Keija Parssinen's (The Ruins of Us) The Unraveling of Mercy Louis depicts a young woman's coming-of-age in small town peopled by complex, conflicted, ultimately sympathetic characters.

Port Sabine is a refinery town on the Texas Gulf Coast, depressed and parochial, built around oil, secrets and religion. Mercy Louis lives with her grandmother Maw Maw, a radical evangelical who prophesies the end of the world will come in Mercy's senior year. A basketball prodigy, Mercy needs this senior year to show the scouts that she's worth the investment, so she can go to college if Maw Maw is wrong. A discovery in a dumpster throws the town into upheaval and witch-hunting, even as Mercy begins to explore the secrets of her own past as well as the possibilities of her future.

The cast of characters includes Mercy's best friend, Annie, riotously rebellious and rich; Mercy's mother, absent until a mysterious letter arrives; and Illa, the manager of the basketball team and a hopeful sports photographer with troubles of her own, fixated upon Mercy in her camera's lens. A new boy in Mercy's life--the first--threatens to upturn her delicate balance: obedience to Maw Maw and the church, and the poetry she makes on the basketball court.

Although this is clearly Mercy's story, many of these characters captivate and capture the imagination; Parssinen's gift is in rendering the essences of both people and place. The Unraveling is suspenseful and disturbing, compassionate and tender, a thought-provoking experience for anyone who's ever been young and wondered about the past, and the future. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Roger--a sarcastic, well-read, talking cat who solves cryptic crosswords--is the star of Cat Out of Hell, an adventurous, gothic mystery novel that straddles a fine line between humor and horror, good and evil, life and death. Roger's story is complicated and at times absurdly comical and far-reaching. Readers, however, are in good hands with Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves), who launches her narrative with Alec Charlesworth--a lonely widower, a former Cambridge librarian--who retreats to a North Norfolk coastal cottage to grieve the death of his beloved wife. As dreary days wear on, Alec opens an e-mail sent to him by a former colleague he scarcely remembers, Dr. Winterton. Attached is a mysterious document called "Roger," a compilation of notes, screenplay pages, JPEGs, videos, audios and file transcripts.

Alec tries to decipher why these materials were sent to him and their meaning. He focuses on a recorded conversation between Roger and a man named Wiggy. Alec learns that Wiggy is also a grieving widower, whose sister and her dog have disappeared. Wading through the files and putting all the pieces together, Alec begins to suspect the chilling story of Roger may link several mysterious deaths. Furthermore, it may even expose a complex plot involving the dark side of cats, their many lives and their intricate--sometimes retributive--behaviors.

Rich characterizations and the inventive structure of Truss's clever, comic novel all serve to enhance this endearing, insightful and often wicked mystery that ratchets up suspense and intrigue while exploring aspects of mortality. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Brianna Hai isn't quite human, but as the owner of an occult shop, her job manages to hide a few of her stranger aspects--not that she has to do much hiding from the tourists who buy the shop's ineffective baubles. Her real concern is for those like her, the Fae, who know she's an exiled royal from Faerie, though the enchanted protections she sets around her shop usually keep the otherworldly visitors in line.

She doesn't know that Nick Antonelli, a police officer whose brother works in Brianna's shop, has been asked by federal agents to keep an eye on her. After Nick witnesses a magical invasion of the shop, Brianna realizes she's not as safe as she thought. More than that, the attack reveals that her father, the High King of Faerie, is in danger. Brianna returns to the deadly faerie courts in order to help him. Unfortunately, the two brothers insist on joining her. Unable to fend for themselves in Faerie, the brothers require her protection and put her in greater danger.

While readers of other literature involving the faerie realm will find the courts and culture in The Exile familiar, C.T. Adams's approach to the land and its occupants is new and refreshing, making this version of Faerie very much her own. In this story, human culture has encroached on this magical land, influencing its architecture and protocols, and is a cause of great tension within the Faerie courts. The Exile is a suspenseful, fun, urban fantasy rich with visceral detail, from the human-influenced structure of the Faerie buildings to the reality-defying beauty of the Fae creatures that inhabit the magical world. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company

In 2006, Edward Mendelson, the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, wrote The Things That Matter, a guide to seven classic novels. Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers, something of a companion volume, profiles eight American authors as "moral" writers, uncovering the effects each of their works had on themselves and on others.

