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World children’s books of the year: a report.

The ALA isn’t the only organization that rewards excellence in children’s books! Since 2014, WORLD News Group has recognized outstanding literature for kids in its annual children’s book issue, published in print and online each February. Throughout the year, selection committees for picture books, middle-grade fiction, and nonfiction read and evaluate as many notable books as we can. (Full disclosure: I serve on two of those committees and chair one of them.) In December, we winnow our nominations down to a shortlist of 10-12 titles, then spend the month of January catching up and rereading. Selections are made at the end of January after some debating and eliminating. The winners in each category are almost always unanimous choices—that was certainly true this year.

So now it can be told: the online edition of the WORLD children’s book section went live yesterday. In the picture-book category, the winner is

Saving the Countryside: The Story of Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit by Linda Elovitz Marshall

Runners-up in this category are

• Playing Possum by Jennifer Reinhardt
• One Little Bag: An Amazing Journey by Henry Cole
• Beautiful Shades of Brown by Nancy Churnin
• Where Is Wisdom? by Scott James

Redeemed Reader has reviewed Saving the Countryside although we haven’t reviewed any of the runners up. Be sure to check out the summaries and recommendations on the WORLD website: “ Beatrix and Her Books .”

This year, the nonfiction committee did not settle on a “Book of the Year,” but rather chose five outstanding examples of in the fields of science/tech, true adventure, memoir, biography, and history. They are

• How We Got to the Moon: The People, Technology, and Daring Feats of Science behind Humanity’s Greatest Adventure by John Rocco (This was the committee’s favorite.)
• All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys’ Soccer Team by Christina Soontornvat
• On the Horizon: World War II Reflections by Lois Lowry
• Through the Wardrobe: How C.S. Lewis Created Narnia by Lina Maslo
• When Stars Are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohammed

Follow the links above to go to our Redeemed Reader reviews. Here’s the short version wrap-up at WORLD: “ Notable Nonfiction .”

Finally, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story) by Daniel Nayeri was the unanimous choice for Children’s Book of the Year. At Redeemed Reader, we’ve reviewed it, talked about it , and interviewed the author . But we also love these runners-up:

• Here in the Real World by Sara Pennypacker (All six committee members voted for this one.)
• Prairie Lotus by Linda Sue Park
• Leaving Lymon by Lesa Ransome
• Things Seen from Above by Shelley Pearsall

Read the article, “ Culture Clash ” at wng.org.

There’s plenty of bad news in the children’s publishing industry, but every year we’re surprised at the number of excellent books we get to choose from. Perhaps we shouldn’t be; no matter how bleak the cultural scene, God’s common grace is always at work, and we’re grateful.

Also at Redeemed Reader

• What were some other top choices for WORLD Books of the Year? Andrew Peterson’s The Warden and the Wolf King was the very first. Others were Circus Mirandus by Cassie Beasley, The Secret Keepers by Trenton Lee Stewart, and Ugly: a Memoir by Robert Hoge.

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So glad I came across this! I really appreciate WORLD magazine and have enjoyed Janie’s columns for years. I trust your reviews

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Jack & Walter in New House Nerves by Paulette Hallam and Charlotte Moerman

The Valley's Secret ISBN 9781035856909 by JJ Somers

Gracious Nature: Poems on Earth and Life by Robert Tiess

Losing My Religion by Jide Familoni

From Darkness to Sunrise: One Man's Natural Epiphany by Theodore G Obenchain

The Chronos Resurgence: Echoes Of Time by James "JimDandy" Dennis

Following the Light: A Guide in Practical Theology by REV Kenneth D Klaman

AWE: A technothriller by Pierre R. Schwob

Once Upon a Time in Baltimore by Sally DiPaula

Exchange Student by Michael R. Lane

The Rochdale Yeast by Rik de Mora

Starship-101 by David Moore

The Dandelion’s Dream by Scott Metcalf

The Bunny who Loved Bocce by William Russell Miller

The Best Way to Make Money by Mohammed Albader

The Rat Cage by Lynette Clarke

Bear Brothers and The Bees by Declan Finan

I'm History...but do I repeat myself? by Lee Knapp

The Book of Souls by Kevin Moore

Collective Vengeance by Joseph Stanley

The Watsons of Tethertown by Mary Hopkins Moore

Murder by Conceit by Steve Graybill

The Desert Saint: A Maria Varela Mystery by A.M. Pascarella

The Gifted Society by Tatiana White

The 7 Pillars of Successful Caregiving by Dr. Eboni Green

It's Raining Gnats and Hogs by Robert Michael Miller

Columbus, Slave Trader by Marcus Wilson

Positive Thinking as a Way of Life by Louise Pearce

The God Squad: Thunder and Pomp by Devan Deyerin

An American Abduction: Is It Fiction Or Is It Happening? by James A. Johnson

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Book Reviews

Sparrow massacres and Cuban vaccines: Books in Brief

Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks.

• Andrew Robinson

How white supremacy became a global health problem

Racism is a systemic issue — one that we have the knowledge and tools to solve. But is there a will?

• Sirry Alang

Tackling ‘wicked’ problems calls for engineers with social responsibility

Many technologies are high-risk, and their problems cannot be fixed by policy alone; engineers must embrace social responsibility.

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The global economy’s 200-year growth spurt — and what comes next

Can an unlimited supply of innovations and ideas maintain growth without costing the Earth? Yes, a wide-ranging book contends.

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Dumping, pillaging and slavery — why exploitation of the high seas must end

It’s time to sustainably manage the international ocean for marine and human life, says bold investigative book.

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Recycled sewage, public health and the memory of the world: Books in brief

How men evolved to care for babies — before society got in the way

An exploration of the evolution of male nurturing shows why, unlike fathers among other great apes, human dads are biologically wired to be hands-on parents.

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How rich is too rich?

Where should society draw the line on extreme wealth? A fresh account sets out the logic and suggests how to redress inequality.

