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Journey Paperback – 7 Aug. 2014

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Be swept away on an elaborate flight of fancy in this Caldecott award-winning, wondrously illustrated picture book about self-determination and unexpected friendship. The winner of the prestigious Caldecott Honor, and described by the New York Times as 'a masterwork', Aaron Becker's stunning, wordless picture book debut about self-determination and unexpected friendship follows a little girl who draws a magic door on her bedroom wall. Through it she escapes into a world where wonder, adventure and danger abound. Red marker pen in hand, she creates a boat, a balloon and a flying carpet which carry her on a spectacular journey ... who knows where? When she is captured by a sinister emperor, only an act of tremendous courage and kindness can set her free. Can it also guide her home and to happiness? In this exquisitely illustrated book, an ordinary child is launched on an extraordinary, magical journey towards her greatest and most rewarding adventure of all...

• Book 1 of 3 Journey Trilogy
• Print length 40 pages
• Language English
• Dimensions 27.1 x 0.4 x 24 cm
• Publisher Walker Books
• Publication date 7 Aug. 2014
• ISBN-10 1406355348
• ISBN-13 978-1406355345
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Walker Books (7 Aug. 2014)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 40 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1406355348
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1406355345
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 4 - 8 years, from customers
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 27.1 x 0.4 x 24 cm
• 23 in Children's Books on Travel
• 64 in Travel Fiction for Children
• 146 in Children's Books on Self-Esteem & Self-Respect

About the author

Aaron becker.

Born in Baltimore, Aaron Becker moved to California to attend Pomona College where he scored his first illustration job designing t-shirts for his water polo team. Since then, he's traveled to Kenya, Japan, Sweden, and Tahiti backpacking around while looking for good things to eat and feeding his imagination. He now lives with his family in Amherst, MA where he's busy at work on his next book project. You can find out more about what he's been up to lately at storybreathing.com.

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BOOKS JOURNEY

A 2014 Caldecott Honor Book

A lonely girl draws a magic door on her bedroom wall and through it escapes into a world where wonder, adventure, and danger abound. Red marker in hand, she creates a boat, a balloon, and a flying carpet that carry her on a spectacular journey toward an uncertain destiny. When she is captured by a sinister emperor, only an act of tremendous courage and kindness can set her free. Can it also lead her home and to her heart’s desire? With supple line, luminous color, and nimble flights of fancy, author-illustrator Aaron Becker launches an ordinary child on an extraordinary journey toward her greatest and most exciting adventure of all.

“Though Becker has plenty of experience as an artist for films, “Journey” is his first book, and it’s a masterwork.” — New York Times Book Review

Click here to order JOURNEY from bookshop.org and help support independent booksellers across the country!

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• FILM DESIGN: animatics
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© 2013-2024 Aaron Becker All Rights Reserved.

Embark On Your Life Journey

Journey®, your trusted journaling companion.

Journey® is a journal and diary app that is available on multiple platforms; iOS, Mac OS, Web, Chrome OS, and Android. Join millions of Journey users, from all walks of life, to embark on your unique life journey towards a deeper gratitude for life, better health, and a calmer mind through journaling.

Capture beautiful memories.

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Shared Journal

Collaborate and create cherished memories with your loved ones, family members, or even friends on an unforgettable journey together. †

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Hello, I am Journey Odyssey AI, your AI journal assistant. Please ask me a question about your journal.

Can you share with me more about this person called Hazel?

Hazel appears to be a beloved person frequently mentioned in the journal entries. Here are some highlights: Hazel was excited to receive a ukulele from her aunt. She had her first field trip away from the city, which she loved.

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An all encompassing digital diary app that is fit to be a writing and journaling companion for people from all walks of life, or going through different life experiences.

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Journey (Aaron Becker's Wordless Trilogy Book 1) Kindle Edition

• Book 1 of 3 Journey Trilogy
• Print length 40 pages
• Language English
• Grade level Preschool - 3
• Lexile measure NP
• Publisher Candlewick Press
• Publication date December 1, 2020
• Page Flip Not Enabled
• Word Wise Not Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Not Enabled
• Sticky notes Not Enabled
• ISBN-13 978-0763660536
• See all details
• Kindle Fire HDX 8.9''
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• In This Series
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review, from school library journal, from booklist, about the author, product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08NTC2K22
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Candlewick Press; 1st edition (December 1, 2020)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 1, 2020
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 32053 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Not enabled
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 40 pages
• #356 in Children's Imagination & Play Fiction
• #1,554 in Children's Fantasy & Magic Adventure
• #1,596 in Children's Books on Friendship

About the author

Aaron becker.

