NOUR’S SECRET LIBRARY, by Wafa Tarnowska. Illustrated by Vali Mintzi. (Barefoot Books, cloth, $17.99; paper, $9.99, ages 6 to 10.) Growing up in Romania and living in the Middle East, Mintzi uses charcoal for war-torn Damascus and earth-colored gouache for the dreams of a girl called Nour (“light” in Arabic) in the hopeful picture book by the Lebanon-born Tarnowska.
GIANT GIANT, by Dylan Hewitt. (Milky Way, $18.99, ages 3 to 7.) Hewitt’s bold colors, spatial jokes and appealingly retro, poster art style are a winning match for the topical message of this picture book about a giant bully who threatens all “peaceful little people” on the planet. a ‘peaceful place’.
MOON WALK, by Zetta Elliott and Lyn Miller-Lachmann. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.99, ages 10 to 14.) This novel in verse, told alternately by two boys in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in the 1980s, one channeled by Elliott and one by Miller-Lachmann, deals with eloquent race, culture and life on the spectrum.
THE FIRST CAT IN SPACE AT PIZZA, by MacBarnett. Illustrated by Shawn Harris. (Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins, $15.99, ages 8 to 12.) What started as a live multimedia cartoon during lockdown, about a feline mission to stop extragalactic rats from devouring the moon, is now a hilarious graphic novel.
BAD MEXICANS: Race, Rich and Revolution in the Borderlands, by Kelly Lytle Hernandez. (Norton, $30.) A historian, Hernández, tells the story of Mexico’s migratory rebels magonist movement, led by the revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón, which united against the dictator Porfirio Díaz and catalyzed the Mexican revolution.
TEEN, by Bud Smith. (Vintage, Paper, $17.) In love despite the best efforts of the world and their parents, Kody Green and Tella Carticelli steal a car (or a couple) and take a road trip across the American West in this irreverent debut novel.
MISS CHLOE: A Memoir of a Literary Friendship with Toni Morrison, by AJ Verdelle. (Amistad, $27.99.) An intimate and lyrical photograph of the author’s decades-long friendship with the Nobel Prize-winning author, praising Morrison’s achievements in “relentlessly stripping the hegemonic gaze” and reflecting on writing as a black woman in America .
HER COUNTRY: How the women of country music became the success they should never have been, by Marissa R. Moss. (Holt, $28.99.) An examination of country music’s last two decades through the careers of Maren Morris, Mickey Guyton, and Kacey Musgraves, who transformed country music from a boys’ club into “a musical world where women are in charge.”
