The form factor and presentation say a children’s book (and the Library of Congress says “juvenile literature”) but this has a creepy vibe to it that is a bit at odds with that expectation. I think that is a good thing; the tilted, not quite right nature of the story and images worked for me. To be fair, they’d probably work for the right kind of kid, too.

Good children’s books aren’t just cutesy. They are disarming, so can reach deep and touch grownups who are open-minded enough to read them (think Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree), or are full of wry and not just laugh out loud humor (think The Very Persisten Gappers of Frip). I really liked this book, but I’m not saying it reaches the level of those two — they are two of my favorite books — though it is several steps in the direction of Frip.

The word play that drives the story (“Ian saw a bird soar overhead” “Ann saw a bird with a sore head”) lends itself to some gory but fun illustrations. (You really notice the red with the saturated colors.) The illustrations are handmade miniatures, photographed at interesting angles and depths of focus.

If you have an odd kid in your life, or know a grownup who was an odd kid, they might appreciate this book and its amusing story about overcoming boredom.

Though I don’t know Purcell’s work well, I’ve been aware of her for a long time, as her subject matter — cabinet of curiosities kind of stuff, eery and disturbingly beautiful — is something I find compelling. She’s on my mental list of artists I want to learn more about, whose work I want to spend time with. So when I found this early volume on sale in a used bookstore, I snapped it up.

What I find fascinating about these images is that so many of them seem to have multiple layers, they invite long looks and investigation. It’s not how they were made, it’s the end result that holds my attention. While technique can be interesting, knowing how an image was made doesn’t make me interested in a photograph if nothing was sparked when I first looked at it. That said, I find it remarkable that most of these weren’t double exposures, but cleverly created single exposures. (Since this book was published in 1980, they obviously weren’t digital manipulations.)

If this level of creativity and exploration of what is possible is what she created early in her career, I have much to look forward to as I get to know Purcell’s later work.

Troeller spent over a decade photographing water therapies in spas all over the world; this book is the result. It may sound luxurious, and I suppose it is, but without the negative associations of excess or incredible expense. This images are about the luxury of time, letting go, taking care of oneself — embodying, in many cases, the metaphor of floating away.

The softness, blur, motion, and interesting light effects work to make you feel the water, the warmth, the relaxation. (They even made me curious about water therapies; I love to be in the water, especially at the beach, but have never tried a spa treatment.) I found the images that captured the sense of motion in water to be the most captivating.

This was a weird trippy story, funny and disturbed from the title on down. The narrative loops around on itself (okay, that was a lie; those drugs don’t exist) and questions its own believability. If you are a sucker for an unreliable narrator, you’ll have to read this book, because Jane Charlotte is your girl.

Janes’s story is fascinating. Paranoia? Check. Delusions and self sabotage? Check. Insane (insanely clever?) bureaucracy — with units named things like “The Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons”? Check.

Ruff manages to ask some interesting and serious questions along the way. What’s evil? What about redemption? What should you be doing with your life? His characters make a distinction between fighting crime and fighting evil, and it doesn’t seem like splitting hairs.

If you like near future or alternate reality stories, want off kilter and a fast pace, I highly recommend Bad Monkeys. If you are like me, you’ll find yourself wanting parts of Ruff’s world to be real, then wondering what it says about you that you think that. Also: if mandrills didn’t creep you out before, now they will.

This is apparently the fourth book Ruff has written. I’ll be on the lookout for the previous three, and I eagerly await the next one, which he’s writing now.

This giant sprawling novel (it goes on for well over five hundred pages) should be ridiculous on its face: a lonely polygamist? Really? That the blurb on the back cover seems to give too much away (grief, an affair, yes the main character is going to literally be a polygamist) doesn’t really help matters much.

Except. Except the name of the author is Brady Udall. He wrote The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, which I loved so much I’d read any book with Udall’s name on the spine.

It would be easy to think I’d have no reason to like this book, this giant polygamist Mormon family. These characters are just so… different, strange… so (and here Brady works his magic) just like real people.

The surprise for me was in how normal the characters’ lives could feel. Because if we’re honest, we can admit that normal can mean lost or lonely or struggling or wishing to be saved, to be a hero, be noticed, and have somebody love you.

Yes, there’s poverty, the privation not privacy in the children’s lives, the baffling choices that go into being a plural wife, and yet Udall kept me turning pages. I kept kept turning pages, getting involved, even though it was a train wreck, I always knew it would be a train wreck, how could it be anything else?

On one level, of course this story is unbelievable, with its classroom-sized group of siblings, brothel construction, the dark obsessions of a misunderstood boy, and a seemingly evil ostrich. Only it is believable, oddly so, because as you read, you recognize the bits that are about any life, and you identify with those feelings, and not the parts that are most crazy and different.

Who doesn’t recognize — because you’ve been there or been struggling with someone who is in that space — the craving for someone to tell you what to do, even when the person calling the shots is supposed to be you? Who hasn’t worried about making excuses or making compromises?

So the book is big and rambling (like the Richard family) and their choices can seem mystifying, and there’s a sense that not as many make it out as want (need?) to, yet the book doesn’t have a throw it against the wall in frustration ending. It isn’t exactly happy, but it makes sense given the logic Golden Richards has chosen to live by.