Mendelson is interested in the "choices they continually made between wearing a mask and exposing their face." He draws upon their private lives via letters and diaries as well as their published works. He categorizes each writer's mask with a single word. For example, Frank O'Hara, the outgoing, sociable poet, wears the celebrant mask, while his poems are "private conversations with individual readers, too quiet to be heard in a crowded room."

This tactic might seem forced at times, but it allows Mendelson to delve with insight into the lives and works of virtuous writers he admires. As the literary executor of the W.H. Auden estate, he has privileged access to this poet, who wears the mask of the neighbor. Christianity shaped the tone and content of Auden's poems and life; he adopted "love thy neighbor as thyself" as his credo. William Maxwell, longtime fiction editor for the New Yorker, wears the magus mask. His autobiographical and plotless novels and stories ("Plot, shmot," he once told John Updike) were "wise-sounding." Lionel Trilling (the sage), Dwight MacDonald (the moralist), Alfred Kazin (the outsider), Saul Bellow (the patriarch) and Norman Mailer (the mythmaker) round out Mendelson's who's who of actors in these modern morality plays. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Western histories of the World War I often focus on the trench warfare on the Western front. When they discuss the campaigns at Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia, they generally tell the story from the Western point of view. In The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, historian Eugene Rogan (The Arabs: A History) looks at the war from the often-overlooked perspective of the Ottoman Empire.

Rogan's story is as complicated as the multi-ethnic empire at its heart. He describes the forces of internal revolution, external wars, lost provinces and lost confidence that led the Ottomans to seek an ally against Russian aggression in the early months of 1914--and how those same forces shaped Ottoman choices throughout the war. He tells the familiar stories of Gallipoli and the Mesopotamian campaign from an unfamiliar vantage point, and the less familiar story of Turkey's fight against Russia on the Caucasian front.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is the recurring question of the relative powers of Islam, national identity and ethnicity within the Ottoman world, beginning with Germany's unfulfilled hope that the Ottoman declaration of war would be seen as an act of jihad, thereby triggering rebellions among Muslim subjects of the British and French empires. Rogan handles the tricky subjects of jihad, secularism, Arab nationalism and Turkish paranoia about a possible Armenian fifth column with historical precision and a keen awareness of their implications for the modern world. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

In Bowling Alone, political scientist and Harvard professor Robert Putnam took a close look at the evolving landscape of community in the United States. With Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, he turns to a distinct but inherently related topic: the dissolution of the American Dream and the many ways that class mobility in the U.S. has stagnated in the 50 years since Putnam himself was a child. Putnam explores the "myths and realities" of the American Dream before analyzing the various factors that he claims are preventing young people today from achieving upward class mobility, which involve family structure, parenting, schooling and community.

The research behind Our Kids spans myriad quantitative and qualitative studies and draws on anecdotal evidence from towns across the country to illustrate his points about class immobility: namely, that affluent kids are offered more opportunities to succeed, often without even realizing it, than poor kids can even imagine. For the purposes of his arguments, Putnam defines "upper-class" homes as those with parents who graduated from college and "lower-class" homes as those with parents with a high school diploma or below. This definition can be problematic in its oversimplification, though Putnam's thorough explanation of the reasoning behind it saves it from distracting from the overall arguments of the book. It's a good thing, too, for his conclusions include actionable and important recommendations on what average citizens can do to change the inherently danger status quo he has observed--including a call for "a commitment to invest in other people's children... our kids." --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

A miniature drone disguised as a spider sneaks into your shower to spy on or assassinate you. A deranged scientist uses widely available biotechnology to construct an ultra-lethal virus. Terrorists use drones to disperse anthrax spores over a crowded city center, infecting thousands.

These terrifying events are the imaginings not of science fiction authors, but of distinguished academics: Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution and Gabriella Blum of Harvard Law School, authors of The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones--Confronting a New Age of Threat. They foresee a future of technology that exponentially empowers the individual, consequently giving anyone the ability to threaten anyone else. This presents a difficult question: If we consent to be governed for the sake of security, what happens when the state can no longer provide that security? Wittes and Blum see Hobbes's Leviathan as an aging, soon to be obsolete beast. New paradigms of domestic governance and international cooperation are required, especially in a future where a few bad actors can cause unimaginable carnage.

