"The Moys of New York and Shanghai"

New from the University of California Press: The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family's Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution by Charlotte Brooks.

About the book, from the publisher:

The most extraordinary family you’ve never heard of.

Born to Chinese immigrant parents, the Moy siblings grew up in an America that questioned their citizenship and denied their equality. Sophisticated and self-consciously modern, they challenged limitations and stereotypes in the United States and sought new opportunities in China’s tumultuous republic. Sometimes the risks they took paid off, but their occasional recklessness also led to infidelity, divorce, bankruptcy, and worse. Those in China faced pressure to collaborate with Japanese occupiers, making choices that had serious consequences for their siblings in the United States.

Charlotte Brooks’s gripping tale follows the family back and forth across the Pacific and through two world wars, China’s Nationalist and Communist revolutions, and the Cold War—events that the siblings and their spouses helped shape. The Moys’ incredible story offers a kaleidoscopic view of an entire generation’s struggle for acceptance and belonging.

The Page 99 Test: Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Love Is an Algorithm"

New from Park Row Books: Love Is an Algorithm: A Novel by Laura Brooke Robson.

About the book, from the publisher:

Take the uncertainty out of love with Pattern, it's more than just a dating app!

Eve wants to make music that's fueled by love, passion, and rage (feelings!). She trusts her gut and her friends and in no way wants to rely on technology, let alone AI, to tell her how she feels. Danny is anxious—about his dad, his dating life, his coffee order (why is it twelve dollars?), and about the dating app he helped create, which seems determined to serve him terrible matches.

When Eve and Danny start dating, it feels like the solution to all of Danny’s worries—except when it doesn’t. Is she happy? Should he be doing more? Or less? This becomes the catalyst for a revolutionary new version of Danny’s app that promises to quantify relationship health and potential, helping users understand what's really going on. Problem solved!

As Pattern and Bug, the ever—so—friendly AI assistant, catch fire, users everywhere begin outsourcing major life decisions to Danny’s algorithms. But as Danny reckons with his newfound success, Eve—whose career relies on her ability to write her emotions into song—grows increasingly skeptical of the app’s impact on genuine connection. Their relationship becomes the ultimate modern experiment: How do you fall and stay in love in the digital age?

Visit Laura Brooke Robson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reluctant Abolitionists"

New from Cambridge University Press: Reluctant Abolitionists: Britain and the End of the Colonial Death Penalty by James M. Campbell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Britain abolished the death penalty for murder in 1965, but many of Britain's last colonies retained capital murder laws until the 1990s. In this book, James M. Campbell presents the first history of the death sentences imposed under British colonial rule in the late twentieth century; the decision-making processes that determined if condemned prisoners lived or died; and the diverse paths to death penalty abolition across the empire. Based on a rich archive of recently released government records, as well as legislative debates, court papers, newspapers and autobiographies, Reluctant Abolitionists examines connections between the death penalty, British politics, decolonisation and the rise of international abolitionist movements. Through analysis of murder trials, clemency appeals, executions and legal reforms across more than 30 British colonies, it reveals the limits of British opposition to the death penalty and the enduring connections between capital punishment and empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Quarter Queen"

New from Ballantine Books: The Quarter Queen: A Novel by Kayla Hardy.

About the book, from the publisher:

A Voodoo witch must navigate a magically and racially divided nineteenth-century New Orleans to save her mother—and the soul of the city itself—in this lush debut novel inspired by the life of Marie Laveau.

In 1843 New Orleans, the reigning Voodoo queen is Marie Laveau, feared by her enemies and followers alike. Her daughter, Marie "Ree" Laveau the Second, is everything her cutthroat and principled mother is not—spoiled and entitled, with a wickedly rebellious streak—and defies her mother at every turn. But Ree’s world is turned upside down when she finds Marie comatose in the bayou, cursed by exiled Voodoo king Jon the Conjurer—Marie’s former teacher, lover, and greatest enemy.

As Marie hovers on the brink of death, Ree races to uncover the secrets of her mother’s life in search of a cure and gradually uncovers a web of alliances, dangers, and deception. What’s worse, Henryk Broussard, Ree’s long-missing childhood best friend, returns as a witch hunter of the Church, tasked with investigating her. With so many enemies circling, including a puritanical-minded Brotherhood of alchemists and the slave-holding mayor of the city, Ree must confront the past and face her mother’s demons that have now become her own—or die trying.

Told in alternating timelines between Ree in the present and Marie’s rise to power twenty-five years earlier, The Quarter Queen is an intimate yet epic portrait of a mother and daughter who have struggled all their lives to understand one another, and a captivating exploration of racism, family, and womanhood.

Visit Kayla Hardy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Instrumental Indians"

New from University of Pennsylvania Press: Instrumental Indians: John Dewey and Indigenous Schools by Matthew Villeneuve.