Born in Baltimore, Aaron Becker moved to California to attend Pomona College where he scored his first illustration job designing t-shirts for his water polo team. Since then, he's traveled to Kenya, Japan, Sweden, and Tahiti backpacking around while looking for good things to eat and feeding his imagination. He now lives with his family in Amherst, MA where he's busy at work on his next book project. You can find out more about what he's been up to lately at storybreathing.com.

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Up Home: One Girl’s Journey

An inspiring, indelible memoir from the daughter of sharecroppers in East Texas who became the first Black president of an Ivy League University—an uplifting story of girlhood and the power of family, community, and the classroom to transform one young person's life.

I was born at a crossroads: a crossroads in history, a crossroads in culture, and a geographical crossroads in North Houston County in East Texas.

Born in 1945, Ruth J. Simmons grew up the twelfth child of sharecroppers. Her first home had no running water, no electricity to light the two crowded rooms, no books to read. Yet despite this—or, in her words, because of it—Simmons would become one of America’s preeminent educators. The former president of Smith College and Brown University, and now the outgoing president of Prairie View A&M, Texas's oldest HBCU, for decades Simmons has inspired generations of students as she herself made history.

In Up Home , Simmons takes us back to Grapeland to show how the people who love us when we are young shape who we become: We meet her caring, tireless mother who managed to feed her large family with an often empty pantry; her father, who refused to let racial and economic injustice crush his youngest daughter's dreams; the doting brothers and sisters; and the attentive teachers who welcomed Ruth into the classroom, guiding her to a future she could hardly imagine as a child.

From the farmland of East Texas to Houston's Fifth Ward to New Orleans at the dawn of the civil rights movement, Simmons depicts an era long gone but whose legacies of inequality we still live with today. Written in clear and timeless prose, Up Home is both an origin story set in the segregated South and the uplifting chronicle of a girl whose intellect, grace, and curiosity guide her as she creates a place for herself in the world.

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Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Children’s Book Review: The Journey Trilogy by Aaron Becker

November 5, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]The first time I encountered a wordless picture book for children was  Journey at my mother’s house nearly a year ago. Long before we had ventured to the library she was already cycling through books for EV every time she visited.

Over the summer, E bought EV a wordless book called  Pool . I was skeptical of it at first, recalling EV’s disinterest in  Journey . Then, I watched something magic begin to happen. E kept making up the story of  Pool , and EV began to  interact with the story . Sometimes she interjected to add something from a prior telling, others she inserted her own details.

I took a turn reading it to her, and I noticed different facets of it than E, so my telling was a shade different. If I asked nicely enough and didn’t make a big deal about it, EV would even “read”  Pool to me.

Pool was one of our most-read books during the summer. When E was listing off books from her want-list for our request list for the library and mentioned  Journey , my ears pricked up.

I wondered – how would EV like the book now that she was older and more engaged in the shared creation of a story? Would  Journey include both enough narrative and enough ambiguity to make for as interesting a read as Pool?

What a difference a few months made!

The Journey Trilogy: Journey, Quest , and Return by Aaron Becker 

Gender Diversity: Female protagonist; most other characters are male, although background characters are sometimes agender.

Ethnic Diversity: None, unfortunately

Challenging Language: None!

Themes to Discuss: imagination, fantasy, canals, cooperation

Reading Time: Depends on the reader! Between 4-15 minutes each, for us.

The Journey Trilogy by Aaron Becker is a beautiful, brilliant, fantastical trio of wordless adventure books by with a capable little girl hero, each with plenty of room for interpretation and expansion in the retelling. Becker proves himself an ingenious storyteller with an eye for detail and a knack for tantalizing ambiguity.

Journey   is the story of a young girl who uses a piece of red chalk to travel to a fantastic world by drawing a door on her bedroom walk. In that world, she learns that the chalk can draw anything out of thin air.

