When Into the Valley begins, B. is cashing her first forged check. The Summer of Love in San Francisco, where B. has just left, is worlds away from the Sacramento Valley she's heading toward. The only time she feels at home is when an unsuspecting teller hands her a bundle of cash within the economical and sterile walls of a bank.

Ruth Galm's first novel is a spare and lyrical story of homelessness. At 30, B. sees hippies as misguided and naïve, but she feels detached from the pearl necklaces, beehive hairdos and patriarchy of the previous decade. She wanders into the desert east of the Sierra Nevada hoping to discover who she is and where she's meant to be, but instead begins to lose both her way and her self-control.

Following the advice of a hapless and criminal janitor she meets in her office, B. learns how to forge checks. But Galm wants the reader to know that, while B. does in fact become a wanted criminal, B. doesn't steal from the banks for the thrill or the cash. Instead, she wants to determine her own identity amid a major cultural shift. Only the secret wad of cash tucked under the seat of her car reminds B. that there are still parts of her identity all to herself, no matter how violently times change.

As the banks and the police begin to catch on, B. wanders the plains of California, weighing her options, until finally a bold act unveils for her an elusive truth she could never have predicted. --Josh Potter

Lauren Holmes's debut collection, Barbara the Slut and Other People, explores a range of human connections. In the title story, a high school student with a rule about not sleeping with the same guy more than once finds the word "slut" spray-painted on her locker and revels in its hot pink color. In "Desert Hearts," a recent law school graduate pretends to be a lesbian to get a job in a sex toy store and contemplates having a baby to feel less alone. In "Pearl and the Swiss Guy Fall in Love," a young woman brings home a tourist, looking for a little action, and finds herself with a house guest who's overstayed his welcome--and fallen in love with her man-hating dog in the meantime.

In many of the stories, the connections in question are sexual; in others, they are more about families and friendships. Individually, each story is about a person's deep desires; as a collection, Barbara the Slut and Other People explores how those desires are shaped and challenged by the contexts in which the characters find themselves. In their depiction of love and acceptance, betrayal and heartbreak, these stories reveal and accept--and even celebrate--their characters' biggest flaws as they strive for intimacy. At times funny, at times crushingly sad, Holmes's book proves her to be a talented writer of fiction, asking readers to engage not only with who they are as individuals but also the world they live in together. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Due to a traumatic childhood incident, 18-year-old Patrick Fort is obsessed with death. He wants to analyze what happens when people die, which makes him a great candidate for the anatomy course at Cardiff University, which requires him and his classmates to dissect cadavers to determine cause of death.

When Patrick finds something unexpected inside his cadaver, he suspects that Number 19--the cadavers are assigned only numerical IDs--was murdered, despite the death certificate claiming natural causes. But Patrick's attempts to prove his theory are hampered at every turn, resulting in events that threaten to grant him personal experience with the very condition he seeks to understand.

Belinda Bauer's Rubbernecker is fast-paced and quick-witted, told from multiple points of view (one seems unnecessary, tied to an unrelated subplot that goes nowhere). Patrick's voice holds the most interest. He's a curious and intelligent boy with Asperger's syndrome, who takes everything literally and is deadly serious at all times, but is also funny and charming, albeit unintentionally. Bauer's (Blacklands) almost gleeful descriptions of cadaverous viscera display a macabre sense of humor that induces chuckles alongside groans of disgust. Then, with revelations that come only pages from the end, the author punches readers in the heart.

Though Rubbernecker, which was originally published in the U.K., received the 2014 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, it's not just a mystery. It's also a portrait of a memorable protagonist who finds a way to embrace life by confronting what lies beyond. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

William Finnegan (Crossing the Line; Cold New World), staff writer for the New Yorker, first got the surfing jones as a kid in Los Angeles, and nurtured it when his TV producer parents moved to Honolulu at age 14. A shy, reclusive white boy in a school of local Hawaiians and Asian immigrants, he found escape and friendship in the waves off shore from their cottage on the wrong side of Diamond Head. As he recalls in his memoir Barbarian Days, "the surf was your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it was also a hostile wilderness... an uncaring God, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure." For the young Finnegan, surfing anchored him throughout the turmoil of his teens and then took him across the globe in search of bigger waves and broader adventures.

