January’s books feature a revisioned classic, a homeschooler’s memoir and a provocative thriller dramedy
This month’s new releases include ‘Call Me Ishmaelle’ by Xiaolu Guo, ‘Homeschooled: A Memoir’ by Stefan Merrill Block, ‘Anatomy of an Alibi’ by Ashley Elston and ‘Half His Age’ by Jennette McCurdy
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The new year means the kickoff of a season with highly anticipated book releases. In January, readers can look forward to several promising projects, including a clever take on a literary staple, a peek into the world of homeschoolers and former Nickelodeon star Jennette McCurdy’s fiction debut.
‘Call Me Ishmaelle’ by Xiaolu Guo
One of this year’s most anticipated releases is a feminist reimagining of the literary classic “Moby Dick.” National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Xiaolu Guo recasts Ishmael as a 17-year-old girl disguised as a cabin boy and Ahab as a Black freedman named Seneca, haunted by his father’s legacy of enslavement.
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Ishmaelle joins Captain Seneca’s crew as he hunts the white whale that took his leg. Guo “dispenses with the digressions on whaling that thickened Melville’s novel,” making this version “more propulsive and immediate,” said Kirkus Reviews. She “blends in her own rhetorical tweaks,” shifting to the “mad, complex voices of Seneca and, at times, the whales themselves.” (out now, $18, Grove Atlantic, Amazon)
‘Homeschooled: A Memoir’ by Stefan Merrill Block
Novelist Stefan Merrill Block recounts the five years he spent largely on his own while homeschooled in his new “absorbing” memoir, said. Isolated from his peers and “virtually abandoned by the adults who might have intervened,” Block “moldered behind closed doors with only his unraveling mother for company.”