After sailing through a town built on a series of canals, she encounters a group of soldiers flying in zeppelins are trying to catch a vivid purple bird. The girl tries to save the bird, but she’s captured herself, and the two work together so she can get free. The bird leads her to a door just like her own, except it’s the same color as the bird! On the other side, she is back in the real world down the street from her house, where she meets a boy with purple chalk.

The easiest example is the red chalk itself. The girl finds it on the floor of her room. Is it the first time she has encountered it? The natural urge is to say yes, as that fits with how stories like this one are usually told. However, she already owns a matching red scooter and red ball which she has been carrying around the house with her. Is it a coincidence that red is her favorite color, or had she created with the chalk before?

These points of interpretation abound in  Journey , and they’re part of what makes it so fun in the retelling. Does the girl mean to steer her little red boat to the top of the highest canal? Is it she or the the bird who engineers the magic carpet that will fit through the bars of her cage? Where do she and the boy find the body of a bike that they draw wheels for at the end of the book?

That’s what makes  Journey perfect for a small reader who can interact with you while you read. The details that EV noticed and questions she asked shaped out version of the story. Sometimes it’s a very plain, descriptive version that simply explains the action on each page. Others it unfurls in the telling like a florid fairy tale, full of little asides and descriptions of the girl’s inner monologue.

Journey would already be a surefire recommendation if it stood alone, but Aaron Becker extended the story into two additional books –  Quest and  Return – that are somehow even more captivating than  Journey itself!

Return begins similarly to  Journey  – the girl decides to travel to her secret world when her father doesn’t play with her. This time, her father follows her to her room and discovers the open door and the fantastical world on the other side. He finds the girl, boy, and king meeting together, but they’re interrupted with the guards and a machine that can vacuum up their colorful creations – and their chalk! A chase ensues, in which the girl’s father sees all the ingenious ways she’s learned how to use the chalk. However, they have to work together to figure out how to protect the girl’s red chalk from capture and free the king and the boy from the grips of the guards.

There is so much to love in both books, but I’ll simply highlight my favorite element of each.

My main telling has the boy as much more tentative and unsure than the girl to emphasize how strong encouragement makes her a good leader and friend. However, there are other times I put them on more equal footing, or have them bicker amusingly. Sometimes the girl is cautious, while others she is headstrong and needs to be reeled back in by the boy.

Each person I’ve watched read it with EV gives the pair their own balance. The only thing you cannot really exclude is that the girl is clearly the protagonist of the series.

Return is  The Empire Strikes Back of the trilogy, because the introduction of the father to the story includes several potentially mind-blowing revelations that fundamentally change the story depending on how much you fixate on the details of the book.

• The father appears to be drawing at his work desk – what is his job or hobby?
• A door similar to the girl’s can be spotted in the father’s office early in the book. Does it already (or did it ever) lead to the fantasy world?
• The father and the girl both have looks of shock on their faces when they meet in the fantasy world. What is it that surprises each of them? What is it that causes the girl’s subsequent cross-armed reticence?
• The girl and her father encounter a series of seemingly prophetic sketches in a cave. How did they get there?
• Did the father always have the ability to draw in the world with his gray work pencil, or did something happen to cause it to be useful? And, do you think the gray looks similar to the gray of the guard’s armor?

If you read between the lines in those questions, you can see that there is an intriguing meta-narrative about the father that might change the meaning of the prior books depending on your interpretation. This is just one example of how the books open themselves up to growing in the retelling.

When I evaluate if a purchase was worthwhile, I do so on a matrix of dollars invested vs. time enjoyed vs. intensity of enjoyment. If I apply that matrix to the  Journey  books they are a relatively flat shape of nearly infinity length and width – meaning, they weren’t that expensive but there is  no end to the time and amount of enjoyment EV gets from them. She walks around the house with them clutched tightly to her little chest, and will sit for an hour retelling the stories to her stuffed animals and toys.

My sole critique of Journey is that Becker missed an easy opportunity to diversify his cast in making the little boy anything other than white. We don’t meet any of his relatives (OR DO WE?), so his whiteness doesn’t create consistency with any other element of the book. Having him be a kid of color who makes fast friends with the girl and joins in her adventure would only add to the wordless power of these books in displaying friendship, loyalty, and cooperation.