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From multiverses to cities: Books in brief

Smarty plants? Controversial plant-intelligence studies explored in new book

A deep dive into plant behaviour and consciousness asks why the topic has been taboo for so long, and whether botanists are changing their minds about plants’ cognitive abilities.

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How volcanoes shaped our planet — and why we need to be ready for the next big eruption

The world should learn from past disasters and prepare for the effects of future, inevitable volcanic catastrophes, a wide-reaching book teaches us.

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Are women in research being led up the garden path?

A moving memoir of botany and motherhood explores the historical pressures on female scientists.

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The comings and goings of ants: how are social skills shaped in an ever-changing world?

A colourful study of the natural history of ants that takes in dry deserts and lush forests aims to show that sociality is shaped by, and changes with, the environment.

• Seirian Sumner

Survival of the nicest: have we got evolution the wrong way round?

How humans, animals and even single-celled organisms cooperate to survive suggests there’s more to life than just competition, argues a cheering study of evolutionary biology.

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Wild women and restoring public trust: Books in brief

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The aspiring astronaut turned theoretical physicist talks travelling, the accelerating expansion of the Universe, thinking beyond three dimensions and detecting gravitational waves.

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The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?

The evidence is equivocal on whether screen time is to blame for rising levels of teen depression and anxiety — and rising hysteria could distract us from tackling the real causes.

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As private firms aim for the Moon and beyond, a book calls for an urgent relook at the legal compact that governs space exploration.

• Timiebi Aganaba

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Surrealism's Influence

A lthough ​ André Breton wasn’t the first to use the term ‘surrealism’, he made it his own with his first Manifesto in 1924. There he defined the fledgling movement as a ‘quest’ to discover ‘the marvellous’ in the mundane and to work towards the ‘future resolution’ of dreaming and waking. While this lofty goal was new enough, the...

In the end a lot of Surrealism suffers from the scripting of manifest content with latent meaning: the artist encodes, the viewer decodes, and the old machinery of symbolic interpretation turns over, only now with a homemade version of psychoanalysis, rather than the Bible or the classics, as the iconographic key.

Adorno's Aesthetics

Owen hatherley.

A dorno ​ is easily parodied. Photos on social media show him frog-like, myopic and bald, denouncing the willing consumption of dross, the personal embodiment of a refusal to ‘let people enjoy things’. Another meme features Reverend Lovejoy from The Simpsons derisively brandishing a copy of Minima Moralia : ‘You ever sat down and read this thing?’ (In the original,...

Adorno’s aesthetics are extreme. ‘He is an easy man to caricature,’ Ben Watson writes, ‘because he believed in exaggeration as a means of telling the truth.’ He is frequently, and rightly, upbraided for his wildly ignorant essays on jazz, but these are by no means all there is to know about his views on the culture industry.

Desperate v. Stolid

James butler.

If the ITV debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer was exceptional, it was only for its inanity. Two men, neither of them with much stage presence or prone to thinking on their feet, traded prepared barbs and crowbarred in their key messages. Each made sure to name audience members, Janet – or was it Paula? – as an empathetic consolation prize for dodging their actual questions. Be honest about when – or if, or how – we’ll fix the NHS? Not on your life.

Back to Bouillon

Patrick mcguinness.

I was made ​ in the small industrial town of Bouillon, in the Belgian Ardennes, where my mother came from and most of the family still lives. One aunt and uncle lived opposite, another lived forty kilometres away on the Luxembourg border, and our cousins lived next door. My mother was the only one of her siblings or close relatives to leave, but when she did she went far enough away to make up...

In any gentrified area, it’s the local that costs more: the honey from the Camden rooftop, the sausages from three miles away, the micro-brewed beer from Adlestrop. Gentrification sells you back the local it destroyed, but as a fetish object at fetish object prices.

What was the ghetto?

Erin maglaque.

I n his book ​ 16 ottobre 1943 , Giacomo Debenedetti describes the deportation of Rome’s Jews to the death camps. When the soldiers came in the early evening, everyone in the neighbourhood was at home.

The Jews of the Regola quarter were still in the habit of going to sleep early. Shortly after dark they were all in their homes. Perhaps the memory of an ancient curfew is still in their...

Historians argue that the Venetian ghetto was both an open-air prison and a bright spot in the darkness of early modern European antisemitism. The government confined Jews to a ghetto, but did not expel them; they were forced to wear a yellow head-covering, but allowed to worship. The ghetto is both a symbol of persecution and a symbol of tolerance, at least insofar as the attitudes of the time allowed.

Primordial Black Holes

David kaiser.

F or ​ more than fifty years, physicists have been stumped by dark matter. Careful measurement of a range of phenomena, from the motion of enormous clusters of galaxies to the rate at which individual galaxies spin, have indicated that all the stuff astronomers can see – the trillions of stars dotted across the night sky – contributes just a fraction of the total mass of the...

What if dark matter is just ordinary matter locked inside black holes – from which, after all, light cannot escape. Such massive, dark objects would trundle around the cosmos, nudging the motion of visible matter while themselves evading direct detection.

Don’t take our word for it

Subscribe to the  LRB  – perfect for anyone with an interest in history, politics, literature and the arts.

On the ‘Village Voice’

Vivian gornick.

I n the ​ mid- 1960s , the Village Vanguard jazz club in Greenwich Village held Monday night speak-outs. At one of them – an evening billed as ‘Art and Politics’ – the Black poet and playwright LeRoi Jones (soon to become Amiri Baraka) held forth, along with the Black saxophonist Archie Shepp and the white painter Larry Rivers. The audience was composed almost entirely of...

The Village Voice went to press with an invitation to its readers to become its contributors. Forget about being professional writers or journalists, the editors announced. Send us what you find interesting. Write it up persuasively and we’ll publish it.

Keeping Up with the Toynbees

Stefan collini.

H ave Britain ​’s leading intellectuals all been related to one another? While the answer to the question in that bald form is clearly no, a suspicion persists that in the past 150 years a higher proportion of intellectual figures of note in this country have been interconnected by ties of blood and marriage than has been the case elsewhere. It is not easy to turn this suspicion into a...

