A man wakes up on Day One and can't remember anything, including his own name, and the people around him are in a similar state. The few clues to the man's identity are the items he finds in his pocket: a toy man with a parachute made from plastic, a hand-drawn map and a photograph of a man and a woman. Using these items, Faller, as he decides to call himself, goes on a search for answers. Memories and meanings of words pop into his mind as he meanders through the city: "Dog. The word burst in his mind, fresh, like he was giving birth to it. Yet, he knew what a dog was.... Four-legged animal, fur, wagging tail. His mind felt slightly clearer, his energy returning." Faller discovers the world has been shattered into floating islands, that he's the man in the photograph, that duplicates of himself live on other islands, and that people from his past who know him are out to kill him for reasons he doesn't remember or understand.

Will McIntosh (Burning Midnight) places readers firmly in his Day One world before slowly revealing the events that led up to the critical moment when everything changed, which helps build tension and the illusion of this shattered world. He also challenges readers to contemplate the meaning of identity and the appropriate use of power. Faller is mind-bending, futuristic science fiction that contains elements of mystery, intrigue, romance, world war, biological warfare and high-tech science, along with likable characters who often make decisions based on gut feelings rather than logic. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

The family of law student-turned-artist Marcelino Truong was intimately involved in the Vietnam War's early events; his father served under the Diem regime in South Vietnam before the 1963 military coup that took down Diem and his family. With Such a Lovely Little War, Truong offers a child's (and expatriate's) perspective of two years during that period.

This riveting graphic memoir is the story of little Marco, the youngest son of South Vietnamese diplomat Khanh. When Prime Minister Diem recalls Khanh to Saigon in 1961, Marco's family--French mom Yvette and siblings Mireille and Domi--must leave the idylls of their Washington, D.C., home. Marco's quiet life is further disrupted when Yvette's inability to cope with her new environment triggers bipolar disorder. As bombs approach their Saigon apartment, the Truong family must make the decision to leave or stay against the increasing threat of war.

Truong's art moves in gauzy, home movie-like orange hues across the page, breaking into blue-gray palettes to describe historical elements outside of Marco's social sphere. He also strikes a delicate balance between childhood innocence and adult experiences. In the Washington suburbs, Domi's and Marco's otherness provokes thinly veiled racism when neighborhood boys engage them in a "Commies" play battle. Later, in their Saigon apartment, Domi and Marco play-act North versus South Vietnamese battles against the backdrop of their mother's escalating emotional volatility. Perhaps the passage of time has added an objective and journalistic vantage point for this eyewitness account, making a pivotal moment in American, French and Vietnamese history so meaningful and gripping. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

Lucy Burningham (Hop in the Saddle), effervescent expert on the bicycle and beer scenes in Portland, Ore., brings her energetic, fun approach to My Beer Year: Adventures with Hop Farmers, Craft Brewers, Chefs, Beer Sommeliers, and Fanatical Drinkers as a Beer Master in Training. A longtime brew lover, Burningham decides to show her knowledge by becoming the beer equivalent of a sommelier, a Certified Cicerone. It is an enticing but daunting challenge; the exam's pass rate is lower than most states' bar exams, and many people study for a year and a half to prepare. Burningham decides she will try to do it in a year.

Her thirst for beer knowledge takes her throughout her home region and across the Atlantic to Belgium and Germany. She sips IPAs from Oregon, savors lambics in Brussels and downs Kölsch in Germany. The histories of different beer styles are fascinating, but Burningham is especially compelling in her meditations on being female in this largely male-dominated scene. Her sense of humor is delightful, and she writes adeptly for an audience who may lack a background in beer terminology. Comparing aluminum and steel kegs, she relays that "aluminum kegs scratch easily, weigh less, and make a 'dong' sound when you bang on them (as opposed to steel's 'ding.')"

