Summary: Well over a century since its original publication, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a classic that stands the test of time. This captivating epistolary novel tells the tale of a small group of people who encounter a mysterious and daunting horror. Throughout their harrowing adventure, these heroes leverage their capacities for friendship, love, cooperation, courage, and loyalty [...]
Summary: Lisa Damour’s The Emotional Lives of Teenagers provides a handy crash course for parents and mental health professionals who are seeking to understand and support the teenagers in their lives. Drawing from her career in clinical psychology and contemporary research, Damour lays out the reasons why adolescence is a particularly challenging and special time in a young [...]
Summary: Charlie Jane Anders’s All the Birds in the Sky is a fantasy novel about Laurence and Patricia, two protagonists who meet first as children and then reconnect as young adults. Laurence has a gift for inventing advanced technology, and Patricia is a witch who excels at communing with nature and channeling its power. As they struggle [...]
Summary: Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a poignant and powerful piece of modern literature. The novel tells the story of Sam and Sadie, two adolescents who strike up an unlikely friendship based on a shared love of video games. As young adults, Sam and Sadie both become video game designers and discover a knack [...]
Summary: Lauren Groff’s Matrix is a work of historical fiction loosely based on the life of Marie de France, a poet from the 12th century. Groff depicts Marie as an unusually large and willful woman who, at the young age of seventeen, is forced to join an impoverished abbey of nuns somewhere in England. Matrix tells the story of [...]
Summary: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a fictional mélange of philosophy, history, romance, and political commentary. Set in Prague during the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the novel recounts the story of two couples struggling to find peace and connection in turbulent times. In a world where time flows forward and everything happens [...]
Summary: Richard V. Reeves’s Of Boys and Men takes a hard look at the challenges faced by the modern American male and advocates for structural changes that can help boys and men overcome them. In Part One, Reeves describes what he calls “the male malaise,” how boys and men have fallen behind and become disengaged from school, work, [...]
Summary: Elaine N. Aron’s The Highly Sensitive Person presents Aron’s theory and research on ”highly sensitive persons” (HSPs). Aron claims that HSPs comprise about 15-20% of the general population, with roughly another 20% being “moderately” sensitive. HSPs tend to “pick up on the subtleties that others miss” and “arrive quickly at the level of arousal past which [they] are [...]
Summary: William K. Rawlins’s The Compass of Friendship is an excellent follow-up to Friendship Matters. Rawlins utilizes the same dialectical framework from his first book but expands his research on friendship into new territory. The opening chapters lay out Rawlins’s general theories of friendship, and the latter chapters examine specific types of friendships such as cross-sex, cross-race, [...]
Summary: N.K. Jemisin’s The Stone Sky is the third and final book in her Broken Earth trilogy. It presents the concluding events of Essun and Nassun’s narratives, revealing how the fate of the world is decided by these two women and their companions. Jemisin also takes us on a journey through Hoa’s memory of how The Shattering occurred, [...]