star Brie Larson. "If you can imagine Julia Child channeling a little bit of Lucille Ball, and a...

If you like the energy and ambition of the musical "Hamilton," Lelia Nebeker of One More Page Books in Arlington, Va., recommends you check out the novel “Island Queen” by Vanessa Riley. The novel is based on the life of entrepreneur Dorothy Kerwin Thomas (1756 – 1846), who was born into slavery in Montserrat and who rose to become a wealthy, powerful landowner in the West Indies. Written in Thoma...

Sometimes setting a novel in a different time or place gives an author permission to reflect our contemporary world in a new way. That’s the case for journalist-turned-author Omar El Akkad’s first novel “American War.” Published in 2017, the novel is a go-to recommendation for Claire Margetts of Weller Book Works in Salt Lake City, Utah, even though — or perhaps because — it made her sob at the en...

We're continuing our Women's History Month theme on "Ask a Bookseller." This week, Jessica Bohnsack of Sheridan Stationery Books and Gallery in Sheridan, Wyo., was happy to recommend a historical fiction novel set in her state: "One for the Blackbird and One for the Crow" by Olivia Hawker. Conditions are harsh on the plains of Wyoming in 1876, and the Bemis and Webber families couldn't be more iso...

Have you ever had a book call to you from the shelf? Emily Peterson of Page 42 Bookstore in Spokane, Wash., says she kept being drawn to the novel "The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek," noticing the cover, reading the back until she finally took it home to read. Then, she could hardly put it down. The historical fiction novel by Kim Michele Richardson is set during the Great Depression in rural Ke...

Sarah Brown of Zenith Bookstore in Duluth has a revisionist history to recommend. " Civilizations: a Novel ," by Laurent Binet, asks: What if colonizers had traveled to Europe rather than the other way around? Binet, who is French, creates a novel in which the Inca emperor Atahualpa crosses the Atlantic to Portugal in the early 1500s. In Europe, he finds a downtrodden peasant class, plague, power...