Barbarian Days is the detailed chronicle of his years of travel, friendship, romance and political awakening. His journey took him through the South Pacific islands to Australia, Indonesia and finally Cape Town--where teaching in an apartheid South African black high school "changed me... turned me toward politics, journalism, and questions of power." While Finnegan explores his own intellectual growth, Barbarian Days is primarily a surfing story of shortboards, "left" and "right" waves, and big swells with nicknames like Restaurant and Racetrack. In all, Finnegan might relate to Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer's recent comment about his growing food empire: "You can't become a champion surfer in a bathtub." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Visiting a variety of charnel houses, repositories of human bones located throughout the world, is not the way one usually spends a holiday, but Denise Inge (Wanting Like a God) had a special reason to visit four ossuaries: she lived on top of one in England. Knowing her house was situated over a room full of human bones, coupled with a diagnosis of inoperable cancer, prompted Inge to rethink her views on death and dying, and to face her fear of the dead, her fear of the unknown that lies ahead.

Although the idea of charnel houses might appear ghoulish, the deliberateness in preserving these human remains can change one's perspective, as Inge discovered in her travels. In the Skull Chapel in Czermna, where the skulls and bones of Germans, Czechs, Poles and Silesians lie together, "the vanquished and the victors laid side by side regardless of race or station... skulls alone are stacked floor to ceiling, each jawless chin seeming to devour the ash-white cranium on which it rests." Inge could still sense the antagonism these enemies felt toward one another in life. In Sedlec, she discovered chalices and chandeliers built out of bones; in Hallstatt, sun-bleached skulls were lovingly hand painted; in Naters, Inge juxtaposes the beauty of the Alps against the macabre. Each visit altered Inge's own feelings toward life and death further, leaving readers with a deep sense of the wonder of them both. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Mike Tyson used to visit him for advice. Ice-T and Ice Cube chose their names in his honor. He's had a substantial impact on gangsta rap and black culture. Robert "Iceberg Slim" Beck was both the "definitive voice of black urban life" and a "misogynist who wrote trashy paperbacks that promote violence against vulnerable young woman," Justin Gifford (Pimping Fictions) argues in Street Poison, the first-ever biography of the writer. Tall, slender and cool, Slim dressed in flashy clothes, a suitable style for the life described in his popular autobiography, Pimp.

In 1918, Beck was born in Chicago, and his family later moved to Rockford, Ill. He lived a contented middle-class life and did well in school until his mother left her second husband to follow a hustler to Milwaukee, shattering the boy's sense of stability. In 1936, an 18-year-old college dropout, Beck started pimping in the streets and clubs while still living with his mother. In his own words, he was "street poisoned" and very successful; he made a lot of money, abused many of his prostitutes and did prison time.

After his final release in 1962, he gradually transformed himself into an author. Though major publications did not review them and few bookstores carried them, Iceberg Slim's books sold in the millions of copies and had a deep influence on African American writing. Without Slim, Gifford argues, there would be "no street literature, no blaxploitation, no hip-hop the way we know them today." Gifford's biography is as gritty as it is revelatory. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Most people, including food writer Anastacia Marx de Salcedo, have had no idea that innovations such as the tin can, dry yeast and crackers were invented to feed soldiers at war. She opens Combat-Ready Kitchen with her realization that the contents of school children's lunchboxes bear a strong resemblance to what's served to special operations soldiers. From there, she takes a journey into the origins and science behind prepared foods.