About the book, from the publisher:

An examination of how settler colonialism shaped the thinking of America’s leading philosopher of democracy and education, John Dewey

John Dewey is regarded as a towering figure in the history of American philosophy, widely remembered by educators as an advocate for experiential and child-centered pedagogy, as evidenced by the mantra “learning by doing.” At first blush, such ideas appear to a share strong resonance with Indigenous ways of teaching and learning. After all, Native educators have long emphasized the importance of hands-on learning drawn from close relationships to place. This resemblance begs the question: What might Dewey have learned from Indigenous people?

Instrumental Indians shows that, despite such affinities, Dewey wrote a great deal about Indians as he imagined them rather than as they are. He did so through the lens of the frontier discourse, a pervasive cultural mythology that represented Indigenous people as savage foils and background actors in the settlement of a frontier across North America. Consequently, Dewey’s imagined Indians became both instrumental and instrumentalized in his philosophy, a paradox that reduced Indigenous people to mere evidence for his pragmatism rather than as a contemporary constituency who might have benefited from its application. By instrumentalizing Indians, Dewey’s contributions to American philosophy were made under the shadow of US settler colonialism.

As Matthew Villeneuve demonstrates, Dewey’s disregard for his Indigenous contemporaries was far from harmless. His career coincided with the height of the federal Indian boarding school system, an era when Native families were subjected to the violence of imposed schooling. Where Dewey failed to offer a critique of such antidemocratic schools, a contemporary of his, Oneida philosopher of education Laura Cornelius, succeeded. In 1920, Cornelius offered an Indigenous theory of democracy and education, an alternative the US government failed to pursue. In Instrumental Indians, Villeneuve provides the first comprehensive account of Dewey’s relationship to Indigenous people―one that challenges the philosopher’s place in the canon of democratic education.

Visit Matt Villeneuve's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Wilderness Hacks"

New from Knopf Books for Young Readers: Wilderness Hacks by Joslin Brorsen.

About the book, from the publisher:

Hatchet meets Survivor in this high-action, humor-filled middle grade adventure about two kids stranded in the wilderness, whose annoyance with each other rivals the roaring rapids and ferocious predators they must face.

12-year-old Sadie Hahn didn’t plan to eat grubs on camera to win a contest. And she definitely didn’t plan to win first prize—a guest appearance on a Youtube show hosted by America’s favorite 13-year-old survivalist Radley Shaw. But she’ll do anything to cheer up her little brother Silas, who’s too young to qualify.

Rad has millions of followers and exactly zero real-life friends, so the contest is a great chance for him to hang out with kids his own age. But it’s hate-at-first-sight when Silas throws a wrench in his plan and Sadie decides Rad is just a clueless poser who doesn’t know the first thing about survival.

Disaster strikes when their scripted rafting trip turns into a real fight for survival. Lost in the mountains, Rad and Sadie must find shelter, build a fire, forage for food and try not to become food for a hungry predator. But can they stop bickering long enough to hack it in the wilderness? And will that be enough to keep them alive?

Visit Joslin Brorsen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Economy of Anonymity"

New from Stanford University Press: The Economy of Anonymity: Power in the Age of Identification by Hector Amaya.

About the book, from the publisher:

We use avatars to play videogames. We use pseudonyms on social media. We use VPNs to mask our identities and activities. In the digital realm, anonymity is everywhere, a persistent option for those who wish to hide, experiment, and deceive. But we are anonymous in more contexts than the digital. In urban settings, we routinely experience the anonymity of the crowd, and routinely use anonymity to participate in political life and social protests. Anonymity matters. This book is a wager that we can learn much about society, humanity, and power by analyzing the structural tensions and possibilities of anonymity, and by analyzing how the economy of anonymity is changing in a modernity defined by computation. While many have explored the connections between surveillance, datafication, and privacy, relatively little has been done to theorize anonymity and its critical role in our lives. This book rebalances our intellectual investments by expanding our understandings of anonymity. Putting the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and Bernhard Siegert into conversation, Hector Amaya examines the contours of anonymity in different social domains—in relationship to individuals, institutions, and contexts; to epistemology and ontology; and to history and society. As the book shows, anonymity entails paradoxical possibilities—sometimes anonymity is experienced as freedom and other times as powerlessness, or subjugation.

--Marshal Zeringue

"American Han"

New from Algonquin Books: American Han: A Novel by Lisa Lee.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s, Jane Kim and her brother, Kevin, dutifully embodied the model minority myth as their parents demanded: both stellar tennis players and academically gifted, they worked hard to make their parents proud. Jane went on to law school. Kevin came close to becoming a professional tennis player. But where they started is nowhere near where they have ended up: Jane has stopped going to her law school classes, and Kevin, now a policeman, has become increasingly distant. Their parents, each on their own path toward the elusive American Dream (their mother hell-bent on having the perfect house and the perfect family, their father obsessed with working his way up from one successful business to the next), don’t want to see the family unraveling. When Kevin goes missing, no one recognizes his absence as the warning sign it is until it erupts, forcing them all to come to terms with their past and present selves in a country that isn’t all it promised it would be.

