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New Book of the Week
Lonely Castle in the Mirror
by Mizuki Tsujimura, translated by Philip Gabriel
I picked up Lonely Castle in the Mirror knowing nothing beyond the back-cover copy, and I think that's the best way to approach this puzzle of a fantasy novel. Thirteen-yea- old Kokoro spends her days alone in her room, too traumatized to return to junior high after a bad experience with the other students. When her mirror lights up one day, she discovers it's a portal to a mysterious castle. Six other junior high students have also been called to the castle and assigned a quest: to find the key to a room that will grant the finder one wish. This very special book twists and turns and had pierced me through the heart by the end. If you want to cry your eyes out (in a good way), read this book! Fans of The House in the Cerulean Sea will find similar themes of connection and friendship here. While we have Lonely Castle in the Mirror shelved in our adult fantasy/sci-fi section in the store, I'd also recommend it for young adult and even middle grade readers. —Haley
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New Book of the Week
The Hero of This Book
by Elizabeth McCracken
You might read this little book, as I did, loving almost every page, and not be sure at the end what actually happened. What happens, more or less, is the narrator—this is not a memoir, she says, but it 99% is—visits London, a city she had recently visited with her late mother, and walks around by herself and remembers—is reminded of—her marvelous, stubborn, private, outgoing, tiny, generous, misshapen, funny, opinionated, brilliant mother. It's a book of adjectives more than story, and as if in tribute to its hero, just about every sentence in the book is odd and beautiful. And if, when you get to the end of the book, you don't quite know what happened, do what I'm doing (with even more pleasure than the first time): read it again. —Tom
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Old Book of the Week
Phinney by Post Book #94
Young Man with a Horn
by Dorothy Baker
If you've ever seen the 1950 Kirk Douglas movie based on this book, please forget that you did: the book is so much better. It's the story of a rootless, almost anonymous boy who finds himself in music—a white boy, specifically, who finds himself in the black musical tradition of jazz, though the book manages to avoid many of the clichés such stories have made familiar. Like Beth Harmon on the chessboard in Walter Tevis's The Queen's Gambit, Rick Martin is an orphan driven to perfect a talent that seems to fall out of the sky, and like Tevis, Baker builds her story, and Martin's half-inarticulate interior life, from the simplest of language. It's a moving and spacious portrait of passionate (and destructive) creativity, and of friendship too, between RIck and his other true love: his fellow players. —Tom
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Kids' Book of the Week
Phinney by Post Kids Book #82
Farmhouse
by Sophie Blackall
The ruined farmhouse on a property Sophie Blackall moved to in upstate New York could not have fallen into better hands than the Caldecott-winning author of Hello Lighthouse. Layering actual materials—wallpaper, old dresses—she found in the ruins, research into the family that had lived there for generations, and her own imagination, she has created a portrait of a place, and a family, over time that feels like an immediate classic. (Age 1 and up) —Tom
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Non-Book of the Week
2023 Calendars!
The 2023 calendars—wall calendars, engagement calendars, advent calendars, in more volume and variety than ever before—are here, including the latest from our runaway bestseller every year, Olympia's own Nikki McClure.
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Link of the Week
Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine
Many of you have turned to Timothy Snyder's short manifesto, On Tyranny, for guidance in recent years (and likely will continue to), and since the Russian invasion of Ukraine many have also turned to his writings on the "bloodlands" of Eastern Europe and Russia under Putin. Now you can also follow along with his fall lecture course on "The Making of Modern Ukraine," which his employer, Yale University, is putting online for free as the lectures appear, and which puts the current war in the rich context of geography, theories of nationalism, and many centuries of history. It's an exciting privilege to be invited into his classroom, and when he mentions upcoming exams, you don't have to take them!
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Cover Crop Quiz #247
I think some fans of this 2006 first edition will know it from the color alone, or perhaps from the hint of the drawing style contained within.
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Last Week's Answer
Our Halloween-appropriate crop was from Shirley Jackson's ever-famouser 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House.
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New to Our 100 Club
Wrecking Ball (Diary of a Wimpy Kid #14)
by Jeff Kinney
(156 weeks to reach 100)
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New to Our 100 Club
Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind
by Yuval Noah Harari
(233 weeks to reach 100)
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Phinney Books
7405 Greenwood Ave. N
Seattle, WA 98103
206.297.2665
www.phinneybooks.com
info@phinneybooks.com
Facebook page
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Were you out on Greenwood during the trick-or-treating on Saturday afternoon? We were so delighted to see the sidewalks as full of costumed kids (and costumed grownups too) as in past years. And we hope to see a similar turnout at another resurrected neighborhood tradition, the 
Who will be there this year? Many favorites you might have seen at Bookfests before, like David B. Williams, Laurie Frankel, Erica Bauermeister, Tara Austen Weaver, Boyd Morrison, and Lynn Brunelle. And many exciting first-time Festers, like novelist Nicola Griffith and memoirist Putsata Reang (both of whose books 
