Book Reviews

By Sunyi Dean
5/5/26
320 pages
$29.99
Tor Publishing

‘The Girl With A Thousand Faces’

Sunyi Dean already had me locked into her twisted narratives with “The Book Eaters” and her endlessly inventive sentences, but this one hit differently. It is set in Kowloon in 1970s Hong Kong, one of the most fascinating places in human history, and she absolutely uses that setting. Every back alley and stacked-high corridor feels alive, grimy and slightly threatening.

Mercy Chan is a ghost talker working for the local triad. Having pieced together a life from a blank slate, she washed up on shore with no past and no memories. Still, she built something out of nothing until a malevolent spirit starts to make everything difficult. What follows is part gothic mystery, part war story, part meditation on grief and generational trauma told in a dizzying series of narratives and nightmares.

Ghosts, spirit cats and monsters are one thing, but what really sealed this for me was the human horror underpinning it all. The Japanese occupation, the things families carry and bury and pass down without meaning to. This is a story about women who will not forgive and women who remember everything, whether they want to or not. ♦ — Review by Julie Goodrich

By Stephen Brusatte
4/28/26
448 pages
$35
Mariner Books

‘The Story of Birds: A New History from Their Dinosaur Origins to the Present’

Stephen Brusatte is the paleontologist behind several brilliant popular science books that I have adored over the last decade. He has this gift for making deep time feel visceral and immediate and absolutely enthralling. He traces birds across 150 million years of history, from small feathered theropods all the way to hummingbirds hovering at your feeder, and somehow it never once feels like a textbook. It feels like a friend who just got back from the Cretaceous and cannot wait to tell you everything.

And the creatures. Oh, the creatures. Penguin-sized gorillas. Elephant birds with eggs the size of watermelons. Demon ducks that are heavier than cows. Science is so strange and so wonderous, and Brusatte just leans all the way in. I love that his enthusiasm just leaps off the page.

My favorite part of books that teach facts and wonder in equal measure is how they inevitably force me to see the world differently. There is always an extra glow for me when I know more about something, and these days the robins and the finches are even more special. I highly recommend this for anyone looking for some awe. ♦ — Review by Julie Goodrich