Let’s No One Get Hurt
By Jon Pineda
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The days of teen life are set to lyrical graphs in poet Jon Pineda’s novel about a girl named Pearl. Her mother left Pearl and her father, and the two are squatters on land near a river along with two other men. Poetry sets the tune in her life, for better or worse, along with the river for which her necessities are drawn. She meets a boy who is well off, and comes to terms with her wants and desires, more on the domestic side than romantic. (March 2018)
The Royal Art of Poison: Fatal Cosmetics, Deadly Medicine, Filthy Palaces, and Murder Most Foul
By Eleanor Herman
St. Martin’s Press
A plot that is as standard as the lines “Once upon a time …”, poisonings tend to enter into many tales both fictional and historic. But how much of this paranoid-driven mode of death was real? Eleanor Herman delves into the stories of historic and recent poisonings and using modern analysis determines if these deaths were really from poison, self-inflicted or treacherous, or rather symptoms of the environment. (June 2018)