Have Britain’s leading intellectuals all been related to one another? While the answer to the question in that bald form is clearly no, a suspicion persists that in the past 150 years a higher proportion of intellectual figures of note in this country have been interconnected by ties of blood and marriage than has been the case elsewhere.

Trouble with the Troubles Act

Daniel trilling.

A ndy Seaman ​ felt out of place when, on 26 May 2022, he walked into the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith. Andy has little connection to Ireland; he’s from East London and his family’s roots are in Dominica. But earlier that day he had heard on the radio that the centre was hosting an event run by the organisation Troubles, Tragedy and Trauma. He told me that he felt...

The Troubles Legacy Act has been unilaterally imposed by the UK. Almost everyone hates it. Northern Ireland’s largest political parties all oppose it, though not for entirely the same reasons.

Georgie Newson

O n ​ 23 May , the day after he called a general election, Rishi Sunak said in a radio interview that his government’s flagship Rwanda deportation scheme will only go ahead if the Tories are re-elected on 4 July. This admission came as a surprise: many had assumed that part of the rationale for calling an early election was to get a campaign boost as the flights got underway. For anyone...

One English slang term that has survived from the original Calais jungle is ‘the game’, used to refer to crossing attempts. Without a legal route of entry, refugees focus on reaching a place from where they can progress to the next level, taking ever more extreme risks along the way. The Rwanda scheme was just one more obstacle in the game.

Cuba Speaks

Rachel nolan.

I n ​ 1968, Fidel Castro invited an American anthropologist called Oscar Lewis to interview Cubans about their lives. Lewis was famous for an oral history project, conducted in a Mexico City slum, which he had turned into a book called The Children of Sánchez (1961). By recounting a poor family’s struggles and hustles, legal and otherwise, Lewis angered the country’s ruling...

After its fall, outsiders speculated that the Cuban regime would collapse and the island would transition, quickly or slowly, to capitalism. But then interested countries have always persuaded themselves that revolutionary Cuba would collapse if it came under enough pressure.

Colm Tóibín’s ‘Long Island’

Blake morrison.

N ovelists ​ don’t usually care for screen adaptations of their work. But the film versions of Atonement, The Remains of the Day and The English Patient do no great disservice to the books. And Colm Tóibín wasn’t unhappy with Nick Hornby’s screenplay for Brooklyn , despite two big changes to the ending. In the novel, when the insidious Enniscorthy shopkeeper Miss...

So much in  Long Island  goes unsaid. It’s a world in which people speak knowledgeably (and sometimes bitchily) about others but reveal little of themselves. As well as secrets, there are problems of articulation: stutters and stammers, an inability to express feeling. Whatever you say, you say nothing.

‘In My Life as a Visiting Lecturer I Meet Various and Sundry People or, Another Way to Think of This, Here Are All the Novels I Never Wrote and You Are Welcome to Them’

Anne carson.

Julio Julio likes to ask a good question in a bad way. Do most of your students fall in love with you? He is a recovering addict but he does not see himself as a statistic, here I am quoting. He describes his novel, which is about the 65th Infantry of Puerto Rico. I watch the clothesline out back, bouncing on the wind with its four frozen shirts.

Long Long talks about waking beside a man bleeding...

On the Nightingale

Mary wellesley.

W e walked ​ in the darkness beneath beeches and hornbeams until, suddenly, we heard the sound of birdsong, an ethereal noise, a sound associated with daytime. What bird would sing the song of day two hours after dusk? Only a creature of myth, a night-singer, the nihtegala – from the Old English nihte and galan, to sing, call, enchant .

For thousands of years this night-singer’s song...

The nightingale’s song is punctuated by rich, almost painful pauses. In the silence, one imagines the bird has come to the end of a verse and is considering, with the ease and confidence of a seasoned performer, where to take the song next.

The Shoah after Gaza

Pankaj mishra.

I n ​ 1977, a year before he killed himself, the Austrian writer Jean Améry came across press reports of the systematic torture of Arab prisoners in Israeli prisons. Arrested in Belgium in 1943 while distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets, Améry himself had been brutally tortured by the Gestapo, and then deported to Auschwitz. He managed to survive, but could never look at his torments...

Memories of Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity, and most demands for recognition and reparations, have been built. Universalist reference points are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians, while denouncing as antisemitic or champions of Hamas all those who plead with it to desist.

From the blog

‘the restless one’, marina warner.

A brass ring concealed under a rug lifts to lead to a hidden world; a neglected door behind a curtain open onto a parallel universe; Lewis Carroll’s  . . .

Battle of the Caribbean

Colin douglas.

Connie Mark, who joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service in Jamaica (the women’s branch of the army) remembered the attacks: ‘If a boat  . . .

If the ITV debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer was exceptional, it was only for its inanity. Two men, neither of them with much stage  . . .

Oxford Action for Palestine

Miyo peck-suzuki.

The police have been regular visitors at Oxford’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment since we set it up outside the Pitt Rivers Museum on 6 May. The  . . .

Send Back the Money

Fraser macdonald.

After the 1843 Disruption, when the Free Church of Scotland split from the Church of Scotland, some of its leaders tried to raise money from  . . .

Sunak’s Choice

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Liberation Day in Lebanon

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Last Saturday, 25 May, was Resistance and Liberation Day in Lebanon. It commemorates the date when the south of the country was freed from Israeli  . . .

‘The Last Days of Franz Kafka’

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The coincidence of the centenary of Kafka’s death, on 3 June, and the publication of the first complete, uncensored English translation of  . . .

Forecasting D-Day

The D-Day planners said that everything would depend on the weather. They needed 'a quiet day with not more than moderate winds and seas and not too much cloud for the airmen, to be followed by three more quiet days'. But who would make the forecast? The Meteorological Office? The US Air Force? The Royal Navy? In the event, it was all three. In this diary piece published in 1994, Lawrence...

The D-Day planners said that everything would depend on the weather. They needed 'a quiet day with not more than moderate winds and seas and not too much cloud for the airmen, to be followed by...

