Bookshop Santa Cruz staff recommendation:

Where does the cycle of violence begin and how does it end? What is justice and who is justified? There are no easy answers and this book offers none. Set against the backdrop of a fictionalized version of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, two families linked by tragedy struggle with the legacy of death, racism, and a flawed court system. This book is so timely and important. It has wrapped itself around my heart and refuses to let go. - Ivy

Saeed Jones has written a memorable, powerful coming-of-age memoir, with his keen awareness of the intersection of multiple identities: to be black, to be gay, to know that being both of these can be deadly in this world. It is as much a testament to surviving the world as it is to surviving one’s own self, as Jones demonstrates with his compelling writing. Even more, it is an ode to single motherhood, an account of the determination it takes to change one’s life, and what one’s life can look like after being changed. - Billy

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