Solutions offered by The Future of Violence, at first glance, might upset readers averse to government intrusion justified by security concerns. But Wittes and Blum's ideas are more nuanced than NSA-style digital dragnets. They argue that security and liberty are not on opposite ends of some scale, that liberty to do pretty much anything relies on an absence of anarchy. Private sector partnerships, reconsidered international jurisdictions and a host of other innovative (and sometimes seemingly obvious) solutions may save us from technological chaos. The Future of Violence is as fascinating as it is accessible. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

There is no shortage of books about Amazon exploration and natural history, but few are of this quality in both storytelling and scholarship. In Naturalists in Paradise: Wallace, Bates and Spruce in the Amazon, Amazon expert, author and former director of the Royal Geographical Society John Hemming (Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon) tells the intertwined stories of three great British naturalists, key supporters of the theory of evolution, who studied the Amazon region between 1848 and 1862. Hemming writes with sympathetic enthusiasm for his predecessors and occasionally drops in a brief anecdote of his own.

Henry Walter Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace and Richard Spruce were all young and mostly self-taught scientists who had never traveled outside England. Bates became known for his entomological work, Wallace for a theory of evolution that spurred Darwin on and Spruce for cultivating a tree that produced anti-malarial quinine.

At a time when the Amazon was still mostly unknown to Europeans, these naturalists plunged into it fearlessly, in Spruce's case going as far as Peru, collecting shiploads of specimens and enjoying the generous hospitality of townspeople and Indians. Despite frequent and severe illnesses, misadventures and technical difficulties, they stressed the "beauty, healthiness and relative safety" of the tropical forests. In addition to identifying thousands of plant, insect and bird species, they took a strong interest in indigenous culture, languages, artifacts, hallucinogens and archeology, and documented it all. Their letters and journals certainly display their prejudices, but also their joyful and tireless curiosity. --Sara Catterall

Lesley M.M. Blume (Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters) crafts a charming story about 11-year-old narrator Julia Lancaster finding her family while in search of her mother.

In the summer of 1968, after her grandmother dies and the family estate is sold off, Julia and her Aunt Constance journey across the country to find her mother, who is estranged from the family. To prepare for the trip, Aunt Constance has packed her most practical travel items--silver candlesticks, Oriental carpets, steamer trunks and Julia's beloved Brownie camera (photographs from which illustrate much of the book). While readers know these are not, in fact, practical items, they reveal Constance's outlook on proper society and foreshadow the societal changes occurring in the United States. Their journey takes them from New York City's Greenwich Village to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury. Along the way, they encounter a New Orleans society lady who knows more than she tells, a Texas big game hunter who arranges a javelina hunt, and a Nevada man who is sheriff of a town in which he is the only resident. Each of these characters provides an adventure for Julia and Aunt Constance to test their mettle, and they each recognize they are stronger than they once thought.

By the time Julia and Constance finally reach San Francisco, they've learned that the journey is just as important as the destination and that the most important family is the one who loves you and cares for you. --Cathy Berner, Blue Willow Bookshop

Attraction knows no bounds in Eisner-nominee Andi Watson's (Breakfast After Noon) sweet tale of a princess and a count with culinary skills.

Princess Decomposia has a great burden on her shoulders. While her father, the king of the Underworld, complains of ailments and confines himself to bed, she must answer letters from the public, approve cabinet documents and hold meetings with the Lycanthrope delegation. In the midst of these pressures, the cook quits, and the princess must hire a new one. The king rejects kippers that are either too dry or too wet, while the new chef, Count Spatula, devises feasts that ensure diplomatic progress with traveling dignitaries. Moreover, he takes pains to make sure the princess eats well. Black-and-white panels chart how the palace transforms from the dark and dreary common hallways and king's quarters to the warm light of the kitchen where the toothless count (too many sugary pastries) works his magic. The count counsels "Dee" (as she insists he call her) to delegate some of her responsibilities, and Skulker (with one large eye in place of a head) reports these developments back to the king. Watson builds to a climax Overground, when the king orders Decomposia to fire the cook and travel above for the Thursday of the Dead celebration.

The princess possesses the integrity her father lacks and finds a way to be true to herself and her new friend while preserving a relationship with her parent. This story is fully satisfying, but readers will hope for more adventures with Watson's heroes. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness