Starla Claudelle can't seem to do anything right, and her grandmother makes sure she knows it. During the summer of 1963, Starla is caught defying her punishment, and--convinced "Mamie" is sending her off to reform school this time--she decides to run away. Starla plans, as only a nine-year-old can, to find her mother, the woman who left her when she was three to become a star in Nashville. Quickly figuring out she can't walk the whole way from her small-town Mississippi home to Tennessee, Starla hitches a ride with a kind black woman traveling with a white infant. Unbeknownst to Starla, she's just bought her ticket for a trip that will help define her life.

Whistling Past the Graveyard's themes of hope, faith and innocence are plunked down in one of the nation's darkest time periods. With an exceptionally strong voice for her young spitfire narrator, Susan Crandall reminds readers that while the depth of hate was extraordinary, there were some people who used their gifts to encourage love, compassion and tolerance.

This young girl who shuns society's idea of a "lady" represents light in the darkness; with her idiosyncratic language and her brassy spunk, she is at turns humorous, endearing and heartbreaking. Through it all, she is convincing--readers won't be able to help but love and admire Starla Claudelle. With echoes of To Kill a Mockingbird and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Whistling Past the Graveyard is a timeless tale. In 1963 or 2013 alike, celebrating the good in others in a precious gift. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

Sociologist Minka Pradelski's research into the effects of the Holocaust on its survivors grounds her moving but surprisingly playful debut novel, Here Comes Mrs. Kugelman. When Tsippy Silberberg's Aunt Halina passes away in Tel Aviv, she leaves Tsippy a curious inheritance: an incomplete silver fish service in an old brown suitcase. While she could have the cutlery shipped to her, Tsippy decides a trip to Israel may help her recover from a strange addiction: Tsippy is hooked on ice-cold temperatures, to the point that she eats only unthawed bags of vegetables from the freezer section of the grocery store.

When her hotel gives her reserved room to another traveler, she books into an allegedly better establishment, and finds herself chosen for a dubious honor: Mrs. Kugelman, a survivor of World War II, tells Tsippy stories of her hometown of Bedzin, Poland, so that her long-dead friends and neighbors may live once again in the retelling.

At first, Tsippy tries to escape. Soon, however, she begins to hunger for more stories of Bedzin, a village that doesn't match the terrifying picture of Polish history Tsippy gleaned from her father. The stories eventually change character, though; as Mrs. Kugelman says, "Peaceful times give way to war... I can't spare you."

Pradelski builds two charming and often humorous stories, that of Tsippy's search for her identity and that of the people of Bedzin. The resulting dual narrative manages to carry off both sweetness and pathos seamlessly, leaving the reader to ponder the power of hope over sorrow. --Jaclyn Fulwood, youth services manager at Latah County Library District and blogger at Infinite Reads

In 1950s Newport, R.I., well-born Lucy De Bourgh marries Thomas Snow, son of a local garage owner and his bookkeeper wife. Thomas is definitely from the wrong side of the tracks, a theme that Louis Begley explores thoroughly in Memories of a Marriage, an intensely intimate portrayal of a couple from several perspectives.

Philip narrates the story of Lucy and Thomas. He runs into her at the ballet one evening and recalls knowing her many years before--she was a hell-raiser, and free with her sexual favors. They agree to meet for dinner at her apartment.

Early in their conversation, Lucy offers condolences to Philip for his wife's death; he reciprocates with condolences for her divorce and Thomas's subsequent accidental death. "What do you mean?" Lucy replies. "I couldn't have gone on living with that monster. You went on seeing him, of course, just like all the rest of my friends. Yup, everything he wanted fell into his lap, including that celebrity second wife, and he never acknowledged that he owed it all to me."

Philip is puzzled by her bitterness and unfairness to Thomas, a good-looking, brilliant investment banker who became a Wall Street pundit. Philip becomes obsessed with the contradictions in the story, both as a friend of Lucy and Thomas--and more particularly as an author sussing out a good story. He seeks out Thomas's second wife, Jane, and several mutual friends to get their recollections of what happened. The picture that emerges is infinitely complex, leading Philip to understand how incompletely he knew the pair--or their marriage. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

In the epistolary tradition of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and 84, Charing Cross Road, Jessica Brockmole's Letters from Skye is a captivating debut novel.

