Kat's Reviews

Picking up a novel by Kate Atkinson always feels like running into a long-lost best friend. My brain just clicks with hers, and soon I’m 100 pages in and marveling at her ability to twist between absurd humor and piercing empathy in mere sentences. PI Jackson Brodie is my favorite of her characters, and I couldn’t be happier to see Atkinson return to his world, and to see if just this once he might catch a break (I doubt it).

Mark your calendars: On August 21st, 2017, a total eclipse of the sun will be visible in America for the first time in 40 years. Over time, eclipses have been interpreted in dramatically different ways across the globe, and this book serves as a tour of that fascinating history. What better way to wait out the year?                                                    —Kat

If there was ever a book to sum up this strange moment we’re in—longing for the natural world as we witness its destruction—this is it. The Moth Snowstorm veers between the rhapsodic and the elegiac, then ties the two together and calls it love. I’ve never read a book like this before, and I can’t stop thinking about it now. —Kat

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, and Detective Antoinette Conway knows this better than most. The acidic, sharp detective from The Secret Place returns for the fight of her life against her own colleagues. Tana French is my absolute favorite mystery novelist, and The Trespasser, with its slow, twisty unfolding, reminded me why. —Kat

What I perhaps love most about the Mary Russell series is that we are frequently treated to trips back in time, to moments that reveal something new about Mary and Sherlock. Imagine my delight in an entire collection of these gems! With stories of Mary Russell’s first sleuthing adventures in San Francisco, as well as a murder by bees and even a glimpse of Mary at age 92, this collection will delight fans of this fantastic series.  —Kat

When a young girl in Ireland claims to have gone four months without eating, a nurse named Lib is sent to her bedside. Skeptical from the start, Lib intends to use her nurse’s training to sort the miraculous from the mundane. The Wonder is an engrossing novel with a satisfying ending that took me by surprise. —Kat

Anyone who has ever stayed up late tracking the movements of local mountain lions on the Puma Project’s website will absolutely love this book, which seeks to change the way we see our wilder neighbors. These stories of citizen science and grassroots efforts to let the wild be wild make peaceful coexistence seem possible—no small feat in today’s world.  —Kat

This novel is the perfect smart beach read for August. Norton Perina, a young, arrogant doctor, accepts an invitation to travel to a remote tropical island to study the native inhabitants, who seem to live for hundreds of years. The People in the Trees is dark, consuming, and crackling with energy.  —Kat

Lyanda Lynn Haupt has long been keenly observing the natural world around her, but in Crow Planet she focuses on a bird that is familiar to all of us. More than just a compendium of fascinating crow facts, Crow Planet also enlightens on what wildness really is, and how to preserve it in our neighborhoods. —Kat

There is nothing like the feeling of opening a new novel by Simon Van Booy. Father’s Day is a gentle and absorbing story about a woman named Harvey and her adoptive father, a felon with a violent past. Shifting between scenes of Harvey as a girl and as a self-assured woman in Paris, Father’s Day is a meditation on the immense effect one human life can have on another. I couldn’t put it down.  —Kat