Summary In the 1920s, hundreds of young women worked in watch dial factories in New Jersey and Illinois, painting tiny numerals with a phosphorescent paint that contained radium. To keep their brushes fine enough for the precise work, they were instructed to put the brushes in their mouths between strokes. The factory owners knew radium…
Summary Glennon Doyle was, by conventional measures, thriving. She had a Christian blog with millions of readers, a nonprofit organization she founded, a marriage, children, and a speaking career built around the message of honest vulnerability. She was also, by her own account, not living the life she was actually living. Then, in the middle…
Summary Michelle McNamara spent the last years of her life pursuing a serial killer she named the Golden State Killer: a man who committed at least fifty rapes and thirteen murders across California in the 1970s and 1980s and was never identified. She was not a detective. She was a true crime writer, the founder…
Summary In 1985, when Natasha Trethewey was nineteen years old, her stepfather murdered her mother on a road in Atlanta called Memorial Drive. He had threatened to kill her before. Her mother had fled him before. The restraining orders and the warnings had not been enough. Trethewey has been living with this knowledge and this…
Summary Kiese Laymon addresses Heavy to his mother. It is the most radical formal choice in the book, and there are many radical formal choices: the memoir is structured as a direct address, “you” throughout, a letter to the woman who shaped him and harmed him and who he loves with a complexity that the…
In the late summer of 1937, a sharecropper’s wife named Ida Mae Brandon Gladney packed up her family’s belongings in rural Mississippi and boarded a northbound train. She had no job waiting in Chicago, no savings worth mentioning, and no plan beyond getting out. What she was running from was the rigid, violent architecture of…
Summary Five Pebble is an unremarkable planet. It has no particularly interesting geography, no great natural phenomena, nothing to draw visitors except its position at a junction of transit lanes that makes it a convenient waystation for travelers moving between more significant destinations. Ouloo, a Laru innkeeper, has built her life here with her child…
Summary The Power begins with a premise that sounds like wish-fulfillment and delivers something considerably more complex. Women and girls around the world discover they have developed a biological ability: they can conduct electricity through their bodies and release it at will, ranging from a mild shock to a lethal charge. The ability can be…
Summary In the world of Panga, robots became sentient centuries ago. They asked for their freedom politely. They got it, because the humans of Panga were reasonable people who recognized that a sentient being asking for freedom has made a sufficiently compelling argument. The robots walked into the wilderness that humans had left largely untouched,…
Summary Two agents are at war across time. Red serves the Agency, a technological utopia that controls the future through careful manipulation of historical threads. Blue serves the Garden, an organic, biological civilization with an equally determined vision of what the future should be. Their respective civilizations have been fighting across centuries and millennia, altering…
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