Cannon by Lee Lai. Drawn & Quarterly, 2025. 9781770468023. 304pp.

Cannon is everyone’s rock. She works in a kitchen that’s insane (her boss is truly the worst), and she’s taking care of her ailing Gung Gung, whose caregiver just resigned. Her mom, of course, won’t return her calls. Her best friend, Trish, never really listens to her, and even uses their friendship as fodder for her writing. (Trish is struggling with her own crap, plus she’s having an affair with a straight boy.)

The only thing that gets Cannon through it is running while listening to tapes about breathing and mindfulness. Her co-worker Benji’s support helps, too.

Lee Lai’s follow-up to Stone Fruit (2022) is just as amazing. Cannon’s characters navigate love, friendship, and family in ways that are both heartbreaking and uplifting. I’ve already read it twice.

My favorite parts: Trish coming to Cannon’s aid when a mean girl is trashing her at a party, back when they were in high school. Plus, the moment when Cannon finally explodes is epic, the more so because Trish is there to help.

     

These picture books published by Transit were all translated from Spanish, and each defied my expectations.

Ashimpa: The Mysterious Word by Catarina Sobral. Translated by Juliana Barbassa. Transit Children’s Editions, 2025. 9798893380026.

I’m sure that any book that opens with a researcher making a discovery, in a book of all places — in this case, finding the long-lost word “ashimpa” — is going to be a hit with the library crowd. As people start using it, and then arguing about how to use it, “ashimpa” goes from a verb to a noun and on and on, getting kids to think about how we use different types of words. My favorite thing: Sobral’s illustrations are totally ashimpish!

    A Sleepless Night by Michaela Chirif and Joaquín Camp. Translated by Jordan Landsman. Transit Children’s Editions, 2024. 9798893389050.

This book had me from the title page, which features animals dressed as fruit, dancing. In the book, Elisa won’t stop crying, and it disturbs everyone, even people on the other side of the planet. Nothing can get her to stop. Everyone is exhausted. (Minor spoiler: then grandma arrives!) My wife claims she saw the surprise ending coming a mile away and refuses to believe I didn’t.

Giant on the Shore by Alfonso Ochoa and Andrés López. Translated from Spanish by Shook. Transit Children’s Editions, 2024. 9781945492877.

The illustrations are beautiful, and the story is melancholy; it’s about an invisible giant that does not come ashore, and that does not have a story written about it.

       

Masters of the Nefarious: Mollusk Rampage by Pierre La Police. Translated by Luke Burns. New York Review Comics, 2024. 9781681378343. 176pp.

An absurd, surreal graphic novel made of one-panel comics, one on each page. It begins with a tidal wave that “conceals occult creatures” and ends with a thumbs-up. Aliens figure in, as do the eponymous Masters of the Nefarious, a trio out to solve the supernatural problems. Every page feels both unpredictable and inevitable as the story moves forward. The pages about a toilet made me laugh out loud, as did the results of a trip to Mexico. Enjoy!

 

Dear Jackie by Jessixa Bagley, illustrated by Aaron Bagley. Simon & Schuster Books for Young People, 2025. 978-1534496576. 288pp. Jackie and Milo are nervous about starting middle school, and they’re so close that Jackie’s mother calls Milo Jackie’s “replacement brother.” (Jackie’s real brother, Jabari, has just moved away from home.) Milo is the kind of boy who cries while reading comic books, and Jackie is not at all a girly girl. They’re perfect friends. At school Milo immediately makes new friends while playing sports, and Jackie doesn’t like them at all. Her locker is below Adelle’s; Adelle wants to give Jackie fashion advice, and isn’t nice about it at all. As notes start to get passed and kids start pairing off, Jackie deals with her isolation by writing herself notes on a typewriter she finds in Jabari’s room. At first they’re the kind of things she wishes someone would say to her, to give her a boost. But soon, tired of more and more people telling her to act and dress more like a girl, Jackie types herself a note from a secret admirer and sticks it in Adelle’s locker “by mistake.” When Adelle finds it, people are shocked, but they also become nicer to Jackie. As everyone tries to figure out who likes Jackie, the whole situation becomes more and more precarious. Worth noting: Early in the book, Jackie tries to dye her hair with disastrous results. (It’s pretty funny, too.) And Jabari is the best older sibling ever. This is the second tween graphic novel by the Bagleys, who also wrote/created/illustrated Duel, the fencing graphic novel with lots of sibling rivalry.  

Cat People: A Comic Collection by Hanna Hillam. Running Press, 2024. 9780762486033. 100pp. A human woman falls through a portal to a world where cats rule and humans are pets. And she arrives on Halloween. My favorite parts: visiting the pet store; cats trying to deal with a moody, incomprehensible human; and when the cat introduces a second human to its home. Hilarious, but intended for adults and older teens rather than kids.    

