Book Reviews

Sona Charaipotra's young adult novel might be familiar to back-in-the-day fans of Doogie Howser — it's about 16-year-old supergenius Saira, fresh out of med school and interning at a hospital.

Caite Dolan-Leach's new novel follows a young woman who gets kicked off a reality TV show and ends up on a 1960s-style commune, where utopian ideals soon fall prey to some very human foibles.

Horror writer Paul Tremblay's new short story collection is full of ghosts, monsters, nightmares and apocalypses — all of which feel so close by they might be happening to you, right now.

Bruce Holsinger's new novel — about overprivileged parents cheating to get their kids into a magnet school — is very topical, but the characters are too flat to hook readers' attention for long.

Some might say these little works only acquire their auras through their creators' fame. But once you start pondering them, they start to seem like far more than mere artifacts of notable psyches.

Lauren Morrill's new YA novel follows 17-year-old Maritza, who's used to taking care of herself. But when she lands with a foster mother who truly cares about her, it turns her life upside down.

A poem on the page has its appeal — but poetry spoken aloud is a more intimate experience. And a new crop of podcasts are expanding poetry, giving context to poems and drawing in new audiences.

One in five Americans have some experience with mental illness every year — and these three new memoirs dig into that experience, whether it's the author's own illness or that of a loved one.

Journalists David Wolman and Julian Smith chronicle the history of Hawaii's cattle trade and profile a number of "paniolos" — every bit as tenacious and resourceful as their mainland cohorts.

The novelist, who died last week at 91, was often slammed by critics as a frivolous sex-and-shopping writer. But her luxuries were meticulously researched and her sex scenes gloriously shameless.