Marian Palaia's debut, The Given World, is a Vietnam War-era road novel, the saga of a young Montana girl's bolt from the family farm for San Francisco, "determined to beat the crappy odds and discover the Pacific" and to find some relief from the loss of her idolized older brother, missing in action somewhere in the tunnels of Cu Chi. Reminiscent of Sissy in Tom Robbins's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Palaia's protagonist, Riley, is up for anything. When seriously busted up as young girl from a fall off the farmhouse roof, she gets a taste of morphine, and after Mick goes MIA, parlays that into a 30-year trip of booze and drugs and sex--working odd jobs and living on the streets, in parks, in cars and the occasional co-worker's flop. She fixes broken-down cars, delivers newspapers, bartends at a lesbian bar, shoots pool and beds junkies and abusive losers. Riley's a mess and knows it; but in Palaia's very capable hands, she's a survivor and an admirable mess.

A peripatetic scholar with several degrees, including a University of Wisconsin MFA, Palaia knows the smells and sticky tavern floors of San Francisco's Mission and Castro districts; the desperation of "rockheads searching the sidewalks, picking up anything small and white... something that will make their a**-out lives feel worth living awhile longer"; and "Saigon's incessant din and treacly grime and sleepless lunacy." In Riley, she has created a character who believes in second chances. The Given World is a moving novel of an era that just won't go away. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Santa Montefiore (Secrets of the Lighthouse) has a knack for creating intriguing romances in the vein of Maeve Binchy or Rosamunde Pilcher. The Beekeeper's Daughter is no exception: it's a sweeping, multi-generational saga of love that begins shortly before World War II.

In 1973, 19-year-old Trixie Valentine is sure her parents are wrong. Jasper Duncliffe, the Englishman who swears he loves her, will come back to tiny (and fictional) Tekanasset Island, Mass., for her. But Trixie's mother, Grace, with tragic memories of an Englishman who didn't follow through on his own professions of love some 30 years earlier, is skeptical.

Told in alternating chapters, The Beekeeper's Daughter is mainly the story of young Grace Hamblin, daughter of the Marquess of Penselwood's beekeeper, in the golden years before World War II. But as the reader quickly realizes, Trixie would not exist if things had gone according to Grace's dreams, and the gap between her hopes and her reality is what keeps the pages turning.

The quirky Tekanasset islanders add charm to this story, as do the servants on the Penselwood estate. Montefiore has created an appealing world, in which long-suppressed secrets of a mother and a daughter finally come to light. Although both Grace and Trixie make some poor decisions, in the end, love has a way of winning out. The Beekeeper's Daughter is a pleasant and enjoyable read for fiction and romance readers alike. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Alex Marshall's debut epic fantasy novel, A Crown for Cold Silver, begins with a massacre. A regiment serving the Crimson Empire surrounds and slaughters a village full of men, women and children in a failed attempt to murder a retired, and legendary, general known as Cobalt "Cold" Zosia.

This incident spurs a dozen plots and subplots, with Marshall ably jumping among characters scattered across a huge and well-imagined world. Cold Zosia's blood-soaked quest for revenge as she takes up arms again forms the backbone of a narrative that encompasses fanatical religions, ethnic conflict and enough fiendish political maneuvering to make George R.R. Martin jealous.

A Crown for Cold Silver is distinguished by the sheer thrill of its action scenes, which benefit enormously from Marshall's pulp-infused prose. One character named Maroto, a veteran and former addict, is endearing largely thanks to his semi-comic displays of aggression: "There hadn't been as much bubbly left as he had hoped, so he stretched his arm back and casually rapped the empty bottle against Hassan's noggin. Something cracked, and as the noble fell away Maroto held up the bottle to make sure he had just broken the glass and not the boy's skull."

Marshall compounds the accomplishment of his storytelling by having it take place in his wholly engaging world. The Crimson Empire and its outlying territories are libertine and surprisingly progressive in some respects--a wonderful backdrop to the bloody business Marshall depicts so well. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

Bruce Eric Kaplan, known to fans of his New Yorker cartoons as BEK, charms with this quirky, doodle-adorned memoir of his formative years.

Born in 1964, Kaplan had the type of childhood that has quickly gone from the norm to nostalgic memory. Instead of structured play dates, children knocked on each other's doors and played outside until dark. Cell phones, cordless phones and even answering machines belonged to the future. Television reception came from a foil-wrapped antenna, and no one's parents exercised. Movie theaters seemed like "magical temples," and baseball cards came with bubblegum so dry it disintegrated in your hands.  