Sipping a pint while reading is not a requirement, but perhaps it ought to be. Foreseeing that readers might do so, Burningham also includes beer tasting sheets and scoring keys in her afterword. --Katie Weed, freelance writer and reviewer

At age five, Ivan Coyote (Gender Failure) knew what it was like to feel different and uncomfortable in one's skin. With a semi-chronological narrative, famous quotations and pen-and-ink illustrations, Tomboy Survival Guide is an insightful memoir of recognizing and accepting one's gender identity while being raised in the Yukon during the 1980s. (Generation X readers will immediately understand and enjoy the many cultural references and nostalgia.)

Coyote is transgender and uses the pronouns they and their. Recalling "the kind of lonely I felt in my belly," Coyote shares defining childhood moments, such as when a stranger thought Coyote was a boy: "Made me feel like he could look inside me and see some part of the truth of me in there." With a strong aptitude for the trades and interest in electricity, Coyote was met with cruel harassment in training programs and on job sites. An advocate for the transgender community, Coyote shares examples of decades of discrimination within the context of personal experiences using restrooms, changing facilities and other public venues.

A live-performance storyteller, filmmaker and musician, Coyote has a narrative style that occasionally strays into casual and off-the-cuff recounting, which lends itself nicely to some of Tomboy Survival Guide's lighthearted moments. Humorous remembrances of childhood summer escapades with cousins are paired alongside challenges in the face of societal injustices. Coyote's memoir offers a moving perspective of life as a transgender person with insights for others on this path and for LGBTQ allies. --Melissa Firman, writer, editor and blogger at melissafirman.com

When readers want to be swept back to the Victorian era, they often turn to authors like the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy, who offer a perfect escape to a time that, despite obvious hardships, is easy to idealize. In Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners, Therese Oneill takes readers on a quick, hilarious romp through the gritty unmentionable details that literature fails to discuss--those of the most intimate nature. Oneill begins at daybreak, waking to abject cold, scratchy bedsheets and, beneath the bed, a bowl that serves as a toilet. She focuses on the life of a well-to-do lady because, as Oneill states, one would not want to be poor given that poverty at that time was especially grim.

Oneill's delight in her subject is endearing. She delivers even the most disturbing facts, like how drinking wells and sewage were placed close to each other, in entertaining ways. Yet Oneill's stories are not without depth. Throughout Unmentionable, she notes how far feminism and related movements have come from the constrictions of Victorian ideologies. She introduces figures like Margaret Sanger, an American nurse and advocate for women's birth control, and Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross. She stresses how long women have fought to be considered people in their own right and how their contributions changed the world. In the end, Oneill offers readers a little parting comfort: that history is seldom as good, nor as bad, as it seems. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company

Biology can be funny--especially through the eyes of Matt Simon, science writer for Wired magazine. The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar: Evolution's Most Unbelievable Solutions to Life's Biggest Problems is Simon's gleeful ode to weird science.

Provocatively titled chapters group evolutionary problems and solutions into wry categories, with various animals and their adaptations featured in each. A sampling: "Turns Out Getting Eaten Is Bad for Survival" and "You Absolutely Must Get Laid." In the latter, Simon writes, "Think finding love in a bar is hard? Try finding it in the desolation of the deep sea." The solution for anglerfish involves the males burrowing parasite-like into the females, their bodies fusing and thus syncing the fish's hormones, ensuring that the males release sperm when the females release eggs.

Like nature itself, Simon's descriptions often repel and fascinate. The hagfish's solution to escaping sharks entails choking attackers, "filling their gills with copious amounts of snot." There is also the fungus that zombifies ants, which Simon repeatedly assures readers he is not making up.

He includes notes on humans, too. He celebrates significant scientists throughout history, including one woman whom Simon laments that science has forgotten: natural historian Maria Merian, who studied bugs in Surinam in 1699. Simon also tells a memorable anecdote about modern marine biologists who, when deep sea diving, play Angry Birds on waterproof iPads during slow ascents to avoid the bends. Closing the book with reflections on the scientists combatting humans' impact on our shared planet, Simon reflects with optimism and appreciation on the significance of their work. --Katie Weed, freelance writer and reviewer

In his stimulating history of the device once referred to as "the idiot box" but now more likely to be a flat-panel screen, tablet or smartphone, British-born critic and San Francisco resident David Thomson (Moments That Made the Movies) takes a revealing look at this "impassive force that commandeered so much of what we thought was our attention, our consciousness, or our intelligence" for the past seven decades.