When Elspeth Dunn, a young Scottish poet living on the remote Isle of Skye, receives a fan letter from a cheeky college student in Illinois, she never expects it to change her life. But though her correspondence with David Graham provides a bright spot in the shadow of World War I, it has disastrous consequences for her family. When David volunteers as an ambulance driver in France, Elspeth remains on Skye, but continues to write--and worry.

Years later, after an air raid on her Edinburgh house in 1940, Elspeth disappears, leaving her daughter, Margaret, holding a yellowed letter addressed to "Sue" and a few clues to her mother's (and her own) history. Margaret begins a cross-country search into Elspeth's past, chronicling her journey in letters to the RAF pilot she loves.

In two parallel series of letters, the book evokes the rugged landscape of Skye, the cosmopolitan bustle of London and the privations of army camps in northern France. Despite the strains of wartime, family worries and love gone wrong, Brockmole's characters write with warmth and wit, sending letters and telegrams across the Atlantic and the English Channel. While the letters trace the love stories of two young couples, they also offer reflections on family, duty and the perennial question of whom we love. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

The first rule of writing noir is to make a location your own. James Carlos Blake has done just that in The Rules of Wolfe, his second novel (following 2012's Country of the Bad Wolfes) about the multi-generational, multi-cultural, multi-criminal Wolfe family. His turf is the 2,000-mile-long border between Mexico and the U.S., with the Wolfes settled on the Gulf end where Brownsville, Tex., rubs up against Matamoros. When Eddie Gato, the great-grandson of the family's 109-year-old matriarch, Catalina, gets crosswise with the Sinaloa cartel in Sonora, his cousins Frank and Rudy Wolfe jump in a family-owned Beechcraft and fly to El Paso to rescue him.

The brash Eddie is in trouble because he wouldn't follow the oldest family rule: "any Wolfe who wants to work in the family 'shade trade' must first get a baccalaureate degree." When the ruling Three Uncles reject his argument that "a college degree was unnecessary to be a competent smuggler," he takes his ambitions to San Luis Potosi, where the Mexican side of the family runs the weapons distribution end of the business and becomes a guard at the mountain ranch of cartel boss La Navaja (the knife). But Eddie and the girl of the boss's second-in-command seduce each other; when El Segundo discovers them, Eddie kills him. He and Miranda steal the boss's Escalade and take off for the border with every cartel assassin after them.

Blake's "border noir" then turns into a long, volatile bilingual chase scene full of killing, car crashes, drugs, double-crosses and desert storms. Blake doesn't just know the territory, the language and the players--he also knows how to tell a great story. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Set in the 1930s, William Ryan's The Twelfth Department is the third thriller starring the thoughtful Captain Alexei Korolev of Moscow's Criminal Investigation Division (after The Holy Thief and The Darkening Field). Ryan brilliantly captures the tensions facing Korolev, a man with a conscience who fought for the Bolshevik Revolution yet doesn't approve of the deadly tactics used by Stalin's NKVD (Internal Security Division) in the hunt for "traitors" to the Communist Party.

As The Twelfth Department opens, however, Korolev is moderately hopeful. It's the summer of 1938, his 12-year-old son, Yuri, is coming for a week and Korolev has some long overdue vacation time. Then Professor Boris Azarov, head of the mysterious Azarov Institute, is found shot to death. Reluctantly, Korolev starts to investigate, only to be told by an NKVD colonel that his involvement is no longer necessary and he should forget anything he'd heard about the case.

Not one to tempt banishment to a gulag, Korolev heads off into the countryside with his son--only to have the case follow him. Thugs show up, Yuri vanishes, and a different NKVD colonel asks for Korolev's help, leaving Korolev in a desperate race to find both Azarov's killer and Yuri, while walking a precariously narrow path between the opposing forces within the NKVD.