Feeding hundreds of thousands of soldiers at war presents a particular set of problems. When soldiers are deployed in places of extreme heat or cold, and are on the move, solving logistical challenges of what and how to eat can determine the outcome of war. Small groups of warriors could raid and pillage to survive, but large-scale military campaigns require innovations such as cured meats, hard cheese and hardtack (dry crackers) to feed troops. The processed food on store shelves today is a modern extension of these innovations.

While Marx de Salcedo recognizes that making restructured meat appetizing and the chemical mix that keeps bread fresh for as long as possible are great inventions that have resulted in cheap, shelf-stable consumables, she also sees the ways in which heavily processed foods have not been good for public health. Welcome as their technological advances may be, she observes, the military cannot be the sole director of food innovation. At a time when social movements encourage people to eat locally and sustainably, Anastacia Marx de Salcedo offers an informed and scientific perspective on the origins, science and importance of prepared foods. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company

Fuzzy mud is pure poison, but even the vile mud's clueless creators are treated compassionately in this playfully pithy middle-grade novel from Louis Sachar (Holes).

Woodridge Academy is a fancy private school surrounded by woods that the students walk around, not through, to get to class. The older boys warn of a deranged, woods-dwelling hermit. But the scariest thing in Heath Cliff, Pa., is not that bloody toothless hermit, but SunRay Farm, a secret lab that alters the DNA of slime mold to create one-celled microorganisms, or "tiny Frankensteins," to burn as an alternative fuel source for an overpopulated, car-obsessed planet. On a trek through the forbidden woods with her friend Marshall Walsh, fifth grader Tamaya Dhilwaddi stumbles upon this Biolene-brand fuel in the form of some curiously "fuzzy" mud. When Chad, a bullying classmate, shows up to beat up Marshall, Tamaya impulsively smashes the toxic goo into his face, unwittingly triggering a massive outbreak of a heinous, rash-producing infection. While this is certainly a cautionary tale about humankind messing with nature to calamitous effect, the lively narrative also deftly captures the emotional turbulence of Tamaya, a latchkey kid with divorced parents who doesn't want to be a Goody Two-shoes; Marshall's struggle with Chad's power over him; and Chad's anger over his parents' neglect. Bouts of middle-school malaise alternate with entertaining, over-the-top transcripts of secret U.S. Senate hearings with Biolene representatives.

Fuzzy Mud asks readers to contemplate overpopulation and how far humans will go to accommodate the world's increasing resource consumption, but Sachar keeps his story buoyant with snappy dialogue and plenty of action. --Karin Snelson, children’s editor, Shelf Awareness

Holly Goldberg Sloan (Counting by 7s) partners with her illustrator husband, Gary A. Rosen, in this enchanting tale of family devotion that features a passel of possums. 

Appleblossom is the most timid possum in her litter of 13, struggling to master her mother's rules for survival in the face of cars, people and hairies (dogs). Mama possum teaches her babies how to navigate life's hazards through various theatrical exercises, with "playing dead" at the top of the list. As the possums are weaned from their mother's care, Appleblossom must embrace her independence: "She has to always move forward, even if she feels small and alone in the world and not much of an actor." Her first independent foray is disastrous: she falls down a chimney where she's discovered by a "littlest people," a child named Izzy. Izzy feels this accident is "the greatest thing that has ever happened to her," and the unlikely pair bond in a tenuous, yet intimate friendship. Appleblossom's family, however, doesn't know she's temporarily safe, so they mount a rescue. Here the narrative shifts back to the nocturnal marsupial world, and the possums practice their prowess as performers to survive the dangers that stand between them and their beloved Appleblossom.

Sloan successfully combines middle-grade adventure with a biology lesson about the miraculous life cycle of North America's only marsupial. Three-color line drawings appear throughout, highlighting the expressive body language of the dramatic possum family. Through Appleblossom, shy children will discover how to "fake it 'til you make it." --Jessica Bushore, former public librarian and freelance writer