The Mexican American family in Luis Alberto Urrea's richly rendered novel The House of Broken Angels is distinctly American: a melting pot of cultures, languages and individuals united in a common dream of perseverance. The novel's protagonist, "Big Angel" de La Cruz, stricken with cancer and bound to a wheelchair, celebrates what will be his last birthday with his children, grandchildren and extended family. Relatives have already converged on San Diego for the funeral of Big Angel's mother, and he's determined to survive just a bit longer, to offer a day of joy and remembrance instead of another funeral.

In this emotional dynamic of impending death, the history of the de La Cruz family unfurls. Big Angel recalls his childhood on Mexico's Baja Peninsula, his courtship with his future wife and the picaresque shenanigans of his philandering father. Paralleling Big Angel's story are those of his children and extended family. His daughter Minnie is tough-minded and takes care of her father. His son Lalo, an Iraq War veteran, is less resilient, struggling with drugs and crime. Big Angel's two stepsons propel the plot forward as their past involvement in gang violence catches up to the entire family. And the relationship between Big Angel and his younger half-brother, "Little Angel," who is part gringo, provides the novel's funniest and most tender moments.

The House of Broken Angels is a big-hearted family saga. It captures "the golden bubble available to everyone," that is, the warm inner gratitude for life that follows grief. "Love is the answer," Big Angel tells his daughter. "Nothing stops it. Not borders. Not death." --Scott Neuffer, writer, poet, editor of trampset

White Houses, Amy Bloom's first novel based on historical characters, tells the story of the love and friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok. The women's relationship was so open that "Hick" was widely known as the "First Friend," yet discreet enough that their intimacies continued unchallenged for years. Bloom's (Lucky Us) copious research infuses the tale on every page but never overshadows her storytelling.

Hick's first-person narration provides authenticity, as do the historic references throughout. (Young Tip O'Neill, "that vile Joe Kennedy," Churchill and J. Edgar Hoover make appearances.) The book opens on April 27, 1945, just after FDR's death, and the women's stories surface through reminiscences. Hick had an impoverished South Dakota childhood and scraped her way up to AP reporter on the Lindbergh kidnapping case, which lead to an assignment in 1932 covering Eleanor. Hick recalls, "I never envied a wife or a husband, until I met Eleanor. Then I would have traded anything I ever had for what Franklin had... polio and all." She then quietly moves into the White House, covering the family as a member of the administration.

The women lead parallel yet intertwined lives, "sometimes requiring me to slip out and stroll back in," Hick notes. "We touched under tablecloths, beneath napkins, behind the newspaper." Their independent spirits--Hick a self-sufficient journalist, Eleanor the tireless activist and tolerant wife--led to an ebb and flow of their affair, but they remained devoted until Eleanor's death in 1962. White Houses gives a fresh look at an iconic first lady, her feisty lover and a significant era in 20th century American history. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

In former ER doctor Kimmery Martin's debut novel, The Queen of Hearts, two female physicians find cracks in their rock-solid friendship when a face from the past returns, bringing buried secrets to light.

As a third-year medical student in the late 1990s, Zadie fell hard for chief resident and notable bad boy Nick Xenocostas, known as Dr. X. Their white-hot, secret relationship consumed her even through a series of tragic events that still haunts Zadie and Emma, her best friend since they were teens at summer camp.

More than a decade later, Nick belongs to a closed chapter Zadie and Emma never bring up, one that nearly put an end to their friendship. Now both successful doctors--Emma is in trauma surgery and Zadie's a cardiologist--the two have also embraced marriage and motherhood. Zadie finds it hard to maintain her composure, as an often-alone mother of three school-aged children and a toddler, and Emma struggles with the impostor syndrome ingrained by her dirt-poor childhood as a miner's daughter. When Nick lands a partner position at Emma's practice, the women are thrown for a loop.

Martin writes impressively about the inside of the human body, but even more incisively about the landscape of the metaphysical heart. Furthermore, Martin wisely plays the chaotic toddler for laughs, but saves plenty of rage and tenderness for the lost battles of youth that shaped the two women and their friendship, yet remained lodged like shrapnel in wounds that never truly healed. Bittersweet and graceful, The Queen of Hearts marks Martin as a fresh voice filled with promise. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Author Lillian Bell launches a lively mystery series starring Desiree Turner, a TV reporter axed from her job after a hot microphone incident went viral. Returning to Verbena, Calif., a small town near Sacramento, Desiree rejoins her sister Donna, brother-in-law Greg and their Uncle Joey. They all live and work together at the family-owned funeral home. The Turners deal in grief, including their own, since the widowed father of Desiree and Donna died in a surfing accident. A year later, the sisters still struggle with his disappearance.
 