On Satire: 'The Dunciad' by Alexander Pope

Clare bucknell and colin burrow.

Nobody hated better than Alexander Pope. Despite his reputation as the quintessentially refined versifier of the early 18th century, he was also a class A, ultra-pure, surreal, visionary mega-hater, and  The Dunciad  is his monument to the hate he felt for almost all the other writers of his time. Written over fifteen years of burning fury, Pope’s mock-epic tells the story of the...

Nobody hated better than Alexander Pope. Despite his reputation as the quintessentially refined versifier of the early 18th century, he was also a class A, ultra-pure, surreal, visionary...

On J.G. Ballard

Edmund gordon and thomas jones.

J.G. Ballard’s life and work contains many incongruities, outraging the  Daily Mail  and being offered a CBE (which he rejected), and variously appealing to both Spielberg and Cronenberg. In a recent piece, Edmund Gordon unpicks the contradictions and contrarianism in Ballard’s non-fiction writing, and he joins Tom to continue the dissection. They explore Ballard’s...

J.G. Ballard’s life and work contains many incongruities, outraging the  Daily Mail  and being offered a CBE (which he rejected), and variously appealing to both Spielberg and...

Lawrence Hogben

The D-Day planners said that everything would hang on the weather. They needed 'a quiet day with not more than moderate winds and seas and not too much cloud for the airmen, to be followed by three more quiet days'. But who would make the forecast? The Meteorological Office? The US Air Force? The Royal Navy? In the event, it was all three. In this diary piece published in 1994, Lawrence...

The D-Day planners said that everything would hang on the weather. They needed 'a quiet day with not more than moderate winds and seas and not too much cloud for the airmen, to be followed by...

Political Poems: 'The Masque of Anarchy' by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Seamus perry and mark ford.

Shelley’s angry, violent poem was written in direct response to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, in which a demonstration in favour of parliamentary reform was attacked by local yeomanry, leaving 18 people dead and hundreds injured. The ‘masque’ it describes begins with a procession of abstract figures – Murder, Fraud, Hypocrisy – embodied in members...

Shelley’s angry, violent poem was written in direct response to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, in which a demonstration in favour of parliamentary reform was attacked by local...

Women in Philosophy

Sophie smith and thomas jones.

The recovery of history’s ‘lost’ women is often associated with the advent of feminism, but, Sophie Smith writes, women’s contributions to Western philosophy have been regularly rediscovered since at least the 14th century. She joins Tom to discuss what we can learn from the women who held their own alongside Plato, Descartes and Hume.Sponsored links:Find out more about...

The recovery of history’s ‘lost’ women is often associated with the advent of feminism, but, Sophie Smith writes, women’s contributions to Western philosophy have been...

Human Conditions: ‘A House for Mr Biswas’ by V.S. Naipaul

Pankaj mishra and adam shatz.

In  A House for Mr Biswas , his 1961 comic masterpiece, V.S. Naipaul pays tribute to his father and the vanishing world of his Trinidadian youth. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz in their first of four episodes to discuss the novel, a pathbreaking work of postcolonial literature and a particularly powerful influence on Pankaj himself. They explore...

In  A House for Mr Biswas , his 1961 comic masterpiece, V.S. Naipaul pays tribute to his father and the vanishing world of his Trinidadian youth. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz in their first...

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52 ways of thinking about kafka.

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Marvel Years

Childhood memoirs in the LRB archive by Hilary Mantel, Richard Wollheim, Lorna Sage, Edward Said, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Rosemary Dinnage, David Sylvester, Jenny Diski, Sean Wilsey, Lorna Finlayson, Yun Sheng...

Living by the Clock

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LRB Winter Lectures 2010-2023

Judith Butler on who owns Kafka; Hilary Mantel on royal bodies; Andrew O’Hagan on Julian Assange; Mary Beard on women in power; Patricia Lockwood on the communal mind of the internet; Meehan Crist...

Missing Pieces I: The je ne sais quoi

Writing about mystery, the unintelligible and that for which no words can be found by Jenny Diski, Jacqueline Rose, Adam Phillips, John Lanchester, Alice Spawls and Hal Foster.

Missing Pieces II: What was left out

Writing about obsolete objects, missing words and anonymous writers by Andrew O’Hagan, Amia Srinivasan, Irina Dumitrescu, Lucia Berlin, Lawrence Rainey and Sheila Fitzpatrick.

Missing Pieces III: Alchemical Pursuits

Writing about cognitive gaps, stolen artworks and missing the things you never had by Hilary Mantel, Michael Neve, Rosa Lyster, Clancy Martin, James Davidson and Malcolm Gaskill.

Analysis Gone Wrong

Unorthodox psychoanalytic encounters in the LRB archive by Wynne Godley, Sherry Turkle, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Nicholas Spice, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Jenny Diski, Brigid Brophy, Adam Phillips, D.J. Enright...

Gossip and Notes on Work and Reading

For the first time since 1982, there is no annual Diary by Alan Bennett. He says his life is so dull he won’t inflict it on LRB readers. If it suddenly gets more interesting he promises he’ll let us...

Writing about drinking by Victor Mallet, Anne Carson, John Lanchester, Wendy Cope, Christopher Hitchens, Tom Jaine, Jenny Diski, Marina Warner, Clancy Martin and John Lloyd. 

War on God! That is Progress!

Writing about anarchism in the LRB archive by Steve Fraser, Susan Watkins, T.J. Clark, Zoë Heller, Hal Foster, Wes Enzinna and Jessica Olin.

Suffering Souls

Writing for Halloween by Leslie Wilson, John Sturrock, Thomas Jones, Michael Newton, Marina Warner and Gavin Francis.

Ministry of Apparitions

Writing about superstition by Matthew Sweeney, Hilary Mantel, Malcolm Gaskill, Patricia Lockwood, Theodore Zeldin, Katherine Rundell, Peter Campbell, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Angela Carter, Ian Penman...

The day starts now

Summer morning reading from the LRB archive by Angela Carter, Eleanor Birne, Steven Shapin, Tom Crewe, Patrick McGuinness and Jenny Diski. 

