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When Andreas’s parents divorced, he became the focus of a bitter custody battle. As he writes: “By the time my parents were racing to be the first to kidnap me from preschool that June day in 1969—the same day my mother left my father—their life goals were catapulting in wildly opposite directions.” Although his father won in court, Andreas was mainly raised by his mother, who grew up in a Mennonite family but became a radical feminist and Marxist revolutionary. On the run, they lived in dozens of places including a collective farm in Chile and a commune in Berkeley. “Caught between parents, cultures, and ideologies, Andreas’s thoroughly engrossing account of his conflicted upbringing is enriched by excerpts from his mother’s diaries,” said the New York Times, “offering glimpses into the mind of a woman so driven by a desire for social equality that her actions call into question what constitutes quality parenting.”
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What caused the Chicago Cubs’ 108-year World Series drought? According to lore, a curse was put on the team by Billy “Goat” Sianis, a saloon owner who was infuriated that Wrigley Field officials wouldn’t let Murphy, his beloved (but odiferous) pet goat, accompany him to a championship game. Herzog tells the tale in verse:
The Cubbies lost that ball game
and they dropped the next one, as well
In fact, when they lost the World Series
Billy Goat asked, Now who smells?
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In his first novel for teens, Cody follows two seniors at an Ithaca high school for students who are talented but troubled. Embarking on a project to tell their life stories, Levon and Samantha tackle such dark topics as suicide attempts, drug use, and mental illness, coming to understand themselves and grow closer to each other. According to Publisher’s Weekly, Cody “thoughtfully conveys Sam and Levon’s complex mental states, the evolution of their relationship, and their journeys of self-discovery.”
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“Black women, long the backbone of efforts to resist state violence, are insisting that we will no longer only play the role of aggrieved mother, girlfriend, partner, sister, daughter, or invisible organizer,” Ritchie writes, “and demanding recognition that we, too, are targets of police violence.” A scholar, organizer, and attorney specializing in police misconduct cases, Ritchie examines how women of color suffer due to racial profiling, police brutality, and other ills—discussing such infamous cases as that of Sandra Bland, who committed suicide in jail after being arrested during a traffic stop. “Ritchie’s focused study and call to action is an essential work,” Booklist said in a starred review of the book, which features an introduction by civil rights activist Angela Davis.
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As a toddler, Oakes admits in her introduction, she was so enamored of sweets that she once wound up in the ER after eating Christmas lights she’d mistaken for candy. Now an author and model who promotes sustainability in the food and fashion industries, Oakes founded a website for people aiming to cleanse their diets of sugar. Her cookbook offers more than a hundred recipes that, she writes, “are familiar, intuitive, easy, and non-fussy, and they contain ingredients that are affordable and readily available to most of us.” Dishes include coconut pancakes; sautéed Brussels sprouts with chorizo; scrambled eggs with kale and crimini mushrooms; and coconut and lemongrass shrimp soup with crispy gingered kale. The book also includes a ten-step detox plan, a “food addiction scale” developed at Yale, and a rundown of the many names for sugar that appear on ingredient lists.
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Moren, a tech journalist and former editor at Macworld, sets his first sci-fi novel—which Booklist praised as “a great spy story”—during a galactic cold war between two superpowers. His heroes are an unlikely pair: a superspy and a washed-up pilot turned janitor who team up to prevent their mutual enemy from using a top-secret mega-weapon to tip the war’s balance of power. “From space, Caledonia was a subtle patchwork of different shades of brown, from the almost gray of its ore-laden mountains to the rust brown, dried blood color of its scrublands,” Moren writes. “But the dark blue-green of its seas broke the monotony, lending just enough color to turn it into something more than a clod of dirt: an entire world.”
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