When Rosemarie and Alan Brewer's beloved pet emu dies, the couple blames the unruly shepherd dogs belonging to neighbors Lola and Kyle Hansen. Their conflict escalates into a fistfight between the wives; soon after, Alan is found murdered. While the Turners tend to Alan's funeral, Kyle Hansen, who was like a second father to Desiree and Donna, becomes the prime suspect in Alan's homicide. Inquisitive Desiree starts a quest to exonerate Kyle and learn more about the murder victim, who was the manager of the Verbena Union Bank. Desiree discovers that Alan harbored many secrets and had a long list of enemies.

Suspenseful subplots and red herrings unravel this smartly crafted comic mystery that assembles a well-conceived cast of suspects embroiled in the stifling absurdities of small-town life. Bell cleverly ties up loose ends, while leaving some stragglers that are sure to rouse reader enthusiasm for the next installment. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

The Rending and the Nest opens on an eerie post-apocalyptic landscape in what used to be Minnesota: the majority of the world's population has disappeared in an instant known to survivors as the Rending. Piles of items from "the Before" are scattered mile-high across the countryside. Mira and her best friend Lana are scavenging one of these Piles several years after the Rending when Lana announces she is pregnant. Hers is the first pregnancy post-Rending, and a reason for hope in this strange new world. But when Lana gives birth to an inanimate object--and other women start to do the same--this moment of hope becomes a new kind of horror, as the survivors are forced to face the disturbing reality of their new lives in ways they could never have imagined.

Kaethe Schwehn (Tailings) builds her story slowly at first, giving readers time to adjust to a world that is eerily recognizable and yet entirely foreign. As the novel develops, this slow pace gives way to a furious speed that is reflective of the ever-shifting understanding Mira and her friends have of their new world. Their landscape offers no "why"; the Rending remains unexplained from start to finish, the world "a driftless, invisible unknown." But by accepting the event as something that just is, Schwehn--and her characters--are free to explore more important questions about what it means to really live: Is surviving enough? If not, what makes a life worth living? And what stories do we tell ourselves--and one another--to make it so? --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

The parents of Chinese millennials (all 400 million of them) have created one of the best educated, most aspirational generations in China's history. A millennial himself, Zak Dychtwald bummed all over the country to become fluent in Mandarin and make friends with his Chinese peers. Young China is his account of his language-impaired efforts to meld into the youth culture of a growing world power. Easily integrating statistics, interviews and the nuances of tonal Mandarin, he paints a picture of a country that "now graduates the most college students of any country in the world." The stats on China are staggering: for example, it has "the largest online matchmaking business in the world" and Alibaba's 2016 "online sales on Singles Day were more than Brazil's total projected e-commerce sales for the year." Take that, Tinder and Amazon!

Dychtwald is an entertaining guide through Chinese dorms, cafes and karaoke bars, touching on young people's almost universal quest for financial success, marriage and children. Along the way, Dychtwald observes students' 90-hour weeks cramming for college entrance exams and the LBGT underground with its "shape marriages" of lesbians and gay men for appearances. All told, Young China is the story of a generation not much different from its counterpart in the West--except the "China dream" of its youth is not to build their homeland's future but to revive its past glory. As one of Dychtwald's roommates puts it: "We remember rags. Now, as a country, it feels we are returning to riches." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

In 2011, Steven Pinker published The Better Angels of Our Nature, arguing that violence has declined over time and humans are actually enjoying the most peaceful time on Earth. Since then, the United States and other nations have elected right-wing populist leaders who challenge this peace. Using divisive rhetoric steeped in fear rather than fact, they claim our best days are behind us. Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, asserts that our best days lie ahead--provided we embrace the ideals of progress.

In Enlightenment Now, Pinker presents a wealth of data to show that where its ideas were allowed to flourish, the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries marked a dramatic increase in the quality of life. A majority of citizens worldwide thrive in democracies, without fear of persecution. Education has led to greater individual wealth and a march toward equal rights for women, the LGBTQ community and people of color. Advances in science have eradicated diseases, increased access to food and led to countless other improvements. Over time, humans have slowly shifted away from superstition and toward rational, evidence-based decision making. Yet some in the West--many of whom have benefited from progress the most--denounce "unfettered" capitalism for inequality, "elite" education for upending traditional values and many other hallmarks of an advanced society.

