Seven-Day Magic

Written by: Edward Eager

First line: "The best kind of book," said Barnaby, "is a magic book."

Why you should read this book: John and Susan's life was less interesting before Barnaby, Abbie, and Fredericka move in across the street, and it gets even more interesting when Susan discovers that a random library book contains a novel's worth of magic, allowing the children to make wishes that really come true, but not necessarily in the way they expect. The book is a seven-day loan, so the children have a week to figure out its rules and fulfill their fantasies, with the book and their own interpersonal relationships complicating things at every turn. This beloved children's novel combines a modern sentiment with a classical perspective on fantasy that makes it persistently excellent.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You don't think books are especially magic.

Phoebe and Her Unicorn

Written by: Dana Simpson

First line: Ow!

Why you should read this book: Phoebe is a little girl who just wants to be treated as the awesome human that she knows she is; Marigold is a unicorn who knows she is better than everyone else, especially humans. When Phoebe accidentally hits Marigold with a rock, she frees Marigold from a narcissistic fascination with her own reflection and is granted a magical wish, which she uses to make the unicorn her best friend. Reluctantly, Marigold infuses her unicorn magic into Phoebe's life, with comical results, and they are both better for the association.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You're the mean girl.

Warriors 2: Fire and Ice

Written by: Erin Hunter

First line: Orange flames lapped at the cold air, throwing sparks up into the night sky.

Why you should read this book: To rectify the imbalance of losing one of the four clans, newly promoted warriors Fireheart and Graystripe are sent on a quest to find the Windclan and return them to their ancestral hunting grounds. The story sprawls about after that, with cats getting sick or injured, cats questioning other cats' loyalties. Fireheart doesn't know who to trust, but Thunderclan must band together or find itself at the mercy of the other cats in the forest.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Meh.

Educated

Written by: Tara Westover

First line: My strongest memory is not a memory.

Why you should read this book: This powerhouse of a memoir follows Westover from her early childhood, growing up in a fringe Mormon family where she was not allowed to attend school or receive medical care, but was required to work in her father's salvage yard without the benefit of OSHA regulations or any type of safety precaution. Westover's brilliant prose allows the reader to enter into the mindset of the little girl who is constantly hoping to please her difficult father and older brother, while the reader gradually becomes aware that these two men are both abusive and mentally ill, and nothing the author can do will ever protect her from their behavior. As Westover escapes her family's mindset and begins learning about the world outside her small mountain stronghold, she comes to inescapable conclusions about herself and her upbringing, illuminating an America that is all too common and yet so far from the range of the ordinary experience that had this story been presented as fiction, it would most likely be rejected for being too unbelievable.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You have just begun working through the trauma of your own physical and spiritual abuse with a qualified therapist and you don't want to derail that process with unexpected PTSD symptoms that might arise from learning about other people's abuse.

Firefly: The Unification War Part I

Written by: Greg Pak, Dan McDaid, Marcelo Costa, and Joss Whedon

First line: "Hey, Wash...sorry to trouble you...but is that engine on fire?"

Why you should read this book: First off, you'd have to be a fan of the short-lived, ill-fated science fiction fan favorite, Firefly, and you'd have to know the series and the characters well enough to be dropped into a new episode of their (back) story without any further explanation. Captain Mal Reynolds and company find themselves in their typical situation: stuck on some backwater planet with a broken ship, no money, and a posse of extremely bad guys on their tail. This time, it's Mal and Zoë's past catching up with them, complicated by a bunch of murderous space cultists, and yeah, that engine was totally on fire.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You aren't already a fan of Firefly.

The Only Harmless Great Thing

Written by: Brooke Bolander

First line: There is a secret buried beneath the mountain's gray skin.

Why you should read this book: Slim and powerful, this fiction takes two historical truths from the early twentieth century—the radiation poisoning of girls working in a watch factory in New Jersey and the intentional electrocution of an elephant at Coney Island—and reimagines a world in which these incidents are linked and satisfyingly, if not brutally, avenged. Unfeeling bureaucracy butts up against sentience in elephants and anger in working class women in a story that bounces back and forth through time to create meaning from seemingly meaningless tragedy. This book is a swift punch to the gut, in a good way.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You scoff at the idea that animals can have feelings or feel righteous indignation.

The Porcupine of Truth

Written by: Bill Konigsberg

First line: The Billings Zoo has no animals.

Why you should read this book: Carson doesn't completely appreciate why his mother has dragged him across the country to watch his estranged alcoholic father die in the backwaters of Montana, but once he meets Aisha he's a little more open to the summer's possibilities. Queer, black, and homeless, Aisha feels even more displaced than Carson, and together they fall into an accidental quest to discover what exactly happened to Carson's grandfather thirty years ago. Quietly meaningful, this satisfying adventure weaves all its threads together into a complete tapestry about love, family, and more love.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Love is not your highest ideal.

Everfair

Written by: Nisi Shawl

First line: Lisette Toutournier sighed.

Why you should read this book: What if indigenous Africans had technological superiority over Europeans at the turn of the last century, and what if this reality existed within a society that allowed open discussion of race and sexuality in the same time period? This vast, populous steampunk alternate-history narrative follows an unlikely cast of Fabians, missionaries, escaped slaves, and oppressed native peoples in their attempts to build a socialist paradise in the wake of Leopold II's colonization of the Congo. Beginning with young Lisette Tourournier's love affair with a bicycle in France, the story criss crosses continents and decades, proposes complex love polygons among people with multiple loyalties, and introduces fabulous technologies and solutions in a dense and nuanced story that operates as science fiction and social commentary and a few other things.

Why you shouldn't read this book: I guess this book is not for unabashed racists, but they probably don't read interesting steampunk novels anyway.

Anya's Ghost

Written by: Vera Brosgol

First line: What's for breakfast.

Why you should read this book: Anya just wants to be a normal high school student, and she's done a lot of work to lose her accent and dissociate herself from the one weird Russian kid in her private school, but she only has one friend, who can be kind of mean, and the boy Anya likes already has a prettier girlfriend. Reeling with the unfairness of the world, she runs off and falls into a well, where she discovers the bones and the ghost of Emily Reilly, who helps save her from the well, and then sticks around to help Anya with her schoolwork and her love life. Maybe Emily is the kind of friend that Anya's always longed for, or maybe her kind of help is the kind of help that Anya can do without.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You will never, ever get over your first love, and you'll never, ever let them get over you.

 

Pachinko

Written by: Min Jin Lee

First line: History has failed us, but no matter.

Why you should read this book: This sprawling intergenerational epic follows three generations of the Baek family, Korean immigrants who came to Japan to seek a better life, despite a pervasive current of anti-Korean sentiment that pervades every aspect of their existence in this new home. Through poverty and privation, the family's love, determination, and connections serve to keep them and their descendants fed, clothed, sheltered, end educated, and while their lives are punctuated, over and over, by tragedy, their ability to draw on their own knowledge and strength allow the surviving members to achieve a little more than their parents did before them. It's a big book, but it moves with surprising speed, painting a detailed picture of lives from a previous century with exquisite and fascinating detail.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You're never going to get over what the Japanese did during WWII.