Calling the fifth volume of William T. Vollmann's mammoth Seven Dreams series ambitious--at over 1,300 pages and stuffed with glossaries, maps, sketches and marginalia--is an understatement.

The series--its last addition was 2001's Argall--has dealt with the catastrophic effects European colonization had on Native Americans, and in The Dying Grass Vollmann describes the downfall of the Plains Indians through the eyes of the Nez Perce. The book follows Chief Joseph and his tribe on their long retreat from nemesis General Oliver Otis Howard, from Oregon and Montana to the Canadian border. The scenes in which the Nez Perce outmaneuver the larger pursuing force, and the sense of impending doom as the tribe is cornered, model bravura storytelling tied to a larger historical sense of what the events meant.

Vollmann's supple prose takes on the consciousness of each of his protagonists. The army, with its brute force, is handled with full humanity, and no character emerges as a stock villain. Howard comes across as especially tragic as his compassionate nature is ground under the wheels of his duty. The genocide of native tribes looms bitterly, and when the Nez Perce narrators ruminate on what has been irrevocably lost, their poetry is almost too much to bear: "The berries will now be turning red in the Buffalo Country, where perhaps we shall go/ by way of the Lice-Eaters' lands,/ riding farther from Wallowa, where something once was."

The Dying Grass stands out among contemporary American novels, a fierce grab at lasting greatness that clears with grace every hurdle it dares to leap. --Donald Powell, freelance writer

Jane Urquhart (Sanctuary Line) returns to her trademark themes of place, memory and loss in The Night Stages, a quietly lyrical novel about a woman who attempts to escape the limitations of her life in postwar, rural Ireland for a new life in America. Tam's journey becomes a reckoning when she is stranded by intractable fog at the airport in Gander, Newfoundland.

The airport, a real-life jewel of mid-century architecture and dominated by the waiting room's majestic mural called "Flight and Its Allegories," provides the setting that organizes the novel. This mural triggers Tam's memories and ruminations over the course of three fog-bound days after leaving Ireland and her married lover, Niall. Figures and scenes within the painting prompt specific memories for a narrative that weaves back and forth in time to tell stories of Niall, his estranged brother, Kieran--for whose disappearance Niall cannot forgive himself--Tam herself and Kenneth Lochhead, the historically based artist who painted the mural.

For the most part, Kieran and Kenneth's stories are told from their respective points of view, while those of Tam and Niall are reported and described as though from a distance and have the feel of reconstructed memory. The novel is slightly uneven as a result. Yet as ever, Urquhart's prose, melodic with Irish names and inflections, is gorgeous, her images incisive. A face is "stern with thinking" or an angry child is "full of refusal." The Night Stages is an elegiac novel that describes the landscapes of home and heart with Urquhart's trademark grace. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Rory McGovern has lived on the brink of financial disaster for the last decade. Her husband, Blake, is an actor who peaked as a teenager, and they scrape by on residual checks. But they were always happy until Blake started flaking out--on Rory, on their children and on adulthood in general. Since someone needs to support their family, Rory gives up her freelance design work and gets a full-time job at a hot new lifestyle website for kids called JeuneBug.

Desperate to keep her kids from realizing how fragile their family's situation is, Rory frantically tries to stay on top of school projects and birthday party plans, while also figuring out how to succeed at a weird job where everyone speaks in cryptic business lingo. The problem is, her two bosses are half her age, and no one else at JeuneBug actually has children. Can Rory be the grown-up in the office and the grown-up in her family, without having a mental breakdown? Will she be able to save both her career and her marriage?

From the authors of The Nanny Diaries, How to Be a Grown-Up is a fun, fast-paced look at modern life for a working New York mother. Rory's struggles are sometimes laugh-out-loud funny and completely familiar to anyone who's ever attempted to get a three-year-old to do something they don't want to do.