Summer lunchtime reading from the LRB archive by James Meek, Penelope Fitzgerald, Bee Wilson, Colm Tóibín and Rosa Lyster. 

Oh What A Night

Summer evening reading from the LRB archive by Anne Carson, Rosemary Hill, John Gallagher, Zoë Heller, Anne Diebel and Patricia Lockwood.

World Weather

From June 2022 to June 2023, the LRB has been collaborating with the World Weather Network, a constellation of weather stations set up by 28 arts organisations in oceans, deserts, mountains, farmland,...

Writing about thinking up other worlds by Glen Newey, Terry Eagleton, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Susan Pedersen, David Trotter and Anthony Pagden. 

In the Classroom

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Close Readings 2024

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In the next issue : Ange Mlinko on Rachel Cusk; Tom Crewe on the Tories; Adam Phillips on Freud and pragmatism.

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Novelist Sarah Perry lost her faith — and found her voice

Paying tribute to the writer who got us all saying ‘Kafkaesque’

‘Swift River,’ a sparkling debut about a young girl you’ll never forget

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The 10 best books of 2023

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• Clarion Reviews

Book 1 in The Council Trilogy

Evette Davis SparkPress ( Sep 17, 2024 ) Softcover $17.95 ( 352pp ) 978-1-68463-270-1

Clarion Rating: 3 out of 5

An unintentional heroine comes into her supernatural own in the intriguing series-opening fantasy novel The Others .

In Evette Davis’s fantasy novel The Others , a gifted woman navigates the hidden world of supernatural figures in San Francisco, hoping to claim her magical legacy.

Olivia is a successful political consultant in the Bay Area when mysterious events begin to derail her professional and personal lives. A panther haunts her dreams, appearing in real life as Elsa, a time-walker who offers Olivia training and assistance. And Olivia learns that she comes from a line of human empaths and that a demon is interfering with her life. Further, Olivia’s friend Lily is revealed to be a fairy who is invested in Olivia’s supernatural progress.

With Elsa’s and Lily’s help, Olivia begins to harness her powers. She also begins working for the Council, an organization of supernatural figures that includes witches and shape-shifters. The group monitors human politics in order to keep the world safe for their kinds. With the Council, Olivia helps to run a campaign for a progressive politician whose policies will nurture a tolerant atmosphere. But her former rival hinders the campaign as well. Meanwhile, supernatural criminals begin to target the locals, and Olivia begins dating a vampire with a complicated history.

In this story, many characters are keeping secrets, and some such secrets have the potential to devastate the fragile accord between humans and supernatural beings. There’s more at stake than just Olivia’s comfort. Still, the role of magic in the novel is limited; there are few depictions of supernatural activities beyond telepathy and empathy. As a result, those who (like Olivia) lead secret lives alongside humans remain mysterious, and the fantasy elements are dulled. Still, though Olivia’s use of her supernatural skills is minimal, her confrontations with ethical issues do result in intriguing passages, as when she wonders whether it is permissible to gauge the reactions of voters to a political campaign.

The novel’s setting is well fleshed out, thanks in part to realistic descriptions of San Francisco landmarks. But while the novel is vivid when it comes to its visuals, other sensory details are neglected. For example, when Olivia is treated to fine French dining, the food is named, though its tastes and effects on Olivia are not. Further straining credulity is the fact that Olivia’s infatuation with William, her vampire paramour, progresses to love and plans of marriage in a timeline of mere weeks. And while Olivia changes and grows over the course of the novel, whose events force her to reconcile herself to the role of the supernatural in her life, few other characters do the same, leading to an overall sense of flatness in the book’s characterizations. The cast’s conversations are also quite direct and functional, though they feature occasional witty gems.

The Others is a beguiling fantasy novel that centers the inevitable conflicts between humans and otherworldly beings.

Reviewed by Jeana Jorgensen June 5, 2024

Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

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Wrong Norma Anne Carson New Directions, 2024 Review by Samantha Neugebauer “All novelists,” remarks Anne Carson in Wrong Norma, “share the fantasy of a different kind of novel.” Yet most novelists–albeit not Carson, a Renaissance Woman known for her astonishing ability to malleate literary forms–end up writing into the tried-and-true formula. The next novel, these other writers promise themselves, will be better–will be different! However, time and time again, as Carson says, they fail to ‘abolish’ the novel and instead, simply ‘renounce’ the novel’s familiar indicators: “plot, consequence, the pleasure a reader derives from answers withheld, the premeditation of these.” While Carson’s speaker may humbly align herself with the broader herd of novelists, Carson the writer–the poet, novelist, essayist, professor of Classics, and translator–has been singularly upending these conventions of prose for some time. Wrong Norma is Carson’s first collection since 2016, containing elements of many, if not all, of her previous works; like Nox (2011), it experiments with collage and memoir, like Eros the Bittersweet (1986), it embeds ‘characters’ from antiquity and various literary arts, including, as in Autobiography of Red (1998), her beloved Herakles, and like Float (2016), the pieces are deceptively disconnected. Carson says they are “not linked” and “that’s why I’ve called them wrong.” I was first introduced to Carson several years ago through Men in the Off Hours (2000), her first widely celebrated hybrid work of essays, poems, epitaphs, and translations. Immediately, I relished her range of knowledge, gnomic observations, voracious imagination, and ability to surprise me. Her forms and subject matters are idiosyncratic. If you read Carson long ago, you come to expect and find pleasure in the way her work will shift, blend, obscure, and spin-off into unexpected terrain. In Wrong Norma, for example, one encounters blocks of Arabic text within a sea of English. If an individual has no fluency in Arabic, the section is incomprehensible, though one could always look up the translation. The Arabic passage is a different kind of surprise, of course, for folks who speak and read Arabic. Lately, I’ve had the concept of surprise on my mind. At the moment, two of my best friends are pregnant. One, a journalist, has declared that she will not seek to know the sex of her baby before delivery because there are “so few surprises in life.” Meanwhile, the other, a novelist, has told me the exact opposite, that she will know as soon as she can because there are “so many surprises in life.” Paradoxically, Carson can speak to and affirm both of my friends’ worldviews. Surprises, Carson seems to say, do exist, can be pleasing, and yet surprises are only surprises because we do not know, and sometimes refuse to know, the full minds of others, including other life forms. “Every water,” she writes, “has its own rules and offering.” Surprises can be real or temporary. Surprises can also be acts of self-deception. I, for instance, often get caught in the rain, because I almost never seek out the morning forecast. Many times, being caught in the rain is kind of exhilarating, but if I need to be somewhere important and look presentable, arriving drenched is undesirable. This is my choice. Being swept away in a flash flood, however, is rarely a choice. Collectively, our ability to predict and warn of flash floods is still insufficient. Understanding the difference between the limits of our own knowledge/susceptibility to surprise, and the limits of our collective knowledge/susceptibility to surprise is interesting to Carson. Many folks are victims to thinking that their own limits are everybody’s limits. Or a group’s limits are signaled by a group’s most uninformed or deranged members. Carson, notably, is more invested in tackling our collective limits. She enjoys resurrecting and dialoguing with ancient figures as if to remind us that there is nothing new under the sun and that if we want to understand why we are the way we are, we need only to revisit and investigate what, collectively, we already know, or used to know. This can be applied to the non-human too. At one point, she interviews rocks. In general, acknowledging life’s many surprises can suggest our humility (good), while avowing to life’s lack of surprises may indicate our study of humanity (also good), or, in extreme cases, our cynicism. The same can be said of our relationship with novels. Wanting to create a ‘different’ novel can indicate erudition and mental fatigue. On the other hand, it might imply hubris, weariness, and disenchantment. In Wrong Norma, you get a bit of all the above. Additionally, Carson remind us, say, as she does in “Essay on What I Think about Most,” that:

