Short, sharp, and expertly crafted, this realistic YA is a portrait of a girl who will do whatever it takes to carve out a place for herself in the world.

Destiny cannot count on anyone but herself. Her mother has struggled with addiction for all of Destiny’s seventeen years, moving them from town to town, bad boyfriend to bad boyfriend—including a particularly dark period in Texas, where Destiny ended up in a psychiatric hospital. But now they’re in a small town in a new state and her mother’s new boyfriend is sober and stable. And even more remarkable, Destiny has caught the eye of local golden boy Ryan.

But Destiny’s fairy tale bubble bursts when Ryan says their summer romance has to give way to football season. Destiny spirals hard, retreating into the same delusional and dissociative patterns that landed her in psychiatric care as a child, but this time the breakdown culminates in a pregnancy that can’t possibly be real.

Destiny’s skill as an artist is alternately a lifeline and a millstone as she struggles to resurface and reconnect with reality.

The post Girl Reflected in Knife first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

Though many of us can point to patterns of brokenness in our lives, we don’t know why they’re there. No matter how hard we work, we can’t seem to outrun the very things that break our hearts. That’s because our everyday setbacks are rooted in our unaddressed wounds.

In Why Am I Like This? seminary-trained, licensed trauma therapist Kobe Campbell helps us understand why it’s so hard to break these patterns as she offers us a deeper understanding of how our past shapes our present. With tender wisdom, rare vulnerability, and profound honesty, Kobe reminds each reader that they’re not alone, empowering them to step into healing with evidence-based, faith-filled coping skills and resources.

In Why Am I Like This?, you will:

• gain an understanding of what trauma and healing really are,
• explore the roots of your dysfunctional patterns,
• learn how your trauma shows up in your everyday life, and
• find trauma-informed, faith-based coping mechanisms to heal your mind and deepen your intimacy with God.

Kobe marries theological insight with therapeutic principles to give readers the tools and insights needed to begin their journey of restoration.

The post Why Am I Like This? first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

From the author of Rabbits for Food comes a profound and deeply moving new novel about a middle-aged couple’s struggle with the husband’s descent into early onset Lewy Body dementia, shot through with Kirshenbaum’s signature lacerating humor.

It begins with hallucinations. From their living room window, Leo sees a man on stilts, an acting troupe, a pair of swans paddling on the Manhattan streets below. Then he’s unable to perform simple tasks and experiences a host of other erratic disturbances, none of which his doctors can explain. Leo, 53, a research scientist, and Addie, a collage artist, have a loving and happy marriage. They’d planned on many more years of work and travel, dinner with friends, quiet evenings at home with the cat. But as Leo’s periods of lucidity become rarer, those dreams fall away, and Addie finds herself less and less able to cope with an increasingly unbearable present.

Eventually, Leo is diagnosed with early onset dementia in the form of Lewy body disease. Life expectancy ranges from 3 to 20 years. A decidedly uncharacteristic act of violence makes it clear that he cannot live at home. He moves first to an assisted living facility and then to a small apartment with a caretaker, where, over time, he descends into full cognitive decline. Addie’s agony, anger, and guilt result in self-imposed isolation, which mirrors Leo’s diminished life. And so for years, all she can do is watch him die—too soon, and yet not soon enough.

Kirshenbaum captures the pair’s final years, months, and days in short scenes that burn with despair, dark humor, and rage, tracking the brutal destruction of the disease as well as the moments of love and beauty that still exist for them.

Story Locale: New York, NY

The post Counting Backwards first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

By the time Marian Schembari was diagnosed with autism at thirty-four years old, she had been labeled with Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sensory processing disorder, anxiety, and depression. Therapists suggested she was a highly sensitive person, offered breathing techniques, and instructed her to practice gratitude journaling. None of this helped. She spent years hiding tics and frequently shutting down, wondering why she couldn’t just act like everyone else. It wasn’t until she witnessed a friend’s diagnosis and sought out professional testing that the pieces clicked into place. She wasn’t just odd or socially awkward, but actually autistic.

Today, more people than ever are being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder later in life. Improvements in the ability to recognize the signs have made it easier to properly identify neurodivergence, especially women and girls who have learned to mask their differences. But it’s still all too easy to go decades feeling broken.

A Little Less Broken is Schembari’s unflinchingly honest story of self-consciousness and doubt, frustration and anger, but also love, motherhood, and self-fulfillment. From the time in second grade when she hid in a closet, carefully writing down notes as her friends explained why they no longer liked her, to an adulthood where she can confidently ask for the accommodations at work and at home, Shembari offers solidarity for all those finding freedom while finding themselves.