In this unusual and captivating account, Kaplan sketches out a complete portrait of a bygone era with just a few well-chosen words and drawings. "I think a lot of us are born waiting to be adults." The clarity of Kaplan's memories suggests a childhood spent in keen observation of surroundings and behavior made alien by his inexperience or simply by genuine oddity, as in the case of his father's secret, never-worn toupee. He perfectly captures the viewpoint of a child; what is simply is, usually with no explanation. His understated tone conveys introspection and a sometimes wistful contemplation of the past, and his semi-formed doodles express a child's viewpoint perfectly. While later generations may view it as a chronicle of how their parents or grandparents lived, today's readers are likely to laugh and give more than a few nods of recognition to Kaplan's vignettes, finding charm in the absurd. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

In 1915, as many as one and a half million Armenians were systematically murdered across Anatolia by order of the Turkish-dominated Ottoman government. Eric Bogosian's grandfather survived the genocide and filled his grandson's childhood with terrifying stories of "burning churches and sadistic horsemen," instructing him: "If you ever meet a Turk, kill him." It is unsurprising, then, that Bogosian has written a history so full of grief and righteous anger.

Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot That Avenged the Armenian Genocide focuses on a small group of Armenian men who between 1920 and 1922 assassinated six Turks and Azerbaijanis who had orchestrated the genocide, and Bogosian (Perforated Heart) provides more than enough background to give pathos to the assassins' mission. These young men, broken to various degrees by the extent of their suffering, killed as an "existential pronouncement to the world that the Armenians were not sheep."

Operation Nemesis is not merely a stirring account of well-justified revenge, however. Bogosian complicates the narrative by questioning whether the assassinations helped the Armenian cause in the long run. Even though the dramatic murders and ensuing trials brought attention to a great crime that the Turkish government was--and is--eager to bury, the decades since have left the matter unresolved. For now, Bogosian suggests, we must respect the innocent dead and honor the few desperate men who fought for justice. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

The final collapse of Nazi Germany in spring 1945 was a hellish maelstrom of chaos and death amid some of the war's most fierce fighting in the ruins of Berlin. Hitler Youth, Volkssturm militia and remnants of the SS battled veteran Red Army units in merciless house-to-house fighting. German civilians suffered from lack of supplies and shelter, and many died in the crossfire or at the hands of Soviet occupiers. As Hitler hid in his bunker, commanding armies that no longer existed and ranting about the betrayals of party members, the scope of Nazi concentration camp atrocities was revealed to a horrified world.

This agonizing chapter of human history was chronicled in journal entries, memoirs and, in Hitler's case, a final political testament dictated just prior to his suicide. German author Walter Kempowski (1929-2007), himself a Hitler Youth conscript, spent much of his career curating a 10-volume biographical collage called Das Echolot (sonar or echo soundings). This collection explored the experiences of belligerents and civilians, mostly unknown, on both sides of the European war through their own writings.

Kempowski narrowed his original goal of cataloging every day of the war down to especially important days. Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich covers April 20, Hitler's last birthday; April 25, the day Soviet and U.S. Forces met on the Elbe; April 30, Hitler's suicide; and May 8/9, when Germany officially surrendered. The first of Kempowski's works to be translated into English, Swansong is a fascinating, emotionally resonant use of original sources. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

One might see similarities between artist Jackson Pollock and novelist Jack Kerouac, but it takes a stretch to add U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower as the third leg of a 1950s creative innovation stool. In 2005, when the original 120-foot 1951 manuscript scroll of Kerouac's On the Road was displayed next to Pollock's 20-foot painting Mural in the University of Iowa Museum of Art, adjacent to the Iowa I-80 spur of Eisenhower's 41,000-mile 1956 National Highway Act interstate system, Riley Hanick made just such a leap. In Three Kinds of Motion, a cornucopia of personal meditation, history, criticism and philosophy, Hanick (Murray State creative writing professor and Iowa MFA graduate) weaves the artistic and historical motivations of the major works of these three mid-century giants into an innovative creation of his own.

