Beware the Wild & Behold the Bones, by Natalie C. Parker

Beware the Wild, by Natalie C. Parker

Behold the Bones, by Natalie C. Parker

Recently, at Kirkus, I've written about Natalie C. Parker's Beware the Wild and Behold the Bones:

It plays with classic horror tropes as well as elements from fairy tales—the danger and wild in nature, the power of belief, the importance of origin—but it’s also very much a story about siblings and family. It deals with domestic abuse—the long-term fallout and how hard it can be to break the cycle—and it explores the lines between love and obsession, the instinct to protect and the desire to control.

American Ace, by Marilyn Nelson

A Fierce and Subtle Poison by Samantha Mabry

...as well as a little about Marilyn Nelson's American Ace, as well as a list of books it inspired me to pick up:

 It deals with family and culture and race; with the relationships between fathers and sons, between extended family and immediate. Ultimately, it’s less about the mystery itself, and more about how a shift in a person’s understanding of his own identity can affect how he sees the world and his place in it. It’s about discovering history in terms of the macro and the micro—about seeing the larger patterns of history and about how individual people fit into that pattern, about the Tuskegee Airmen as a group and about the individuals who made up the whole.

...and finally, I put together a list of the books I went ahead and bought MYSELF for Valentine's Day:

Last year, I wrote about my decision to give myself a Valentine: pre-ordering a whole slew of upcoming romances. I enjoyed myself so entirely—for months, books just APPEARED in my mailbox, it was like MAGIC—that I’ve decided to make it a personal tradition. But I’ve also decided to give it a tweak: rather than ordering purely upcoming books, I’m going to buy some backlist titles, too!