“Lots of people including Aristotle think error an interesting and valuable mental event… Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake… From the true mistakes of metaphor a lesson can be learned. Not only that things are other than they seem, and so we mistake them, but that such mistakenness is valuable. “

Not only is this excerpt a guaranteed crowd-pleaser for eager budding writers and lovers of figurative language, but it’s also a fine example of Carson’s gentle nudging together of life’s surprises with life’s lack of surprises. What is, one might ask, the relationship between surprise and metaphor? Surprise and willful, correctable misunderstanding? Maybe the difference between people can be measured in how long they hold on to their resistance to understanding. Furthermore, Wrong Norma gives the sense that Carson, in her search for wisdom, takes to following unknown roads, hoping to surprise and engage herself. In “Getaway,” the speaker, who is grieving both heartbreak and the loss of her mother, “is reading only books written by people named Margaret so as to feel close to her mother.” In one of the book’s most captivating pieces, “Lecture on the History of Skywriting,” the Romantic speaker takes aim at the “so-called Enlightenment.” At a certain junctor, the speaker becomes cloud:

“Tuesday I became clouds. Possibly a defensive measure – everyone loves clouds, they lift the heart, they lift the eye. Actually they lift the heart because they lift the eye. Cog- nitive scientists say that people place gods in the high blue sky because looking up causes a rush of dopamine in the brain. Yet clouds do more than draw your eye upwards. They invent your imagination.”

This lengthy piece concerns the life of a writer told through cosmic grandeur. As the above passage shows, science occasionally serves as its backbone; and yet, science is also its enemy. The cloud-speaker later laments that during the Age of Reason:

“I had to replace the shapeless caprice of my atmospheres with 4 basic cloud types. I had to edit the indecipherably fluid filigree of my language into a dry-as dust classificatory system replete with Latin terminology…”

It seems that in Carson’s mind, science is one source of freedom, and Romanticism is another. We, or at least, she, can have both. The American Modernist poet Wallace Stevens once stated that we admire something in a poem long before we understand it. This is often my experience of falling in love–or reading Carson. While I might become confused by her work at times or find myself unfamiliar with one of her references, my first instinct is to edge even closer to Carson, rather than to seek outside sources to make sense of what she is trying to convey. This in itself is a reason to read her. Wrong Norma, like all Carson’s work, contains worlds. More importantly, these worlds feel very much like unique places that exist firmly within her, digested and formed from her lifetime of reading, personal experiences, and reflection. She draws from them like a woman at a well to create her pieces. The internet has profoundly changed humanity’s relationship to knowledge to a degree not seen since the dawn of widespread literacy and the printing press. We have more access to information than ever, and yet, so much of this information passes through us unabsorbed. Much of the prose I encounter nowadays feels like some monument constructed from disparate scrapyard finds (the scrapyard in question being the vast expanse of content and hive-mind opinion available online), rather than from the inner self, i.e. the soul, of its author. Plato warned us of this, They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. Not so with Carson. Her work is personal yet informed and assimilated within her, unaffected by our times. Wrong Norma is both fresh and deep; it’s Athena springing fully grown from Zeus’s head and also, it’s Zeus’s head. Throughout Wrong Norma, regular text is interspersed with small typewritten notes, many of which are faded in a facsimile style. In the later half of the book, Carson’s own illustrations appear. Like a jolt of intimacy, Carson’s notes and pictures bring you staggeringly close to their creator, reminiscent of zines and children’s crayoned drawings. As an editor for the literary magazine, Painted Bride Quarterly, I love looking back at our archive, from the years before I was born, before the magazine was sleek and ‘professional.’ It’s the same pleasure I get from diving into Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, The Restored Edition, where we can witness the poet’s intuition and decision-making process as she cuts lines, alters, punctuation, and changes titles. In all these examples, the imperfections bring the human to the forefront. Carson’s gift is that even when she is hidden behind regular typefaces, you feel the living force of her, so alive and singular, like a cloud above, willing to bestow us with its accumulated bounty.

Samantha Neugebauer is a lecturer at NYU in D.C., a senior editor for Painted Bride Quarterly , and co-host of the short story review channel Short Story Boudoir . Visit her at, samanthaneugebauer.com .

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How Did Cats Take Over the World? One Bizarre Drawing at a Time.