The  Journey  Trilogy is breathtaking modern classic of fantasy from Aaron Becker that can captivate kids from age 2 to 102. All it takes to enjoy them is an imagination and a willingness to get lost in the beautiful details of his fantasy world. If your toddler isn’t quite enough for it yet, she’ll get there.

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Journey, by Aaron Becker | Book Review

Book Review of  Journey The Children’s Book Review

Written and Illustrated by Aaron Becker

Ages 4+ | 40 Pages

Publisher: Candlewick | ISBN-13: 9780763660536

What to Expect: A Wordless Adventure

Sometimes there are no words to describe a book. And sometimes, there are no words in the actual book itself. Journey is one of those books—it’s both wordless and wondrous.

When a young girl draws a magic door on her bedroom wall and goes through it with her red marker, she leaves a drab-colored world and enters a magical world filled with color and adventure. Using a colored marker, she creates ways to navigate this unknown place: a boat, a balloon, a flying carpet, and a tandem bike. Amongst the world’s beauty, there is also danger, and an evil emperor captures the girl. How will she escape? How will she return home?

No spoiler here, but an unexpected friendship is the outcome of this incredibly gorgeous tale told only by the artwork on the pages. The little girl is adventurous, courageous, and kind and knows how to have fun. She will inspire you to take your own imaginative journey if you can tear yourself away from this incredible book.

The first book in a trilogy, Journey by Aaron Becker, won a most prestigious award—a Caldecott Honor Book in 2014.

Buy the Book

About the author-illustrator.

Aaron Becker has worked as an artist in the film and animation industry, where he helped define the look and feel of characters, stories, and the movies they become a part of. With Journey, he has created characters and worlds of his very own, using traditional materials and techniques. Aaron Becker lives with his wife, daughter, and cat in Amherst, Massachusetts.

What to Read Next if You Love Journey by Aaron Becker

Quest , by Aaron Becker

Return , by Aaron Becker

The Tree and the River , by Aaron Becker

Harold and the Purple Crayon , by Crockett Johnson

Where the Wild Things Are , by Maurice Sendak

The Red Book , by Barbara Lehman

Bianca Schulze reviewed  Journey by Aaron Becker. Discover more books like  Journey  by reading our reviews and articles tagged with Adventure .

• X (Twitter)

Bianca Schulze is the founder of The Children’s Book Review. She is a reader, reviewer, mother and children’s book lover. She also has a decade’s worth of experience working with children in the great outdoors. Combined with her love of books and experience as a children’s specialist bookseller, the goal is to share her passion for children’s literature to grow readers. Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, she now lives with her husband and three children near Boulder, Colorado.

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BOTTOMS UP AND THE DEVIL LAUGHS: A Journey Through the Deep State , by Kerry Howley

This was one of the Book Review’s 10 best books of 2023 .

The people in Kerry Howley’s new book include fabulists, truth tellers, combatants, whistle-blowers. Like many of us, they have left traces of themselves in the digital ether by making a phone call, texting a friend, looking up something online. Certain conveniences have become so frictionless that we reflexively entrust devices with mundane yet intimate secrets: group-chat gossip, numbers of steps taken, dumb selfies.

“It is our fate to live in the age of the indelible,” Howley writes in “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs,” her account of the national security state and the people entangled in it. “It’s best to just take another photograph. Keep building up the database. Throw it into the cloud, whatever that is.”

Howley is a writer for New York magazine and the author of “Thrown” (2014), a book about mixed martial arts fighters (real) that was narrated by a philosophy student named Kit (not real). As far as I can tell, “Bottoms Up” seems to be narrated by Howley — though who she “really is” and, by extension, who any of us “really are” is something that this book encourages us not to take for granted.

The book is riveting and darkly funny and, in all senses of the word, unclassifiable. Howley writes about privacy and its absence; about hiding and leaking and secrets and betrayal. But she also writes about the strange experience of living, and how it gets flattened and codified into data that can be turned into portraits of static, permanent beings — creatures who would be unrecognizable to ourselves.

“With endless information comes the ability to take information from its context, to tell stories perfectly matched to the intentions of the teller, freed from the complex texture of reality,” Howley writes. Countering that slide toward bland propaganda, “Bottoms Up” returns information to its context, capturing as much as possible the texture of reality, showing us how bewildering it often is.