Perfect for those who enjoy Lauren Weisberger's books, or McLaughlin and Kraus's earlier titles, How to Be a Grown-Up is smart, fabulous reading. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

"I've lived my whole life in this city, and I know too much about how business gets done here," proclaims V.I. Warshawski in Sara Paretsky's Brush Back. The experience of both protagonist and author with Chicago's political, criminal and athletic landscapes make the 17th novel of Paretsky's P.I. crime series a thrillingly convincing addition.

When V.I.'s old flame Frank Guzzo shows up in her office asking for help exonerating his mother--newly released from prison after serving 25 years for beating her daughter to death--the seasoned private eye has deep reservations. This woman treated the Warshawski family viciously, and V.I. believes Stella Guzzo is guilty of the crime for which she was convicted. But V.I.'s history with Frank Guzzo motivates her to look into the case. What she uncovers leads her and her loved ones into the dark, dangerous underside of Chicago politics--and Wrigley Field.

Through three decades of V.I. Warshawski, Sara Paretsky (Critical Mass) has portrayed the strong, independent female authentically. With V.I. now in her 50s, Paretsky continues to draw a determined, believable hero. V.I. bleeds when she's assaulted, aches the day after and admits fear of a corrupt social system much larger and more powerful than she. But she also perseveres, "You know how it is. I was jumping over a tall building and forgot that it takes me two bounds these days."

With V.I. Warshawski working to brush back the bad guys, Paretsky scores another hardboiled winner sure to make the fans go wild. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

"This book is about how I came to embrace and celebrate the variety and contradictions that make up my life," writes Dan-el Padilla Peralta in the introduction to his memoir, Undocumented. Variety and contradictions abound: Peralta lived in a homeless shelter with his single mother and brother while attending one of New York City's most prestigious private schools; he attended Princeton as a Classics major while fighting to gain legal immigration status in the United States; he was written up in the Wall Street Journal as an undocumented student while struggling to find a way to work legally after college graduation.

Undocumented is, as he intended it to be, the story of these many aspects of his life, and how he came to graduate at the top of his Ivy League class against all odds. Perhaps because of the many layers of his personal and public life, Peralta's memoir can at times feel scattered: personal stories of family meals and phone calls are strewn amid recollections of various school events, which are distributed among accounts of the various homeless shelters and low-income apartments in which Peralta and his family lived. But throughout these pieces are powerful musings on the role of race, politics and poverty in the lives of those in the "hood"--as well as those in the upper echelons of Manhattan society--that rescue Undocumented from floundering.

Though he admits that his story is rare, the product of "structures, contexts, and luck reigned supreme," Peralta's experiences paint a vulnerable--and very personal--story of the immigration debate in the United States. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Guy de la Bédoyère's The Real Lives of Roman Britain is not a narrative history of Roman Britain. (De la Bédoyère has already written several versions of that narrative.) It is instead an attempt to look at the 360 years of Roman occupation in terms of human experience rather than "the generalities of military campaigns, the antics of emperors, the arid plains of statistical models and typologies of pottery, the skeletal remains of buildings, and theoretical archaeological agendas."

The attempt is not entirely successful due to a problem that de la Bédoyère identifies early in the book as "visibility." There is surprisingly little evidence, physical or textual, concerning the Roman experience in Britain, and even less about individuals--often no more than a name and a hint. (Sometimes not even a name. One individual, known as the "Aldgate-Pulborough Potter," is recognizable only by the distinctive incompetence of his work.) Consequently, much of the book is devoted less to the lives of Roman Britain and more to an evaluation of the available evidence.

In lesser hands, this close analysis of inscriptions, clay tablets, pottery shards and, yes, the skeletal remains of buildings, could be as dry as the dust from which they are taken. De la Bédoyère considers each bit of evidence with wit and imagination, leading the reader with him on the path of discovery rather than simply providing his conclusions. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Tristan Gooley (The Natural Navigator) has spent more than 20 years walking through the countryside and along the coasts of England, and is the only living person who has both flown and sailed solo across the Atlantic. In The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs, Gooley generously shares his astute observations of natural (and fabricated) elements--trees, plants and animals, clouds, stars and planets, and cities, towns and villages. Although Gooley's home is England, he is a world traveler and his observations are universally helpful.