In “Catland,” Kathryn Hughes has a theory about our obsession with our feline friends — and one cat lover in particular.

By Leah Reich

Leah Reich writes about tech and culture. She lives with Lumpy, her cat, in New York City.

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CATLAND: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania , by Kathryn Hughes

Anyone who has lived with a cat can tell you: Cats are familiars and mysteries in equal measure.

Despite the outsize presence of their little bodies, we sometimes seem to know very little about them. How did we find ourselves in this feline-dominated landscape, and why are we still discovering how much there is to know?

Arriving to explore this mystery — and to complicate it further — is “Catland,” by the writer and critic Kathryn Hughes. The title is both literal and metaphorical, a nod to the intertwined worlds the book explores: the imaginary place invented by the Victorian cat illustrator Louis Wain, and the lived landscape we continue to inhabit some 150 years later.

“Catland” is, at its core, an examination of a quickly modernizing, post-Industrial Revolution Britain, where everything was transforming, including cats — who went “from anonymous background furniture into individual actors.” In short order, cats lost their “weaselly faces and ratty tails” as their faces and eyes became rounder. (While Hughes refers to the quick genetic turnaround possible given cats’ reproductive behaviors, it is not entirely clear whether cats really looked like this or were simply represented as such by artists.)

As with designer dogs and their gentlemen breeders, early cat fanciers competed in cat shows, distinguishing their rarified breeds from the common alley and barn cats who multiplied without concern for lineage.

The commercial artist and illustrator Louis Wain’s art evolved alongside this emerging feline paradise, and his cats also grew both rounder in face and elevated in status — until, eventually, their society was as weird and complex as their owners’. At the height of his popularity, Wain’s cats were everywhere, doing everything — selling soap and boots in advertisements, being patriotic on postcards, riding bikes or bickering with spouses in newspapers and magazines.

Unfortunately, Wain’s business acumen was virtually nonexistent. His fortunes, like those of the cats and cat fanciers of his era, had significant highs and lows. (His worsening mental illness did not help financial matters, but it also did not seem to hamper his productivity or creativity.)

How much did Wain actually influence the new cat aesthetic? Despite the author’s claims to the contrary, his work seems less a propellant than a reflection of the zeitgeist — as seen through his own increasingly eccentric perspective.

Indeed, “Catland” is populated by other characters who, in the author’s own telling, were at least as deeply involved in shaping the emerging cat world. There’s Harrison Weir, who organized the first Crystal Palace cat show in 1871, and “kick-started the modern cat-fancy,” and the clergyman’s daughter Frances Simpson, who had enormous influence on cat culture. Alongside her involvement in breeding, showing and judging, she became an authority whose feline-adjacent endorsements, pronouncements and opinions appeared in countless publications and in a column called “Practical Pussyology” (a lost Prince B-side if ever there were one).

And we meet countless others: the “cat’s meat men,” who walked the streets of London with scrap-laden carts to sell to cat owners — and would slip scraps to strays along the way. The master of “nonsense verse,” Edward Lear’s dedication to both his cat (Foss) and his companion (Giorgio) helped, says Hughes, create the association between cats and queer men in the public imagination. And, of course, there could be no Catland without cat ladies, whether they be caretakers, small-time breeders or grandes dames. Indeed, there are so many threads and characters, the connections between them and to the larger narrative sometimes get lost.

The sensitive should brace themselves: Stories of cruelty, violence and animal hoarding abound — difficult, but necessary, context. (Hughes does not bring us to the present moment, but the perceptive reader, particularly one well-versed in cat rescue, TNR and animal welfare, will find plenty of parallels to our current moment.)

Similarly, those looking for a straightforward biography may at first be disappointed, but cat lovers, and even the cat-indifferent, are encouraged to put their trust in Hughes. “Catland” is a delight. This is history as told by someone whose knowledge of and infectious enthusiasm for her subject is matched by obvious delight and warm, expressive writing.

In Louis Wain’s last illustrations of cats, his favorite subjects were freed from their constrained Edwardian interiors, romping through imagined landscapes and, in some kaleidoscopic, almost psychedelic instances, freed from their own forms. Perhaps Wain truly was both of and ahead of his time. In either case, it’s easy to see how much has changed — and strangely, how little.

CATLAND : Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania | By Kathryn Hughes | Johns Hopkins | 422 pp. | $29.95

The late Protestant theologian Jürgen Moltmann asked: How can we find a human God in a dehumanized world?

Editor’s note: This book review originally appeared in America on March 15, 1975. Jürgen Moltmann died on June 3, 2024, at the age of 98.

This is clearly Jürgen Moltmann’s most important book since Theology of Hope 10 years ago. In his earlier work, Moltmann put the recovery of eschatology in service of a newly hopeful and future-oriented Christian reflection. The focus of his writing was on God’s coming Kingdom through the resurrected Christ. His major philosophical stimulus derived from Ernst Bloch, who was then known to few readers in this country.

Harper 346p $10

In The Crucified God Moltmann examines our common past for the source of our future hope of resurrection. His focus is on God’s identification, through the cross of Christ, with the sufferings of man. His philosophical dialogue is chiefly with the Frankfurt school of critical theory, especially its early leaders Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno. His critical question is: How can we find a human God in a dehumanized world?

Moltmann continues to agree with J. B. Metz that “every eschatological theology ... must become a political theology, that is, a (socio-) critical theology.” He knows well that this effort has caused a confusion of identity for many Christians involved in social issues. Luther’s theology of the cross was proposed as a criticism of the church, he recalls; it must now be radicalized so as to be a criticism of society as well. “The path of a theology of the cross that is critical of society,” he warns, “goes between irrelevant Christian identity and social relevance without Christian identity.”

