India, Sept. 1 -- Sometimes you can't quite put your finger on what it is that's making a stack of inked pages tug on the wells inside you, but you stick with it nonetheless. Luckily with Allison King's The Phoenix Pencil Company, you'll be glad you stuck around. And that's probably because the plot of the book is in a way, storytelling.

Be it Monica's incredibly relatable contemporary struggles or her grandmother, the Alzheimer's-stricken Meng's war-ravaged past, at the heart of it, it's two women eking out their business of living, one more conflicted, the other more dramatic. And what ties it all together? Pencils, and the magic that lives in them - and to Allison's credit, a core plot point you will barely find yourself questioning b...