In the unlikely setting of 1937 rural Montana, teenage cousins share a passion for aviation in Cloudmaker, a sweeping yet personal coming-of-age story. Following Painted Horses, Malcolm Brooks again offers engaging, resolute characters and evocative descriptions of the country and the era.

Eighteen-year-old Annalise is exiled from California to her aunt and uncle's in the "bona fide jerkwater" town of Big Coulee, interrupting her social life as well as her flying lessons. Meanwhile, her cousin Huck, 14, has secretly tested a glider and built the frame for an "honest-to-God airplane" in his dad's shop. Worldly Annalise and whip-smart but sheltered Huck share respect, affection, a goal of getting in the air and a commitment to following Amelia Earhart's progress.

Descriptions of their flights are exhilarating, as they revel in the landscape and views, with Big Coulee no larger than a Lionel train village: "It all looked so gol dern small." Supporting characters are fully realized: Huck's father, Roy, is "a salt-of-the-earth sort" and his mother, Gloria--frail, protective and a tent-revival Christian--gradually becomes central to the story. While Huck and Annalise refine the plane with Yak, new to town and key to their success, subplots simmer: gangsters have a keen interest in a wristwatch Huck acquired in a recent escapade; looming drought forecasts trouble; and both cousins find romance. Evocative, descriptive prose of 1930s Montana--as well as the days "before white people and horses and guns"--in pitch-perfect dialect will immerse readers firmly in Brooks's beloved American West, and above it. --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.

The woman at the center of Mona by Pola Oloixarac (Dark Constellations), translated from Spanish by Adam Morris, is a young Peruvian writer who gigs as a "vraie [true] littérature" academic at teaching posts around the world. She's one of a small group of international writers nominated for a distinguished Swedish literary award, and as she arrives in Sweden, she hopes that a win, with its monetary prize, will give her freedom to leave academia. What at first seems to be a set piece in the rarefied world of ambitious literary types evolves into a psychological exploration of how performative behavior can substitute for authentic living.

Once in Sweden, Mona "luxuriate[s] in her own exoticism, gliding freely through her very own ocean, feeling special and unique." Yet Oloixarac makes sure that readers see through Mona's egocentrism, using other characters as mirrors to show how she appears to those around her, and it isn't always pretty. "You're a complete caricature of a woman," she is flatly informed by Lena, a European writer. Mona is almost always high, frequently drunk and her graphic hypersexuality turns out to be, unsurprisingly, horrifyingly dangerous. Her inner life, revealed by the narrator, underscores how little energy she invests in connecting with those around her.

It's true that the other writers seem to be playing at age-old literary types--the hedonist, the contrarian, the celebrity--but Mona's dispassion protects her from the work of burrowing deep into her own consciousness. With controlled emotion that builds to a devastating ending, Mona uncovers the complexities of a post-feminist generation. --Cindy Pauldine, bookseller, the river's end bookstore, Oswego, N.Y.

In Stacy D. Flood's gorgeous novella, Minister Peters boards a train in South Carolina in 1947, laboring under the burdens of very personal loss and the generational damage to a Black man from the South. Minister was a single father after a killing took his wife (in "the age when the murder of a black woman didn't warrant the pen, ink, or gasoline that it would take to investigate"). Now, after losing his daughter also, Minister departs for the promise of the North and an escape from his ghosts.

The Salt Fields puts Minister at a crossroad, with little left to breathe life into him and nothing to lose. He's seated on a train with three strangers, and the dynamic flows from there. Flood packs generations into a novella not much more than 100 pages long, with language cradling the horrific thorns of the past. If prose about lynchings and whippings could ever hold beauty, Flood accomplishes it. Words are never wasted in this compact work, and Flood is proficient at painting the piece with few strokes. Sometimes this occurs on a small scale, with a line or two (e.g., the action in a club is "a long kiss between everyone in the room."), but he's equally adept regarding societal issues such as racism and sexism. In a short yet significant description, the whites-only entrance to the train station is freshly painted with Romanesque pillars, the Black entrance chipped paint over old pine. Yet both lead to a common platform where everyone awaits the same train to somewhere else. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

In this meditative, tenderly written debut novel from Laura Maylene Walter, a teenage girl struggles with the challenge of creating her own fate in a world where a woman's destiny is written on her skin.

Celeste Morton is approaching her changeling period, when an adolescent girl's birthmarks that reveal her future will settle into their final form. Her brother is also eager to study her adult markings--since only women have these markings, Miles can learn about his fate through what Celeste's predict about her family; he also longs to practice interpretation professionally, in spite of the field being closed to men. When Celeste does change, her markings reveal a future tragedy she can't bear to share. It overshadows even the fear of abduction, a pervasive threat for changelings, who are nearly irresistible to men.

The focus of Body of Stars is less on its protagonist's struggle with society than on a more intimate level. Its heart is in the relationship between the siblings, in resilience after a life-changing event, and in the search for meaning in the face of mortality. Walter also hints at larger themes of what these markings mean to issues of gender throughout the world, including implications for transgender people in countries more progressive than the Mortons'.

This luminous coming-of-age story will appeal to fans of The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker and readers of feminist science fiction like The Power by Naomi Alderman. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

In J.T. Ellison's gripping romantic suspense novel Her Dark Lies, a murderer is on the loose at the worst possible time. When troubled artist Claire Hunter becomes engaged to impossibly wealthy Jack Compton, she believes her struggles are over--not only does she stand to inherit a fortune, she also gains attention and acclaim for her budding career thanks to her new powerful connections. But when the couple's family and friends gather for the wedding at the Comptons' villa on a private island in Italy, it quickly becomes apparent that someone does not want Jack and Claire to live happily ever after. A mysterious and sinister individual is terrorizing the couple, and as the weather grows more menacing and the murders add up, Claire and Jack are forced to confront their pasts--particularly the truth surrounding the puzzling deaths of several Compton women on the island, including Jack's first wife.