She reintroduces us to figures like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and John Walker Lindh. We revisit the case of John Kiriakou, the ex-C.I.A. officer who disclosed on television that the American government had waterboarded (that is, tortured) a detainee. Kiriakou would become the first C.I.A. officer convicted of a leak. He later took a job at the Russian propaganda outfit Sputnik Radio.

But at the center of this book is Reality Winner (“her real name, let’s move past it now”), who was 9 years old on 9/11. What happened to Winner is the point on which a number of the book’s themes converge. She joined the Air Force at 18, becoming a linguist who spoke Dari and Pashto. She later worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency. In 2017 she was arrested for mailing five printed pages of classified information to The Intercept that detailed Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 elections.

Howley got to know Winner and her family, depicting a young woman who “took ideas in their fullness, ignorant of their social context, and therefore radically open to argument.” Winner worked as a translator for the drone program while teaching yoga and worrying about global warming. “She was not on a team,” Howley writes. The book suggests it was this — the fact that nothing Winner did was easily amenable to the narrative of a particular side — that eventually did her in.

Winner sent the classified information to The Intercept because she visited the site for news; she knew that some of its journalists were skeptical about the allegation of Russian meddling, and she wanted to show them evidence of the meddling. Howley explains, step-by-step, how The Intercept bungled the handling of those five pages, neglecting to consult its own first-rate digital security experts, eventually showing the document — creases and watermarks intact, betraying the source — to the N.S.A. for verification. “It would prove extremely unfortunate for Reality that the audience who might be most interested in and moved by her case was largely captured by a publication embarrassed by it,” Howley notes.

It would also prove extremely unfortunate for Reality that the American government used her work for the American government against her. “It had taught her obscure languages,” Howley writes, “knowledge of which it now implied was dangerous.” A note Winner had made about wanting to “burn the White House down” was taken as proof of malevolent intent, omitting the “ha, ha” that followed it. (Winner later wondered if she would have fared better with an “lol jk.”) She was sentenced to 63 months — “the longest sentence ever handed down for an Espionage Act conviction.” The government assembled the fragments from Winner’s life and projected a story into the absences, essentially creating what Howley elsewhere calls a “fantasy built on solid ground.”

This warped kind of world-building bears more than a passing resemblance to what conspiracy theorists do. So it’s fitting that the title “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs” comes from a 2014 viral video of a Christian woman at a conference who presents a (remarkably polished and assured) case that Monster Energy drinks are a vehicle for Satan. From there it’s just a short crawl to QAnon’s elaborate nightmares about Satan-worshiping pedophiles.

The arc of Howley’s extraordinary book feels both startling and inevitable; of course a journey through the deep state would send her down the rabbit hole. “There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, now a congresswoman from Georgia, said in 2017. How’s that for the banality of evil? As Howley puts it, “True believers speak of Satanism with the bored fluency of someone selling condos.”

But it’s not as if QAnon has had to make up its nonsense out of whole cloth. Its propagation also relies on the not uncommon impulse to worry for one’s children. It was only toward the end of the book that I noticed how children were a recurrent presence — Howley’s, her friend’s, those of a camera assistant in Baghdad killed by an American strike.

Howley learned she was pregnant while reporting the book. “I despaired many times, in the writing, about my ability to protect the thing I was growing,” she says. She was immersed in a world “that had forgotten what it was like to construct a self in the dark.” We become ourselves by shedding our past selves — but now those discarded selves are recorded somewhere, potentially living longer than we do. In her acknowledgments, Howley ends with a note to her children that could serve as a blessing for us all: “May you be only as remembered as you wish.”

BOTTOMS UP AND THE DEVIL LAUGHS: A Journey Through the Deep State | By Kerry Howley | 233 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $28

Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times. More about Jennifer Szalai

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9 Books That Transport You Around the World

By katie dancey-downs | may 17, 2024, 5:41 pm edt.

If a trip to a tropical beach or secluded cabin thousands of miles from home is off the table, the next best thing is to pick up a book that will bring you on journeys all across the world from the comfort of your home. From thrillers set in the middle of the world's busiest cities to character pieces that drop readers into the middle of remote forests and mysterious islands, here are nine books that anyone with a little wanderlust should add to their to-read pile .