The post A Little Less Broken: How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

Rosalind Franklin knows that to be a woman in a man’s world is to be invisible. In the 1950s, science is a gentleman’s profession and in the years after WWII there are plenty of scientists who want to keep it that way.

After being segregated at Cambridge, then ignored and criticized in the workplace, she has no intention of being seen as a second-class scientist and throws everything into proving her worth. But despite her success in unlocking the very secret of life, the ultimate glory is claimed by the men she left in her wake.

Inspired by the true story of a woman so many tried to silence, The English Chemist is a tale of hope and perseverance, love and betrayal.

The post The English Chemist: The Story of Rosalind Franklin first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

When a blowup at school gets Karmen sent home for a few weeks, life gets more complicated: things between her parents are tenser than ever, her best friend’s acting like a stranger, and her search to understand why Julian died keeps coming up empty.

New friend Pru both baffles and comforts Karmen, and there might finally be something happening with her crush, Isaiah, but does she have time for either, or are they just more distractions? Will she ever understand Julian’s struggle and tragedy? If not, can she love—and live—again?

The post Where Was Goodbye? first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

Dennis Monk is 26, a college graduate, and a former blackout drunk. Once, he planned on being a writer. Now, he mostly works menial jobs as he puzzles over how to exist in the world as a sober person. He’s spent the last few months living at his parents’ house in the Philadelphia suburbs, but after they kick him out, he returns to the temptations of city life and a summer of couch surfing across South Philadelphia.

Monk makes his humbling pilgrimage through a Philadelphia itself in an awkward state of change; growing, gentrifying, maturing in baffling and humiliating and wonderful ways; haunted by its past as well as its unrealized potential. A few of Monk’s schoolmates have gotten nice jobs and moved out of state, but many have failed that millennial imperative for geographic and social mobility. His adventures with former friends and lovers reveal that sobriety is not the happy ending of his confusion but merely a new, just-as-messy chapter. What if you quit drinking and that alone makes you no happier, no kinder, no better at life? From where does one seek his salvation then—and where can a weary traveler lay his head?

Michael Deagler’s Early Sobrieties is a second coming-of-age story, a wry but poignant meditation on the sublime, confessional, redemptive power of a writer, at last, finding the right words.

Story Locale: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The post Early Sobrieties first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

Before COVID-19 made “pandemic” a household word in 2020, there was the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s and 1990s. Author Lynn Curlee explores the parallels and the difference as he recounts living in New York and Los Angeles when the disease silently took hold of the gay community. As the disease became a full-blown public health crisis, Curlee watched in horror at the devastating progression of HIV/AIDS, the staggering losses endured, and divisive politics and discrimination that cost many people their lives.

With honesty and heart, Curlee tells the stories of the many friends and loved ones that he lost to the disease, including his own life partner. LGBTQ+ rights and access to health care continues to be threatened today. The Other Pandemic is a stark and strong reminder of how history speaks to the present, and this window to the past is a valuable tool for understanding our current cultural landscape.

Story Locale: 1980s and 1990s NYC; Los Angeles

The post The Other Pandemic: An AIDS Memoir first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

Emmalene loves the sounds of her city—but Grandma Jean does not. She doesn’t consider it music. And she just doesn’t get it.

But when Emmalene encourages her to take a closer listen, Grandma Jean hears something beautiful.

Song in the City is a rhythmic and lightly humorous tale that bridges the gap between generations of music and family while centering love, understanding, and joy.

The post Song in the City first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.

Putting up a front and hiding her mental illness from her classmates is going to be the hardest thing high schooler Natalie Cordova has ever done. It’s her senior year, and she’s just been selected to present her artwork at a prestigious show. With the stress of performing on her shoulders, it doesn’t help when Natalie notices a boy who makes her heart leap. And then there’s fellow student Ella, who confronts Natalie about her summer car “accident” and pressures her into caring for the world’s ugliest dog. Now Natalie finds herself juggling all kinds of feels and responsibilities. Surely her newly prescribed medication is to blame for the funk she finds herself in. But as Natalie’s plan to self-treat unravels, so does the perfect façade she’s been painting for everyone else.

Written from experience, this heartfelt and candid contemporary YA novel explores the stigma surrounding mental illness and offers an uplifting narrative of resilience.

The post The Art of Insanity first appeared on Shelves Bookstore.