New Releases Tuesday: The Best Books Out This Week

From MacArthur Genius Grant fellow Kelly Link comes this new collection of fairy tale retellings that combine French lore, Scottish ballads, and the Brothers Grimm. Link’s modern fairy tales blend the realistic with the fantastical, the cerebral with the compassionate, resulting in a collection that feels totally new. Here, questing brothers become enchanted by a weed-selling feline, futuristic Hansel and Gretel contend with a planet of vampires, and hell is a busy airport.

In Above Ground, the award-winning author of How the Word is Passed contends with an ever-changing world through the lens of fatherhood. These poems explore how we become rooted in self through historical institutions and familial ties, but then how this same sense of self and perspective becomes disrupted — or refreshed — by having children and witnessing the world anew. The journey this collection takes readers on details parents’ growth just as much as their children’s.

Ren’s life is water and swimming, period. She starts her day in the pool, only hangs out with her swim teammates, looks up to her coach, and that’s it. Except her love for the life aquatic goes a little further past getting a scholarship. The pressure she faces from her parents and coach make her want to know what it feels like to actually live as one of the creatures she grew up hearing stories about. It doesn’t bother her that they, say, tempted sailors to their doom, or feasted on human flesh.

This is like reverse Ariel goals from The Little Mermaid, but make it sapphic with body horror.

In this YA novel, Tison combines vignettes and poems to tell the story of two Bribri brothers whose lives become upended once they protect another. One day, in the woods, they rush to the aid of their cousin, who they think is being hurt by a popular soccer player at their high school. After they brutally beat him, they are set on a path of counseling sessions and shunned at school. They also wonder themselves if they are destined to become like their abusive father, who can’t be trusted to be alone with their mother. As the narrative — told from differing points of view — unfolds, the boys come into their own, and realize how Bribri traditions can help them in their journey.

Ah Boon and the girl he comes to love, Siok Mei, spend their childhood in a fishing village in 1940s Singapore when it is still under British rule. Though Ah Boon doesn’t have much interest in fishing, he has a preternatural sense for discovering islands with hoards of fish for the taking. This ability ties him to his community and the land it inhabits for years to come. Once the Japanese invade, life changes for him and Siok Mei, and the two of them, now teens, have to decided where they fit into this newly changed world.