1. Shantaram // Gregory David Roberts; $18

Based on events from his own life, Gregory David Roberts’s Shantaram takes readers on a whirlwind adventure across the world, from an Australian prison break, to the Bombay underworld, to the hills of Afghanistan. Alongside the main character, Lin, we explore the culture of the Indian city that was once called Bombay (now Mumbai), where we break bread with people from all over the world. Throughout the book, Lin sets up a health clinic in a slum, acts in Bollywood movies, and is pushed to his limits in a Bombay prison.

2. Ways to Disappear // Idra Novey; $16

One day, a famous author mysteriously disappears from a park in Rio de Janeiro after climbing an almond tree. Her translator, Emma, sets out to try and find her. As the mystery deepens, Idra Novey explores the fine art of translation, which might hold the key to this fictional writer’s whereabouts. The vivid descriptions of Brazil will make you feel like you're on the journey with Emma as she combs through the rooms of the missing author's house, listens to lizards, befriends the locals, and travels across the country.

3. The Return // Victoria Hislop; $12

To escape an unfulfilling life back home, The Return 's protagonist, Sonia, travels to Spain, where she discovers that dancing is the perfect outlet for her troubles. But while the vibrancy of flamenco reignites her passion, readers will also witness the effects that civil war had on a family 70 years earlier. On the surface, this might look like a light summer read, but it’s packed emotional turmoil. A story of love, passion, and family, it will transport you right to the cobbled streets of Spain.

4. Swing Time // Zadie Smith; $13

This novel takes us between London, New York, and the Gambia, as we follow two girls from neighboring housing estates bound together by a love of dancing. As the book unfolds, we follow the different paths their lives take—one of which involves jet-setting with a famous pop star and her extremely questionable choices. In Swing Time , Smith ( White Teeth ) explores class, race, and privilege in a story of an ebbing friendship and tortured souls.

5. The Beach // Alex Garland; $17

Even if you know the famous film adaptation with Leonardo DiCaprio, it’s still worth reading this cult classic. This book transports readers to paradise in the form of a remote island in Thailand cut off from the rest of civilization and untouched by tourists. It's lush and mysterious, with vivid descriptions that firmly plant readers squarely in the middle of it all. But just as the perfect world starts to come undone, our main character, Richard, has to face off against his own demons. It’s the ultimate story of backpacking gone wrong.

6. Unbowed // Wangari Maathai; $9

If you want to experience the real Kenya, then pick up this memoir by Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai. This story chronicles her early life in a rural Kenyan village, her hard-fought struggle to be educated, and her foundation of the Green Belt Movement to conserve the environment and empower women to take action in their local communities. She also details the opposition she faced throughout her life, with people determined to stop her environmental mission. This story moves from Nairobi to small Kenyan villages and further across the world as Maathai becomes more and more determined to make meaningful change. It’s a book that doesn't just take you to another country—it also helps you understand it.

7. Surfacing // Margaret Atwood; $16

In Surfacing , we travel to a remote and wild island in northern Quebec, Canada, where our main character is searching for her missing father. It's a place she hasn't been back to in years, and when she finally returns, along with her partner and another couple, everything starts falling apart. She’s weighed down by the secrets she carries, the toxic behavior of her companions, and the unanswered questions about her father. Atwood, a native of Canada who also wrote The Handmaid’s Tale , brings this excursion into the wilderness to life through vivid details and descriptions that give the reader an authentic sense of place.

8. Life of Pi // Yann Martel; $9

After their cargo ship begins sinking, a young boy named Pi makes his escape in a small lifeboat—a lifeboat that just so happens to have a tiger on board. The two unlikely companions have to somehow manage to live with each other while surviving on whatever they can. As Pi drifts in and out of consciousness, the duo lands on a mysterious island inhabited by a colony of meerkats. In this fantastical story of survival, we’re never quite sure what’s real as we travel across the ocean and explore the island through Pi’s eyes.

9. Corelli’s Mandolin // Louis de Bernières; $15

We travel to the Greek island of Cephalonia during World War II, along with Captain Corelli, an Italian who is part of the occupying forces. As Corelli makes a home of the island—arguing with the locals, playing his mandolin, and falling in love—we meet other characters affected by war in the region. This story is at once funny, heartbreaking, and romantic. There are characters you’ll remember forever, and the master storytelling makes it feel like you’ve visited Cephalonia for yourself.

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