Gooley's recommendations are oriented toward the curious and practical, and can be applied to any walk in nearly any location: "This is a book about outdoor clues and signs and the art of making predictions and deductions... to make your walks, however long or short, eminently more fascinating." For example, the smell of smoke may indicate a temperature inversion in the air; therefore, fog may be likely in the morning or evening, but will not last long. The prevailing wind direction can be ascertained by noticing which side of the trees is thicker with branches. Our fists can be used to determine how long before the sun sets, and the placement of shops and cafes reflects the flow of foot traffic. While Gooley's tips encompass useful, practical ways to predict a change in weather, determine when a predator may be prowling and find true North at night, his true gift is in igniting curiosity and wonder about the world around us. --Kristen Galles from Book Club Classics

Although poet Major Jackson lives in South Burlington and teaches at the University of Vermont, he's no Robert Frost. Raised by his grandparents in Philadelphia, Jackson comes from urban streets and schools where music, vacant lots and graffiti shaped his African American roots. His first collection, Leaving Saturn, and second, Hoops, explored that personal background in the ongoing sequence poem "Urban Renewal." In Roll Deep, Jackson continues the "Urban Renewal" narrative with 18 new segments describing experiences in the wider world of Greece, Spain, Brazil, Kenya and Italy, in which beauty masks undercurrents of poverty and violence. For example, in "La Barraca Blues Suite" the narrator savors "a daily paper/ ...between sips of café con leche" while knowing "Guernica is down the street." Or in "The Dadaab Suite," the speaker views Kenya's majestic Maasai Mara while "the sound of crushing bones racked my ears;/ a battalion of lions gorged on a half-eaten gazelle."

As poetry editor of the Harvard Review, Jackson firmly grasps contemporary poetry. Roll Deep works within traditional meter as it embraces hip-hop rhythms and references to modern conveniences, still holding to the themes of Jackson's roots. In "Dreams of Permanence" he observes thinly masked racism in a desolate urban scene "before city cops,/ seemingly patrolling only this part of town,/ rush to manhandle some shy kid." In the concluding personal poem, "Why I Write Poetry," among his many reasons, one stands out: "Because my grandfather loved clean syntax,/ cologne, Stacy Adams shoes, Irish tweed caps,/ and women, but not necessarily in that order." More Langston Hughes than Robert Frost, Jackson is a poet of many voices. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Readers follow 100-year-old Lillian on her way to cast her vote, in this moving tribute to the long uphill struggle that her vote signifies.

"A very old woman stands at the bottom of a very steep hill," Jonah Winter (The Founding Fathers) begins. Shane W. Evans's (We March) mixed-media portrait captures both Lillian's intelligence and hard-won serenity. As she makes her way up that hill, she remembers the plight of the generations before her: her great-great-grandparents standing on an auction block "in front of the very same Alabama courthouse where rich white men, and no one else, are allowed to vote"; her great-grandpa Edmund on his way to vote in 1870, thanks to the Fifteenth Amendment (though his wife still had no right to vote); then the impediments of the poll tax, and the obstructions to women even after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Evans distinguishes Lillian's memories as ghosted images outlined in pencil and pen on cutouts of solid colors, allowing Lillian's elegant figure to pop in every scene. One of the most powerful is a double-page spread that splits between the sepia-toned image of Lillian voting for the first time in 1965 and her present-day self robed in elegant finery and rendered in full color.

This is a picture book for older readers who can understand the symbol of the KKK's burning cross and the Civil Rights marches of the 1960s. It delivers a powerful message about never taking the right to vote for granted. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness