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The new year means the kickoff of a season with highly anticipated book releases. In January, readers can look forward to several promising projects, including a clever take on a literary staple, a peek into the world of homeschoolers and former Nickelodeon star Jennette McCurdy’s fiction debut.
‘Call Me Ishmaelle’ by Xiaolu Guo
One of this year’s most anticipated releases is a feminist reimagining of the literary classic “Moby Dick.” National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Xiaolu Guo recasts Ishmael as a 17-year-old girl disguised as a cabin boy and Ahab as a Black freedman named Seneca, haunted by his father’s legacy of enslavement.
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Ishmaelle joins Captain Seneca’s crew as he hunts the white whale that took his leg. Guo “dispenses with the digressions on whaling that thickened Melville’s novel,” making this version “more propulsive and immediate,” said Kirkus Reviews. She “blends in her own rhetorical tweaks,” shifting to the “mad, complex voices of Seneca and, at times, the whales themselves.” (out now, $18, Grove Atlantic, Amazon)
‘Homeschooled: A Memoir’ by Stefan Merrill Block
Novelist Stefan Merrill Block recounts the five years he spent largely on his own while homeschooled in his new “absorbing” memoir, The Washington Post said. Isolated from his peers and “virtually abandoned by the adults who might have intervened,” Block “moldered behind closed doors with only his unraveling mother for company.”
Block does muse about why there was so little oversight under a 1987 Texas court ruling that legalized homeschooling, but his book is “less an indictment of homeschooling in general than a vivid portrait of the way the practice failed one child in particular.” He does briefly reference the “regulatory vacuum” while writing with the “phenomenological precision and narrative verve of a novelist.” (out now, $30, Harper Collins Publishers, Amazon)
‘Anatomy of an Alibi’ by Ashley Elston
With a screen adaptation of her last hit novel on the horizon, Ashley Elston returns with a “new twisty crime novel,” Book Riot said. Protagonist Camille enlists the help of a woman who resembles her, Aubrey, to try to catch her husband Ben’s misbehavior so she can escape the marriage. However, when Ben winds up dead, only one of the two women has an airtight alibi. (Jan. 13, $30, Penguin Random House, Amazon)
‘Half His Age’ by Jennette McCurdy
Former child star Jennette McCurdy’s provocative debut novel follows Waldo, a “naive, lonely impulsive teenager” who sets her sights on her married creative writing teacher, said the Booklist Queen. Her obsession with her middle-aged teacher drives Waldo to “go to any lengths and try to overcome any obstacles to get what she wants.”
Writing the novel has been the most “creatively fulfilling experience of my life,” McCurdy said in a statement, per Variety. Through Waldo, she explores the “complexities of desire, consumerism, class, loneliness, the internet, rage, addiction and the (oftentimes misguided) lengths we’ll go to in order to get what we want.” (Jan. 20, $30, Penguin Random House, Amazon)
‘Nine Goblins: A Tale of Low Fantasy and High Mischief’ by T. Kingfisher
Acclaimed fantasy horror writer T. Kingfisher is rereleasing her previously self-published 2013 novella, “Nine Goblins: A Tale of Low Fantasy and High Mischief.” An early example of cozy fantasy that debuted before the genre became as popular as it is today, “Nine Goblins” tells the story of the Nineteenth Infantry of the Goblin Army as it fights to make its way home amid an ongoing war with elves and humans. Kingfisher’s “trademark humor is on full display,” said Publishers’ Weekly. Fans will “have fun delving into the archive.” (Jan. 20, $25, Macmillan Publishers, Amazon)