Korolev is one of the most likable detectives in modern fiction, and his precise but practical approach to solving crime in such a restrictive society is both intelligent and fascinating. The Twelfth Department will appeal to fans of historical mysteries and students of Soviet Russia alike. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Mitch Moxley is an idealistic upstart on a mission to become a journalist in an economically booming, pre-Olympics China. Instead, he finds himself the unwitting propagandistic mouthpiece at the state-run English-language paper, China Daily, and a stranger in a strange land whose job evolves from foreign lackey to a sort of cultural ambassador.

Apologies to My Censor, Moxley's chronicle of his five-year, "coming of age" odyssey living as an expat in Beijing, begins in 2007, when he finds himself trying to make a living in a bizarre, Judd Apatow-esque bachelor universe thousands of miles away from home, surviving alongside a sea of fellow misfits who glorify China by day and engage in drunken revelry by night. Life in China brings manic highs and depressing lows: beauty in the remotely backward villages of the Xinjiang countryside; boredom and desperation in English voice recording; temporary fame as music video actor and calendar pin-up; happiness and heartbreak with a Korean-Russian lover.

Despite the country's "beautiful and ugly, thrilling and boring, inspiring and infuriating" qualities, its vibrancy continues to draw Moxley back. Though he infuses Apologies with much insight and color commentary as to the cultural divides between East and West, it's his own interior development that makes his memoir a success. What aspires to become a cultural document of the here and now instead delivers the classic tale of a young man who finds himself and his voice against all odds. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

It's fitting that the "Ethicist" for the New York Times Magazine should be interested in writing about villainy. After all, Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs) has covered nearly every other facet of popular culture. Centered on a theme more abstract than those of his past works, I Wear the Black Hat examines society's most vilified figures and what their condemnation reveals about our collective ethos.

Reading Klosterman is akin to staring through a kaleidoscope of cultural references, rotating it slightly and seeing something both completely unexpected and strangely logical. A discussion of the Monica Lewinsky scandal segues neatly into a study of celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton, while Kareem Abdul-Jabbar serves to clarify a character study of O.J. Simpson. Even Batman earns a place in the line-up. In each case, we are pushed beyond questions of individual psychology to more wide-sweeping implications. For example, the question is not why Hitler was evil, but what our interpretation of his evilness reveals about society as a whole.

Klosterman's range of interests, which has led to bylines everywhere from the Guardian to Spin, is evident in his unusual entertaining style. A self-described media addict and voracious consumer of Internet content, he never takes readers' attention for granted. His strange humor provides all the necessary incentive to follow him through far-flung analogies and even the occasional personal tangent. --Annie Atherton, intern at Shelf Awareness

Enticing, crisp full-color photographs of paws, claws and "clingy toes" lead young readers into a guessing game about which "foot" propels which animal.

Ingo Arndt, whose photographs have appeared in National Geographic and BBC Wildlife, introduces six creatures with a full-spread close-up photograph of the underside of its foot ("Whose foot is this?" reads the text), then with a turn of the page, readers discover its often surprising owner in its natural habitat. Each of these six lead the way to other creatures whose feet serve a similar purpose (e.g., "feet that dig"; "feet that jump").

What appears to be the pad of a kitten's foot in one close-up full-spread photograph turns out to belong to a tiger, revealed in its majestic beauty on the left-hand page of the next spread. Arndt then introduces a quartet of feet--arranged in a windowpane--belonging to other animals with "feet that walk." He offers some detail about each foot's design: the "soft and springy" sole of an elephant's foot helps "cushion its walk," for instance. A double-page photograph of a duck's foot leads into other examples of "feet that swim," including the flipper of a seal.

Arndt also uses his photographs to show how different characteristics help the animal in its habitat; the tokay gecko's ribbed toes assist in climbing smooth surfaces, while the red-eyed tree frog emits a sticky liquid from its toes that help it hold tight to branches and leaves. A highly intriguing book for budding scientists and animal lovers. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness