Continuing along the path that her first book, The Fire Sermon, laid out, Map of Bones is another measured elegy for a world in ruins. Atomic detonations blanketed the world in cold and ignorance, and the survivors learned to fear anything to do with the blasts. Technology. The past. Each other. A quirk of the …

Untwine is the kind of book that must be read in installments. Not because it has Dickensian chapters; it actually flows so naturally from page to page, story to story, that it really should be read in one long afternoon. But at least for me, that was impossible. It was too heartbreaking. Giselle and Isabelle are …