With tidbits of early criticism of On the Road ("typing") and Mural ("painting with a broom") mixed with his own experiences ("after reading him in high school... Kerouac had become embarrassing to me") and even the history of road-building design and materials (including architect Louis Kahn's comment about his favorite material: "Concrete really wants to be granite but can't quite manage"), Hanick's Three Kinds of Motion is a captivating reading adventure. Whether he is describing Ike's participation in the Transcontinental Convoy of 1919 or jumping ahead to Iowa City's great flood of 2008 that nearly destroyed the museum (FEMA declared it "not to have been damaged enough to warrant the funding of its demolition"), Hanick's curiosity and reflections make for an entertaining road trip. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Ginny Gilder made her way from a privileged Upper East Side life in New York City to Yale University in 1975, in the early years of Title IX, which legislated equal educational opportunities for both men and women in all areas, including athletics. Ginny had never been an athlete; her family instead emphasized business success and keeping up appearances. But she was drawn to the grace, beauty and seeming effortlessness of rowing, and against the coach's instincts, joined the Yale crew. The story she tells in Course Correction of collegiate competition, gender discrimination, the long road to the Olympics and personal growth, also yields Ginny's eventual healing from the emotional traumas of a well-concealed family history.

In four sections titled Catch, Drive, Release and Recovery--the four parts of a well-executed rowing stroke--Gilder details the corresponding segments of her life. Rowing captures her passion; she drives herself through injuries and health problems to an eventual Olympic medal; she learns to let go; she forms a successful family of her own, despite a damaged past.

Gilder's prose is earnest, heartfelt, expressive and clearly strongly felt. Her narrative will appeal to sports fans and readers dedicated to memoirs of pain and redemption. Course Correction touches on the injustices that Title IX was designed to correct (including a memorable scene involving a nude protest), and portrays a painful, affecting and impressive athletic career. But it is centrally a story of one woman's lengthy and hard-won coming-of-age and coming home. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

With a charming and resourceful mouse as a guide, Alice Schertle (the Little Blue Truck series) and Stephanie Yue (the Guinea Pig Pet Shop Private Eye series) lead readers through the seasons.

A lush landscape with a small mound of dandelions in the foreground appears with the opening lines: "Way out in the wide world/ there is a meadow./ in the middle of the meadow,/ under a clump of dandelions,/ there is a hole." The view then telescopes down to the hole's opening and the critter that lives within: "Such a little mouse,/ with his smart gray coat,/ with his ears pink as petals,/ with three twitchety whiskers on each side of his nose." Yue zooms in on the fellow's features in four windowpane close-ups. She visually charts the changes of each season to the meadow and the mouse's routine, while Schertle returns to the refrain: "Such a little mouse./ Off he goes into the wide world." In spring, "he watches the busy bees on the clover blossoms." A cutaway view depicts the mouse's cozy three-room home (kitchen, bedroom and storeroom) as he tucks away food supplies, preparing for the day when the autumn wind and the ants whisper, "Winter is coming." As snow covers the meadow, Shue's series of vignettes reveal the mouse busy in his kitchen, making use of the ingredients he's collected in warmer seasons.

Children will appreciate the thoughtful details such as a bed made from a hotpad and matchboxes that support the mouse's bookshelf, and identify with the little mouse who accomplishes big things. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Charlotte Zolotow would have turned 100 this year (she died in 2013), and these 28 poems, arranged by season, allow young readers to experience life's epiphanies through observations in nature.

The first poem, "Change" (originally published in River Winding in 1970) sets the stage for the collection, as a child describes herself in relation to the passing seasons. Tiphanie Beeke pictures a blonde girl who seems to mature from the left page to the right: "This summer/ still hangs/ heavy and sweet/ with sunlight/ as it did last year." She similarly experiences autumn, winter and spring as consistent, year to year. Zolotow ends with a surprise: "It is only I/ who have changed." For the concluding poem, "So Will I," Beeke portrays a boy on his grandfather's shoulders, imagining a future in which he will honor the man's memories ("white snow falling falling"; "the bluebird and thrush/ at twilight/ calling, calling./ He remembers long ago/ .../ And so will I/ so will I").

Zolotow's poems vary in rhyme, rhythm and mood, as changeable as life itself. For "Autumn," a child describes the shortening day as "the light long summer/ is grown old"; another child sees a harbinger of spring this way: "Little crocus/ like a cup,/ holding all that sunlight up!"

Zolotow's fans may wish that the poems' original publication dates had been included. But this is a small quibble in an ideal introduction to poetry's big ideas. Zolotow had a gift for describing singular moments from a child's eye–view. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness