A writing group is more than the sum of everyone in it. You share manuscripts at various stages of progress. Some fall by the wayside, others make it to completion. You celebrate successes and commiserate over the inevitable disappointments. You get to know one another and develop shorthands of communication that no one else understands. And every once in a while, you get to witness a story idea that the writer knows has arrived as a gift in her life and you are lucky that you are going to run alongside as she develops it.

Here’s one of those projects: Books Up the Mountain, a picture book by my friend and colleague Caroline Starr Rose, illustrated by Gabrielle Grimard. And here’s Caroline, e-chatting with me about the book.

An attempted murder at a large, noisy, unwieldy Indian American family reunion in New Jersey forms the inciting incident in Dinesh Thiru’s YA comedy-mystery, or maybe it’s a mystery-comedy—My Killer Family Reunion. When a rich and cantankerous woman like Grand Mom gets knocked down by a car, what’s not to be suspicious about? Because wasn’t she really knocked down by her nephew in order to get her out of the way of said speeding car, and if that’s the case, why did he have to push her down so hard that she suffered a severe concussion?

I thought I’d made peace with the writing demons of insecurity by acknowledging them and expecting to encounter them in the process of writing every single book. Then a recent review knocked me off my wise-woman pedestal.

Towards the end of last year, a time that seems now like an eon ago, I wrote about the oddities of a 1996 children’s book from GM, no less, that aimed to push—really!—an American electric car.

With little fanfare, electric cars had begun to appear on California’s roads. They were tested on select groups nationwide. They were quiet. They emitted no fumes. Their drivers loved them. Yet ten years later they were all gone. It would take another two decades for the EV to reappear as a viable, if partial and imperfect, way to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. A 2006 documentary asks, why should we be haunted by the ghost of the electric car? Why, indeed?

In similar vein, The White House Effect (2024), directed by Pedro Kos, Jon Shenk, and Bonni Cohen, is a thoughtful, often unsettling look at a moment when political leadership had an opportunity to change the trajectory of global warming. Policy windows were open. Scientific consensus that global warming was real and human-caused was solidifying. And yet, here we are today.

I’ve always been fascinated by doors. I’m even trying to use one as a portal in a novel that is, I’m sad to say, currently refusing to bend to my will.

This door. with its brass crossbar latch and its loop for a dangling padlock, used to hang in my grandparents’ house in south India. When the house was sold, my parents moved the door to a new house they were building in a different city. As a result, I have this sense of doors being more than stationary objects that let people in and out. Also who can forget the doors on the spaceship Heart of Gold in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? (The humble one remains my favourite.)

Electric Birds of Pothakudi is a picture book based on the true story of a villager in south India who took extraordinary action to protect a pair of nesting birds. It’s a strikingly illustrated book, in a bold mix of manual and digital work, with a palette that ranges from brooding to brilliant. I’m continuing my conversation with author Karthika Naïr, and also, I’m happy to add, looping in illustrator Joëlle Jolivet. Karthika kindly sent me several page scans scans from the French edition of the book, which I’m happy to include here as well. It’s always wonderful when a book finds expression in more than one language.

I was a part-time cashier in a rare-books store when I died…

That’s the funny, idiosyncratic voice of the first-person narrator in Cry by Alisa Valdés. Altagracia Martínez (known as Grace) is a 16-year old bisexual goth filmmaker in Austin, Texas. She’s also battling internal demons, on account of having lost her own mother to suicide two years before the story begins. Grace isn’t wild about the “stenchmother” who is her father’s new wife, so there’s plenty of conflict brewing.

Electric Birds of Pothakudi is a picture book based on the true story of a villager in south India who took extraordinary action to protect a pair of nesting birds. The book is an ode to its rural setting as well as to an act of compassion and really, you can’t disentangle the two. The titular birds (oriental magpie robins for all you English-speaking birders), are known in the region as vannathikuruvi. The name derives from the Tamil word for a person who washes clothes on a riverbank or lakeshore, as flocks of these passerine birds are seen in such places. Bird names in southern India are not only colloquial but utterly embedded in the landscape and somehow this story manages to capture that essence.

Seventeen-year-old Lexa Donovan’s timid, plus-size life goes sideways when the spirit of Marilyn Monroe takes up residence in her body in this laugh-out-loud funny paranormal YA tale perfect for fans of Lisa Schroeder and Ashley Poston.

That’s from the publisher description of Mima Tipper’s new YA novel, Channeling Marilyn, featuring none other than the ghostly presence of—ta da!—Marilyn Monroe. Wish you’d thought of that, right?

The star who became an icon, who wowed generations, turns up to aid a girl whose longings are matched only by her own self-doubt. How on earth can Lexa manage to pull off a role famously played by the goddess of the silver screen herself?

Mima Tipper spools out a charming, funny storyline ahead of her engaging character. It’s replete with obstacles. There’s a crush. There’s a little bit of a triangle. There’s fear. There’s stage-fright. And then Marilyn, wouldn't you know, starts reaching beyond her role of resident mentor and coach. And under it all is a layer of loss and grieving.

Here’s Mima to give us a curious, unexpected perspective on writing this book—its dedication:

Nettle by UK writer Bex Hogan (“a Cornish girl at heart”) is the first book in the Faery Realms series. As Nettle stumbles into a parallel world, placing her grandmother in grave danger, she’s taken captive by a malevolent faery king and given impossible tasks to complete. If this is reminiscent of fairy tale tropes that resemblance comes from both influence and intent.

Even while Nettle’s untangling relationships of the heart, she finds out who she is and how she became trapped in her circumstances—and what, in the end, she cares about. The prose spools out in a clear first person, past tense narrative, the protagonist’s perspective revealing the story and its setting in well-paced sequence.

Excerpt:

The air was thick with magic, I could practically taste it and I knew that while this place was hauntingly beautiful, it was also undoubtedly dangerous.

In Owl King, we return to that faery world, where the borders between the magical and human worlds are porous yet jealously guarded, power is wielded by flawed characters susceptible to impulse, and matters of the heart can govern the fates of many. Echoes of Scheherazade play through the stories that Lyla tells the titular Owl King, even as her sister Ilsette tries desperately to free her. The nested tales are scattered through the book, some tender and nurturing, others cautionary in nature.

Here’s Bex Hogan herself, reflecting on the influence of fairy tales on writing this book. Welcome, Bex!