Bookshop Santa Cruz staff recommendation:

Rivers Solomon seems to consistently bring something fresh and completely unprecedented to the genre in a most magnificent way. I’ll let you read the back of the book for the plot, as there’s so much going on—from the Middle Passage to magical mer-people to shared memories and the strength of one young person to save her people. Solomon pulls it all off with aplomb. It’s a little book that packs a lot of punch about historical trauma and the ways we integrate our history into our lives, and helps us think about what history we are responsible for carrying. I can’t stop thinking about this one. - Jax

In the Dream House is an incredible follow-up to the glorious Her Body and Other Parties. Carmen Maria Machado has written an honest and harrowing memoir about her psychologically abusive relationship. Machado contrasts her memories with true examples of oppression in queer history and with narrative tropes. A beautiful exploration of the reality of abuse in queer relationships and a necessary account that subverts any idea of what a memoir can be. - Natalie O.

This delightful book is hard to categorize. Written by Sasha Sagan, the daughter of astronomer Carl Sagan and writer-producer Ann Druyan, For Small Creatures is part memoir, part history, part science, and all heart. Raised by her famous parents as ethnically Jewish but not religious, Sasha Sagan was taught from a young age to find the miracle in the natural world that surrounded her. When her own daughter was born, Sagan was committed to continuing this way of upbringing but wanted to make sure that her daughter also had a sense of ritual and meaning that Sagan herself felt so deeply inside but had a hard time naming. Reflecting on nature, history, science, art, and literature, Sagan tells the story of how across eons and cultures, humans have always developed a way to mark the nature of time’s passing, of life, of death, and of the phenomenon of feeling. In charming prose, she offers a wonderful way to find meaning in everyday life.  - S.M.C.

In her elegant collection of essays, acclaimed Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie considers how time and place shift within a rapidly changing world, unearthing the past and untethering the present, whether while on an archeological dig in Arctic Alaska, in the Highlands, or stopped along a country road. A combination of longer think pieces and shorter meditations, with lyrical simplicity as its through line, Surfacing is itself a welcome practice in timelessness. - Melinda