Both deeply serious and wickedly funny, American Han is a profound story about striving and assimilation, difficult love, and family fidelity. A searing portrait that challenges assumptions about the immigrant experience, Lisa Lee’s debut introduces a powerful new voice on the literary landscape.

Visit Lisa Lee's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Darkology"

New from Liveright: Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment by Rhae Lynn Barnes.

About the book, from the publisher:

A groundbreaking history, decades in the making, that chronicles how blackface dominated American society culturally, financially, and racially for nearly two centuries.

Never before has the disturbing story of blackface and its piercing reflection of American society been so comprehensively told. With Darkology, Princeton historian Rhae Lynn Barnes meticulously unravels the complex, subterranean, and all-too-often expunged history of “Darkology”―the insidious study, commodification, and dehumanization of Black life, through which performers caricatured the enslaved and formerly enslaved for their supposed subservience and happy demeanor.

Given the extraordinary research reflected in Darkology, it’s not surprising that Barnes spent twenty years tracking down “fading photographs, old movies, bureaucratic detritus, moldy scripts, and living witnesses, assembling an impressive archive that allowed her to demonstrate the astonishingly broad reach of blackface minstrelsy” (Laurel Thatcher Ulrich). Painstakingly piecing together these scattered shards of evidence, Barnes reveals the shocking extent to which blackface took center stage in every era of American history.

This was not a fringe activity. By 1830, as political resistance to slavery grew, blackface exploded from a niche performance into a venomous national export. Within a decade, hardly a theater in the country didn’t put on minstrel shows. Following the Civil War, this grotesque entertainment soared, seeping from professional theaters into everyday amateur shows, print, and advertisements. It was everywhere: Elks Clubs, religious institutions, battlefields, universities, and schools. It wasn’t just in the Jim Crow era; it defined it. The very name “Jim Crow” derives from minstrelsy’s founding character.

Darkology dismantles the myth that blackface was a fleeting, post–Civil War phenomenon. Even in eras known for liberal progressivism, it flourished. Barnes unearths the startling fact that four-term president Franklin D. Roosevelt was a devotee who died hours before a blackface show he had commissioned at Warm Springs. It permeated U.S. military bases and was even used in World War II Japanese American concentration camps and German POW camps as a bizarre tool of “Americanization.”

After WWII, the tide began to turn as Black veterans and mothers in places like suburban California protested the practice in schools. Still, blackface performances proved resilient, surfacing as late as 1969 at the University of Vermont. Even as the Civil Rights movement fought for equality, blackface remained present in American politics and white supremacist organizing through the Nixon and Ford administrations, its legacy still percolating in variable forms today.

By tracing minstrelsy’s evolution through oral histories, material culture, and a wide range of multimedia sources, Barnes’s “masterpiece” (David Blight) forces us to reckon with the myriad ways the American Dream wore blackface. Recasting this American story with “vivid and engaging storytelling” (Howard French), Darkology is a landmark work that peers beneath the boulders deliberately obscuring our past―illuminating a path toward a more just and equal society in America’s future.

--Marshal Zeringue

"If Books Could Kill"

New from Kensington: If Books Could Kill (Tomes & Tea Mystery #3) by Karen Rose Smith.

About the novel, from the publisher:

Daisy Swanson’s daughter Jazzi has moved away to the lakeside town of Belltower Landing, but the apple doesn’t fall from the tree. Much like Daisy, she’s running a tea bar and bookshop––and has a knack for getting into hot water…

Town librarian Mathilda has a troublesome new emplROSEoyee, and after Jazzi spots the two of them arguing at the ice-sculpture festival, Mathilda asks Jazzi if she’d mind discussing her workplace woes over a cup of tea. During the visit, Jazzi also finds out about Mathilda’s top-secret stash of valuable first editions.

Soon afterward, those rare books have vanished—and Mathilda is dead. As the police check out suspects and a lawyer searches for the next of kin, Jazzi learns that the librarian’s life was as mysterious as any crime thriller. She’d left home and changed her name as a teenager, and always seemed a little lonely. Oddly, it’s her new employee who seems the most distraught.

It’s the off-season, so the upstate New York town is free of the usual swarm of tourists—but the quiet doesn’t last long. The press is descending as the murder makes national news, and rumors start circulating. With Belltower Landing steeped in suspicion, Jazzi must figure out whether the first editions were the real motive for sending Mathilda to her final resting place…

Visit Karen Rose Smith's website, Facebook page, and Instagram page.

Coffee with a Canine: Karen Rose Smith & Hope and Riley.

The Page 69 Test: Staged to Death.

The Page 69 Test: Murder with Lemon Tea Cakes.

The Page 69 Test: Murder Marks the Page.

The Page 69 Test: Booked for Revenge.

--Marshal Zeringue