Pinker urges us (on both the political right and left) to reject ideology and tribalism, to look beyond the daily onslaught of negative news and to challenge preconceived notions and romantic ideals. By embracing the spirit of Enlightenment, he believes, the future is not bleak but bright. --Frank Brasile, librarian

In Greenland, the ice pack is receding, exposing layers of rocks that have lain hidden for millennia. Geologist William Glassley describes "some a fraction of an inch thick, some thicker than houses, colored in a palette of earth tones and off-whites, greens and blue-blacks and reds, fold back on one another, pinch and swell, stretch to paper thinness, then thicken again, telling stories we ache to know but can barely read." He is working with two colleagues to decipher those stories embedded in the earth. They suspect that billions of years ago the land was a sheer zone where two ancient continents collided, creating a mountain range the size of the Himalayas. They need to analyze the rocks, however, to know if this hypothesis is true.

A Wilder Time is far more than dry geological inquiry, though. It is a poetic, metaphysical and philosophical treatise on the wildness of life on earth. Glassley ponders the connections between humans and reindeer as he nibbles on reindeer lichen. He sniffs a piece of rock and wonders what new life forms might be created as freshly released atoms drift on the breeze. And he delights in the taste of a piece of glacial ice frozen for thousands of years. His enthusiasm for geology is palpable. His love of the wild is tangible, and his way with words beautiful. Throughout, he re-creates the dramatic moments and discoveries he and his team encountered in this under-explored section of the world. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Sue Fliess (How to Trap a Leprechaun) introduces a little girl with brains, ambition and tons of creativity in a rhyming picture book that would make even Dr. Seuss jealous.

Mary loves science, which doesn't make her the most popular kid in the class: "Mary had a little lab./ She tested and created./ While other kids were at the park,/ she built and calculated./ Inventing can be lonely, though." Since she doesn't have any friends, Mary decides to get a pet. But Mary is an inventor. She doesn't visit the local animal shelter or dog breeder to find her new companion; instead she visits a farm to clip a tuft of wool from a sheep. Back in her lab, Mary devises the "sheepinator," an elaborate, Willy Wonka-like machine, and "[s]he pushed the wool into the chute/ and poured the mixture in./ Then pumped the pedals with her feet/ to give it all a spin." And, presto, Mary has her very own sheep.

Readers will singsong along to the tempo of the popular nursery rhyme as Mary's classmates beg her to make sheep for them. Predictably, mayhem ensues. The initial temptation is to speed through the tale to find out what happens--there are sheep everywhere--but the brilliantly detailed and delightfully zany illustrations from Petros Bouloubasis slow the pace. His illustrations pay attention to features as simple as the rivets in the sheepinator or the tape holding pictures on the wall and as amusing as the sheep helping carry groceries or buffing the kitchen floors. This focus on a fully formed illustrative world makes the picture book as fascinating visually as it is plotted. Mary Had a Little Lab is an innovatively fun celebration of smart girls. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

Caroline Murphy has always heard that her birth during a hurricane cursed her with bad luck, and in her 12th year of life, the story seems true. At the Catholic school she attends on St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Caroline has no friends and teacher Missus Wilhelmina loathes Caroline because her skin is "darker than even the paintings of African queens hanging in the tourist shops." At home on Water Island, a speedboat taxi ride away, Caroline lives with her father and the hole her mother made in their lives when she suddenly left. A constant presence in Caroline's life are the spirits. One, "the woman in black," is particularly disquieting--completely black except for "eyes shining like two full moons in her face"--and Caroline suspects the spirit took her mother. Then she meets Kalinda Francis, a new classmate from Barbados with dreadlocks and a confidence that sends her straight to the head of the pecking order. Caroline is shocked to realize Kalinda can see spirits, too, but even more shocked when the popular girl becomes her close friend. However, Caroline will never feel whole unless she finds her mother, and her growing romantic feelings for Kalinda threaten their bond.

This tender, character-driven exploration of first loss intersecting first love balances sympathetic characters with a setting unfamiliar to many readers. The smooth integration of island details grounds the narrative and provides a sobering backdrop for the elements of magical realism. Kheryn Callender's commitment to remaining within a preteen's scope of understanding preserves the narrative's simplicity and authenticity. Though readable for grades four through seven, ages 10 through 13 may most appreciate this empathetic and emotionally mature coming-of-age drama. --Jaclyn Fulwood, youth services division manager at Main Branch, Dayton Metro Library