What a glorious way to spend a honeymoon: Mark and Olivia Gunnerson go backpacking through the vast Erebus Resort in the mountains of Colorado, where scientists have “de-extincted” species like the woolly mammoth and other Pleistocene megafauna. Just watch the peaceful beasts at their watering holes. Behold the giant armadillos, and the indricothere that make mammoths look like dwarfs. The scientists have removed genes for aggression in these re-creations, so humans will be safe unless they’re accidentally stepped on. And yet, someone doesn’t want the newlyweds camping there, made evident by ..read more

Twelve-year-old Tyler Gooden loves solving his Rubik’s Cube. After his dad died three years ago, he felt adrift until he found this gift from his father, set aside years before. The mental aerobics and motor dexterity that cube-solving required gave him a sense of focus. So begins the story of Tyler’s determined journey to the national championship, sponsored by Cube-Mania. He can’t afford to attend, but Cube-Mania founder and CEO Victor Chen recognizes his “remarkable ability” and offers a surprise sponsorship. As the competition begins, Tyler meets a crew of fellow cubers, including “cubing ..read more

With her loving uncle away traveling, orphaned Xue joined an entertainment house to hone her musical talents in playing the qín. Now, following years of service and learning, the 17-year-old has become an apprentice, and her uncle gifts her a new qín. Shortly after, he’s killed by bandits, leaving her lonelier than ever. Throwing herself into her music, Xue captures the attention of handsome young nobleman Meng Jinglang, who offers to pay off her indenture contract in return for her playing music at his manor for one year. The offer grows more enticing when he reveals that he knew her uncle a ..read more

Amarie Walker hightails it out of Washington, D.C., after her ungrateful fiance cheats on her again. It’s time to take her Black girl magic elsewhere and focus on passing her nursing exam. She winds up in the mountain town of Service, West Virginia, and accepts the one open job for for miles around, as an assistant at the veterinary clinic. Eli Calvary is trying to keep the business he inherited from his late father afloat. Without his say-so, his mother tries to help by starting a silent auction for romantic dinners with one of the three Calvary brothers to raise money. Adding to Eli’s stres ..read more

Ocean Yoon is still part of the Alliance, the space agency of a united Korea—but barely. After a tense encounter that ended in a firefight, Ocean’s privileges have been restricted. She proved herself to be a good shot, but also perhaps too independent-minded. Now she serves on the Ohneul under a captain who sometimes respects her and sometimes seems to use her for her piloting abilities and self-confidence. The other members of the Ohneul’s crew have gelled well despite their differences and are happy to follow Ocean as the captain’s second, though the addition of a new crew member, Haven, fr ..read more

The book profiles kids ranging in ages from 6 to 16, detailing the challenges they faced and their paths to delivering breakthrough inventions or developing and improving on existing ones. The book is divided into five sections covering inventions that solve daily problems, assist others, advance technology, help the environment, or are just for fun. Readers will encounter famous names like Benjamin Franklin (who invented swim fins at age 11), Louis Braille (who developed the Braille alphabet when he was 15), and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (who at 13 created an adder/subtractor). Pew also ..read more

Whitney Whitaker and her cousin Buck have won the bid to remodel a Nashville fire station into a home while leaving the historically significant exterior intact. Starting the project, they meet several neighbors, including Joanna Hartzell and her friend Gideon Koppelman. Joanna, who owns half of a two-family townhouse, is worried that with the other side abandoned by a quarrelsome family, her home might become damaged and devalued. Deciding to take a chance on buying the dilapidated townhouse from the Bottiglieri siblings, whose parents lived there before they died, the cousins run into plent ..read more

Page, Washington bureau chief of USA Today, biographer of Barbara Bush and Nancy Pelosi, draws on abundant sources and hundreds of interviews to create a brisk, evenhanded biography of Barbara Walters (1929-2022). Beset by an abiding sense of insecurity, Walters grew up seeing that success could swiftly turn into failure. Her father, a nightclub owner, had been “a mercurial breadwinner.” When he made money, the family lived extravagantly, “but always with the risk that he might gamble it all away.” Walters began her rise in TV news as a researcher and writer on NBC’s Today show. Once she took ..read more

After their father left home to undergo treatment for tuberculosis, 19-year-old May Chow and her 18-year-old sister, Gemma, took over his flower-selling business in order to support their family, which also includes 12-year-old Peony and Ma, who’s expecting a fourth child. With the country still gripped by economic depression, money is tight, and the girls’ meager earnings barely make ends meet. Making matters worse is news of a proposed train station in Chinatown that would effectively destroy the community. Thanks to prejudice and discrimination against Chinese Americans, influenced in part ..read more

Following a distant glimpse of a small Asian child named Kûn pedaling through a modern landscape past outsize ghostly images of turbulent waters and immense prehistoric creatures, Baker-Smith rewinds to a view of the dinosaurs’ cataclysmic demise. He then goes further back to depict the massive interplanetary collision that produced our moon and, after millions of years of raging storms, led to the appearance of teeming life in unusual forms that evolved over eons into those of today. Meanwhile, through ages of ice and volcanic fire, fractured bits of crust float over Earth’s roiling, fiery i ..read more