The book is most persuasive in its three central Christological chapters, which develop the theme that a new future for God, man and the world is inaugurated through the crucifixion of Jesus. Here Moltmann takes an earlier thesis on the reciprocal relationship between historical and eschatological method and applies it to the “trial of Jesus”—testing the revelation of God’s truth in Jesus analogously to the way a question of justice is “tried” in human society. Jesus’ death is understood as a consequence of His ministry. Because of what He preached and lived, He was condemned, publicly executed, “God-forsaken.” (For Moltmann, exaggeratedly in my opinion, Jesus’ final cry from the cross in Mk. 15:37 implies God’s abandonment).

Since it is this crucified man whom God has raised from the dead, God’s love is revealed in His death for all who are sinful and godless. It is thus the death of Jesus, as the man condemned by the law and abandoned to suffering by His Father, that gives significance to the Resurrection of Christ, who is raised from the dead to be the first of all those embraced by God’s promise of new creation.

Three succeeding systematic chapters explore the implications a theology of the cross has for specifically Christian views of God, man and society. “Which God motivates Christian faith,” Moltmann asks, “the crucified God or the gods of religion, race and class?” In the book’s longest and most provocative chapter, he argues that the crucifixion is an event between God and the Son of God and implies a history of suffering within God himself, suffering that redemptively includes the history of human suffering. To date, most critics have found Moltmann’s demand for a Trinitarian ground for the theology of the cross more compelling than his thesis that the active suffering of God for man involves process within God’s own life. At least, it is not clear to me how Moltmann avoids replacing monotheism by tritheism, or immutability by a passing event.

Further discussion of Moltmann’s book would do well, I think, to ask what more precisely he means by “dialectical identity.” This is probably the pivotal philosophical concept in the book, the tool by means of which Moltmann examines the paradox of God’s crucifixion and the strain between Jesus’ death in history and His Resurrection into the eschaton. But the epistemological principles that relate to it are suggested more than they are explored. What really is meant when we speak of finding identity in nonidentity, or of understanding history and eschatology as dialectically united?

These questions could also deepen our appreciation of the contribution critical theory might make to Christian thought. But whatever the outcome of the dialogue, Moltmann has already rendered the church and its theology a signal service.

Leo J. O’Donovan, S.J., is president emeritus of Georgetown University and director of mission at Jesuit Refugee Service/USA.

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2023 gift books, world reviewers’ top picks for family and friends on your list.

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Looking for a great gift book for your family? Each year, WORLD reviewers recommend hundreds of books for all ages. Below you’ll find our top gift book selections for your family and friends—books to make you think, laugh, and read late into the night! Most of all, we hope these books will encourage your family and friends to love God more deeply and savor more of the wonderful world He has made.

Note: Some of these books have objectionable or challenging material. Please read linked reviews and cautions to make sure each selection is right for you and your readers.

Books for Children

Urchin of the Riding Stars , The Mistmantle Chronicles by M.I. McAllister

Truth in the Tinsel  (ebook only) by Amanda White

Jotham’s Journey by Arnold Ytreeide

A Chameleon, a Boy and a Quest by J.A. Myhre

The Wingfeather Saga by Andrew Peterson

Frog’s Rainy Day Story and Other Tales   by Michael and Sarah Dowling

Lucy and the Saturday Surprise by Melissa Kruger

The Test of Lionhood   by Kevin Sorbo

The Treasure by Marty Machowski (for families to read with children)

God, You Are by William R. Osborne (for families to read with children)

The Really Radical Book for Kids   by Champ Thornton

The Lost Year   by Katherine Marsh

Jack Zulu and the Waylander’s Key   by S.D. Smith and J.C. Smith

This Seat’s Saved by Heather Holleman

Sacred Seasons by Danielle Hitchen (for families to read with children)

Devotion (Young Readers Edition) by Adam Makos

Watership Down: The Graphic Novel illustrated by Joe Sutphin ( see review and cautions for the original novel.)

The Arrow and the Crown by Emma Fox

Heartwood Mountain: The Adventures of Wilder Good   by S.J. Dahlstrom

What if? 2 by Randall Munroe

See all our children’s book reviews.

Books for Adults

Elisabeth Elliot: A Life   by Lucy S.R. Austin

Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo

The People’s Justice by Amul Thapar

Signals of Transcendence by Os Guiness

Saved by Benjamin Hall

• The Wager by David Grann

Remaking the World   by Andrew Wilson

Banana Ball by Jesse Cole with Don Yaeger

Palestine 1936 by Oren Kessler

Redeemer President   by Allen C. Guelzo (reprint)

Godmersham Park   by Gill Hornby

The Caretaker by Ron Rash

Broker of Lies   by Steven James

The House of Love and Death   by Andrew Klavan

Artifice   by Sharon Cameron

Theology/Applied Theology

Every Moment Holy edited by Douglas McKelvey

Digital Liturgies by Samuel James

You Are a Theologian  by Jen Wilkin & J.T. English

Called to Cultivate   by Chelsea Patterson Sobolik

Humility by Gavin Ortlund

See all of WORLD’s adult book reviews.

More Gift Ideas

The World and Everything in It  Classic Book of the Month selections for 2023

• January: Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
• February: Things Fall Apart  by Chinua Achebe (plus Darwin Comes to Africa )
• March:  Abraham Lincoln by Allen Guelzo
• April: Humility by Andrew Murray
• May:  Moby Dick   by Herman Melville
• June: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
• July: The Chosen by Chaim Potok
• August:  Christianity and Liberalism by J. Gresham Machen
• September:  Uncommon by Tony Dungy and Nathan Whitaker
• October:  Surprised by Oxford   by Caroline Weber
• November:  Unpacking Forgiveness  by Chris Brauns
• December:  Urchin of the Riding Stars , The Mistmantle Chronicles by M.I. McAllister

Adult Books of the Year for 2023

• Christianity and Liberalism  by J. Gresham Machen
• Elisabeth Elliot: A Life by Lucy S.R. Austen
• Being Elisabeth Elliot by Ellen Vaughn
• The Worry-Free Parent by Sissy Goff
• Critical Dilemma by Neil Shenvi and Pat Sawyer

See the Dec. 2 Books Issue of WORLD Magazine for honorable mentions

Children’s Books of the Year for 2023

• Nonfiction winners
• Fiction winners
• Picture book winners

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