Eschewing a chronological approach, Thomson divides Television: A Biography into two segments: "Medium" (an exploration of "the climate of TV, the things that are always there") and "Messages." The latter, and more engaging, section comprises a set of loosely connected essays on subjects that include television's treatment of race (with particular attention to Bill Cosby and the O.J. Simpson trial), women (epitomized in the iconic comedy I Love Lucy), crime (spotlighting the Law & Order franchise that had stretched to 1,062 episodes by the end of 2014) and the news.

The subject of this ambitious study is vast. As of 2015, by Thomson's estimate, some 5,000 years worth of television, from the sublime to the execrable, have unfolded before our eyes. Thomson commands this surfeit of material impressively, and his taste is eclectic.

Television: A Biography captures the "ordinary, casual pleasure to be felt with television," though it's "tinged with unease at what the medium has done to us." Anyone who's been alive in the era of TV would have to concede, as Thomson eloquently demonstrates here, that its transformational influence on every aspect of life in the United States has been nothing less than profound. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

In Float, poet, essayist, translator, critic, playwright and professor Anne Carson (Nox) offers new poetry and prose presented in 23 separately bound chapters, arranged in an attractive acetate case. It is a marriage of penetrating intellect, inspiring language and the art of the book. "Powerless Structures Fig. II (Sanne)," for example, is a short poem on the death of a loved one that concludes, "Three steps up no steps down/ she dies/ in April 2010 of alcohol and indescribable longing." "Eras of Yves Klein" contains six pages of personal biographical entries about this French artist, each line beginning with "The Era of..."--including "The Era of Covering Up Rosicrucian Beliefs with the Vocabulary of Phenomenology so as Not to Be Ridiculed by Paris Intelligentsia." Another, "Maintenance," is an amusing take on upkeep--in one line asking "Is order an issue of maintenance as in in what order as in the order given in the diagram the order they came out of the box etc."

Carson ruminates on the process of translation in "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent," citing Joan of Arc, Francis Bacon and Friedrich Hölderlin. And in the lyrical poem "Wildly Constant," the narrator reflects, "I always walk in the morning./ I don't know why anymore./ Life is short," and continues with what could be a summary description of Float: "What would it be like/ to live in a library/ of melted books?/ With sentences streaming over the floor/ and all the punctuation/ settled to the bottom as residue." A visit to the library inside Carson's head is always worth standing in line. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

This charming YA novel (narrated by Love herself) plays out like a romantic comedy. Ironically, that's the genre most hated by movie buff and high school senior Gael Brennan, who is a huge fan of Alfred Hitchcock and Wes Anderson films.

According to Love, Gael is a Romantic, someone "who ruthlessly believes in Love in its finest form." Unfortunately, Gael's new girlfriend, Anika, does not. She's an Adventurer, defined as someone who "primarily seeks out a partner for life's adventures (and misadventures...)." Shortly after Gael professes his love to her, he arrives at school early to discover Anika liplocked with his best friend, Mason. Heartbroken, Gael punches Mason, quits band and generally mopes around, watching movies and eating snack-sized Snickers bars. When Gael is run down by Cara, a first-year college student on her bicycle, the accident leads to that "dreaded enemy of True Love since the dawn of freaking time," the Rebound. Meanwhile, Gael begins to realize that his sister's babysitter Sammy, despite her love of romantic comedies, is good company, and she's quickly becoming a friend he doesn't want to lose. (At least she likes Serpico.)

Throughout The Romantics, Love carries on a droll commentary about the nature of the human heart and Gael's relationships with friends, his little sister, his parents and possible girlfriends, all the while enlightening readers as to how she works her magic. Gael is a warm and sympathetic character, and this playful, entertaining take on love by Leah Konen (The Last Time We Were Us; The After Girls) should find plenty of ardent fans. --Lynn Becker, blogger and host of Book Talk, a monthly online discussion of children's books for SCBWI