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In her lush yet efficient prose, Ursula Le Guin needs less than two hundred pages to create a planet on which Earth refugees have settled, only to make the same mistakes as their forebears. The difference is that some have preserved humanitarian values and are putting them into practice. Victoria…

Jonathan Ferry teaches kids the fundamentals of chess by giving personalities to the pieces. Prunella, a humble little pawn, wishes she was a queen. Norry, a knight, explains how important pawns can be in defending the other characters on the chess board. Nyella, the benevolent queen, demonstrates this principal by…

It is a testament to Shirley Jackson’s talent that she could pack so much power into such a short book. Consuming a mere one hundred forty-six pages (in my edition), she deftly sketches a village, its inhabitants, and a peculiar family with a dark legacy. Merricat Blackwood and her older…

Although this novel is complete in itself, I highly recommend that you first read its predecessor, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Both bring a unique perspective to a subject that has inspired mountains of literature: Nazi Germany. Gretel Fernsby, a 91-year-old widow, lives in an exclusive London apartment building where…

Two cultural advents, health spas and breakfast cereals, get the laugh treatment in The Road to Wellville. Employing detailed research and an astonishingly rich vocabulary, author T. C. Boyle takes us on a tour of Battle Creek, Michigan in 1907, where John Harvey Kellogg battles to rescue his wealthy clients…

What a unique mixture of characters! An elevator inspector who senses mechanical flaws without seeing them. A man who claims to have designed an elevator based on the mechanism’s point of view. Manufacturers warring over documents that could revolutionize or destroy their industry. Not to mention a labor union campaign…

Take away the mermaid, the side-kick ghost, the enterprising ex-orphan, and you’re left with an ordinary detective story. But where’s the fun in that? Things in Jars, Jess Kidd’s third novel, manages to be both horrific and humorous. Set in nineteenth-century London, it’s a tale Charles Dickens would have been…

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a novel of naivete, reminiscent of George Orwell’s Animal Farm or William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. In all three cases, the characters find themselves torn from their routine lives and forced into new situations. The story unfolds through the eyes of nine-year-old…

I can’t imagine a more horrifying story than the true one Daniel Ellsberg unveils in The Doomsday Machine. In this well-documented history of nuclear weapons and American policies governing their use, the author demonstrates that the danger they pose is far greater than most people realize. Ellsberg reaches backward in…

Maybe it’s just a coincidence that Searching for Caleb takes place in the mid-1970s. It was a directionless time in America. President Nixon was forced out of office. The Vietnam War ended in disaster. The nation was politically and ethically disillusioned. Morale was at its lowest point since the Kennedy…