North Continent Ribbon: Stories by Ursula Whitcher. Neon Hemlock, 2024. 9781952086847. 172pp.

This book contains short stories that stand together as a novella. It was shortlisted for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, and my friend Gina recommended it to me during Seattle’s Worldcon back in August.

The stories explore the culture of the planet Nakharat, a slightly futuristic society obsessed with secrets and promises that take the form of ribbons hidden in one’s hair, and that has an AI, which they don’t trust but make extensive use of. It’s worth reading the book without knowing more than that.

The sense of the culture that emerges from the six stories was beguiling, and their characters brought me back over and over. It stands with The Left Hand of Darkness and Ancillary Justice in what it accomplishes in terms of world building, and it’s all the more impressive in that it’s much shorter than either book. Highly recommended.

     

Angelica and the Bear Prince by Trung Le Nguyen. RH Graphic, 2025. 978059312472. 218pp. Includes sketches and an author’s note. Angelica (aka Jelly or Jellybean) was just accepted as a tech intern at the Log House Theater, and she’s super excited. (She’s also a bit nervous because she’s the kind of person who takes on too much, and she recently burned out.) She saw a play there for the first time when she was seven, and it was about a young girl sent off to live with a white bear by her father. In fact,  Per the Bear is kind of the mascot for the theater. And Angelica has been texting whoever runs the Per the Bear fan account for a while. (It turns out he’s the guy who wears the costume at the theater.) When Angelica tells her friend Christine (an actress) about all the texting, it’s clear Angelica has a crush on him. The rest of the book involves their romance, Christine’s relationship, the boy in the bear costume’s backstory, and Angelica and Christine’s mothers and their restaurants. It’s adorable in a way that didn’t annoy me, and I loved Angelica’s parents. This is one of those books that makes me wish my daughter was still young enough to read to. Though my local library classifies this as a young adult book (it has high school-age characters), I wouldn’t hesitate to hand it to a 5th grader. Nguyen’s previous graphic novel, The Magic Fish, was also lovely and sweet; though that felt a bit more personal, this is a beautiful fairy tale.    

This Place Kills Me by Mariko Tamaki and Nicole Goux. Abrams Fanfare, 2025. 9781419768460. 270pp.

Abby Kita is something of an outsider at Wilberton Academy, a transfer student who is pissed off. But at the afterparty for the Wilbergin Theatrical Society’s production of Romeo and Juliette, she ends up talking to one of the play’s stars, Elizabeth. When Elizabeth is found dead the next morning, Abby is the last person who spoke to her. Plus she has Elizabeth’s copy of the play (she kind of forgets that, and then keeps it secret) which includes a note from her secret boyfriend. This turns Abby into an amateur detective of sorts, with the Watson to her Holmes being her not-quite-friend of a roommate. The secret of why she left her last school is held over her head by those who want her to leave things alone.

Tamaki’s writing continues to amaze me; I always think she’s at the top of her game, but her books get better and better. Goux’s art, and particularly her use of limited colors in the book, makes the whole thing shine. If you’ve never read Groux’s graphic novel F*ck Off Squad (cocreated with Dave Baker), it’s a thing of beauty.

Worth noting: This takes place in the age of the Sony Walkman, so it may give you a sense of nostalgia, too.

   

The Delicacy by James Albon. Top Shelf, 2021. 9781603094924. 320pp. Two brothers get a surprise inheritance and move away from their small island town (and their mother).  One (Tulip) opens a restaurant in the outskirts of London; the other (Rowan) grows veggies at the property they inherited. Tulip becomes more and more obsessed with success and fame; Rowan feels a bit abandoned and unappreciated. At the center of their restaurant’s menu is an unusual, tasty mushroom that they find on a small plot on their land. It’s soon in every dish the restaurant serves. The secret to cultivating it is a doozy, and leads to all kinds of conflict between the brothers. There’s a remarkable page that conveys the taste of this mushroom, the first time Tulip tastes one, that wowed me. But it’s Albon’s composition and his perfect, unpredictable use of color that pulled me through the book. Love Languages by James Albon. Top Shelf, 2025. 9781603095570. 176pp. This story of friendship, language, and eventually love is Albon’s best graphic novel yet. It’s about two foreigners who meet in Paris: Sarah, who’s got an office job managing a bunch of jerks, and Ping, an au pair with her own work frustrations. They mix French, English, and Cantonese to get to know each other after a few chance meetings. The brilliance of the book is not only the writing, which is wonderful; it’s the way Albon conveys the way the two dip in and out of languages and combine them. It’s something I’ve never seen done before, and it’s even more amazing after they get to know each other better. (Albon also does a great job expressing Sarah’s language fatigue and confusion at other points in the book.)