Book Reviews

4.7

The Tucci Cookbook is a hardcover Italian cookbook published by Gallery Books in 2012, co-written by Stanley Tucci with his parents Joan and Stan Tucci, alongside chef Gianni Scappin and Mimi Stanley Taft, with a foreword by Mario Batali and photography by Francesco Tonelli. Built around nearly 200 recipes rooted in Italian home cooking, the book weaves family memory, wine pairings by Tyler Coleman, and the culinary legacy that runs from the Tucci household table to Big Night and beyond. This review assesses the book's content, structure, and reception from published sources — not a kitchen test.

May 12, 2026

Girl in Pieces by Kathleen Glasgow

4.6

Girl in Pieces is a New York Times bestseller and Kathleen Glasgow's debut young adult novel, following seventeen-year-old Charlie Davis through the brutal, nonlinear process of healing from self-harm, trauma, and near-suicide — a story Kirkus Reviews called "poignant and transcendent."

The Complete Cooking for Two Cookbook, Gift Edition: 650 Recipes for Everything You'll Ever Want by America's Test Kitchen

4.6

America's Test Kitchen's The Complete Cooking for Two Cookbook, Gift Edition is a comprehensive hardcover resource featuring 650 re-engineered recipes designed specifically for two-person households, backed by the organization's signature test-kitchen methodology and a New York Times bestseller track record of more than 400,000 copies sold.

The Hamster Handbook (B.E.S. Pet Handbooks) by Patricia Bartlett

4.6

Patricia Bartlett's The Hamster Handbook (B.E.S. Pet Handbooks, 2nd ed., Sourcebooks, 2015) is a full-color practical reference designed to guide both new and experienced hamster owners through housing, feeding, healthcare, breed differences, and hamster behavior — drawing on the expertise that defines the long-running B.E.S. Pet Handbooks series.

Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell

4.5

Impossible Creatures is a #1 New York Times bestselling middle-grade fantasy novel by Katherine Rundell, illustrated by Ashley Mackenzie, in which two children — Christopher Forrester and Mal Arvorian — race across a hidden magical Archipelago to stop the fading of the world's magic and save its impossible creatures from extinction. The Wall Street Journal named it one of the Best Children's Books of the Year, calling it "a glorious fantasy adventure… brimming with intelligence, inventiveness and generosity of heart," and Kirkus Reviews, which awarded it a starred notice and placed it on its Best Books of 2024 list, called it "an epic fantasy with timeless themes and unforgettable characters." The first book in a planned trilogy, it arrives in a Yearling Deluxe paperback edition with stenciled edges.

The Book Club for Troublesome Women: A Novel by Marie Bostwick

4.4

Marie Bostwick's novel follows four women — Margaret, Viv, Bitsy, and Charlotte — whose suburban book club becomes an unlikely engine of feminist awakening when they take up Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, making it a humorous, thought-provoking, and nostalgic work of historical women's fiction published by Harper Muse on April 22, 2025.

May 13, 2026

The Lost Girls: Three Friends. Four Continents. One Unconventional Detour Around by Jennifer Baggett

4.4

The Lost Girls is a group memoir in which three Manhattan media professionals — Jennifer Baggett, Holly C. Corbett, and Amanda Pressner — quit their jobs, leave their boyfriends, and spend a year backpacking 60,000 miles across four continents. Published by HarperCollins in May 2010, the book is an entertaining portrait of friendship under pressure and the cost of a quarter-life detour, though critical reception was split: critics praised the authors' vivid, passionate writing as an intensely enjoyable read for travel-writing fans, while Kirkus Reviews found the narrative unable to fully convey the depth of what the trio experienced.

May 12, 2026

Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy by Simon Blackburn

4.3

First published by Oxford University Press in 1999 and issued in paperback in 2001, Simon Blackburn's Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy remains one of the most widely read entry points into Western philosophical thought, structured around the canonical fields of the discipline and animated by the great thinkers who shaped them — though specialist readers may find its treatment of epistemology uneven.

The Last Thing He Told Me: A Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick (The Hannah by Laura Dave

4.3

Laura Dave's The Last Thing He Told Me is a tightly constructed domestic thriller in which Hannah Hall races to uncover the true identity of her vanished husband, Owen Michaels, while forging an unlikely alliance with his fiercely resistant sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey. A Reese's Book Club pick, a Goodreads Mystery & Thriller of the Year for 2021, and the basis of an Apple TV+ series, the novel earned wide commercial and critical traction — and readers who gravitate toward fast-paced mysteries laced with emotional stakes will find it squarely in their wheelhouse.

Dancing with Death: An Inspiring Real-Life Story of Epic Travel Adventure by Jean-Philippe Soulé

4.2

Dancing with Death is a travel adventure memoir by Jean-Philippe Soulé chronicling the Central American Sea Kayak Expedition 2000, in which Soulé and his partner Luke Shullenberger paddled roughly 3,000 miles from Baja California to Panama across three years and seven countries — a journey the author describes as his most epic expedition and one he is fortunate to have survived.

Smarter Homes: How Technology Will Change Your Home Life (Design by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino

Smarter Homes: How Technology Will Change Your Home Life is a 2018 non-fiction industry guide by interaction designer and IoT thought leader Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, published by Apress, that traces the history of smart home technology and critically examines how consumer products for the connected home are designed, marketed, and shaped by dominant players such as Amazon, Google, and Apple — aimed squarely at product designers, R&D professionals, and trends researchers.

May 12, 2026

The One Thing: The Suprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary KellerJay Papasan

First published by Bard Press in 2013, this non-fiction self-help book by real estate entrepreneurs Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan argues that radical focus on a single most-important task is the engine behind extraordinary results — a message that earned it a place on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Amazon.com.

May 10, 2026