Rich, beautiful and privileged, Jack and Claire are not terribly sympathetic characters, but their devotion to each other is enviable and touching--and their obliviousness to reality is both frustrating and compelling, as readers learn about the culprit behind the mounting tragedies long before the characters connect the devastating dots. Ellison (Good Girls Lie) tells the story from multiple perspectives, revealing just enough information to build suspense and cast doubts about who can be trusted, making this novel delightfully unpredictable and absorbing. Ultimately, it's not clear whether the Compton family needs protecting from the world--or the other way around. --Angela Lutz, freelance reviewer

At the start of Nadine Matheson's sinister The Jigsaw Man, Detective Inspector Anjelica Henley returns to field duty with London's Serial Crimes Unit only to be greeted by pieces of two dismembered bodies. The methodology reminds Henley of the serial killer Peter Olivier, infamous for jigsawing his victims and scattering the segments around London. The latest body parts are carved with Olivier's signature, a symbol whose existence the cops have never publicly revealed.

The problem is, Olivier has been serving a life sentence inside a high-security prison and Henley put him there herself two years earlier. The only logical conclusion is that Henley and the SCU have a copycat killer on their hands. Henley must face Olivier again to ask for help, but he has other plans.

The Jigsaw Man is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach; it depicts gruesome scenes of murder and torture, sometimes from the victims' point of view. But this is countered by the humane portraits of the detectives. Henley isn't just an inspector; she's also a wife and mother with a young daughter and struggling with the work-life balance while trying to keep her family safe from murderous psychopaths. There's also the fact Henley is a Black woman leading a team of detectives, her trainee is a man named Salim Ramouter and the head forensic pathologist is a woman named Linh Choi. Matheson doesn't make a big deal out of her diverse cast of characters. She's simply normalizing inclusion and reflecting what the real world looks like. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

Abby Collette (A Deadly Inside Scoop) embraces the quirks of the charming town of Chagrin Falls in A Game of Cones, her second Ice Cream Parlor mystery. Bronwyn "Win" Crewse is happy that her family's shop is finally thriving in her quaint Ohio village. One of the few Black families in Chagrin Falls, the Crewses have managed the ice cream parlor for decades, but it had begun to fail in recent years, so Win left her advertising job in New York City to work on revitalizing it.

At a town meeting, Win and her fellow shopkeepers are stunned to find out that Zeke Reynolds, a developer, is planning to put a mall right on the town "square" (it's really a triangle). The small-business owners are appalled at how Zeke's plans would alter their village and affect their livelihoods. And then, just a day after he's booed out of the meeting, Zeke is found dead in an alley.

To complicate matters, Rory, a former ad agency friend, abruptly appears, offering Win an amazing deal to come back to New York. Rory's erratic behavior makes her a prime suspect in Zeke's murder, so Win and her shopkeeping pals can't help but get involved. Nobody liked Zeke's plans, but there's no way Rory would actually be involved in his death, would she? Lighthearted and full of delicious-sounding ice cream, A Game of Cones is a cozy treat. Win and the quirky cast of Chagrin Falls add flair to this charming #ownvoices mystery. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson, Ariz.

Among the bulwarks against the tide of anti-intellectualism in the United States is Vivian Gornick (Fierce Attachments; The Odd Woman and the City; Unfinished Business). Taking a Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature and Feminism in Our Time, an erudite but accessible collection of 24 previously published pieces spanning nearly 40 years, shows Gornick at her enduringly brainy, astringent and peevish best.

The selected essays reflect Gornick's longtime evangelism for the active mind and her abiding preoccupations with literature, feminism, lefty politics and her beloved New York City. She is especially attuned to Jewish American literary life. On Alfred Kazin and his peers she writes, "An angry fever inhabited the work of many of these writers, one that burned with so singular a strength only the remarkable elasticity of the American language could take it on." Gornick's immunity to groupthink finds her taking positions that could easily be misconstrued as contrarianism: she praises Harriet Beecher Stowe's démodé Uncle Tom's Cabin, but is sour on Joan Didion's adulated Play It as It Lays.

Pulling up the rear in Taking a Long Look are the book's oldest pieces, all originally published in 1978. They leave readers with the certainty that while Gornick may not have always been right ("If the ERA does not pass this year, it will pass next year. Of that there can no longer be any doubt"), she was always blisteringly good (Henry Miller "really thinks he takes Bunyanesque steps across the world of human vermin"). --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Authors, illustrators and brothers Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey rocketed onto the children's literature scene with their gentle and heartwarming picture book The Old Truck. In The Old Boat, the brothers/creators once again use the inspiration of the persevering women in their lives to tell a heartfelt, moving story that spans generations.

"Off a small island, an old boat rode the tide." The first spread shows an adult and a child--both brown-skinned with hats and big smiles--floating atop an ocean full of fish near the shore of an island. The next spread shows both figures, aged, driving the boat farther from the island, which is now surrounded by garbage. As the sailors grow older, they ride the tide "first shallow./ Then deep./ Then deeper." Eventually, the no-longer-a-child fishes alone: "Far from home, the old boat was cold/ and lonely/ and lost." As with The Old Truck, the child-to-adult in The Old Boat ultimately finds their way and makes changes back home, "First shallow./ Then deep./ Then deeper." Unlike in The Old Truck, though, the positive changes they make include not upgrading the boat but instead allowing it to slowly turn into a reef--"an old boat was home."

The Pumphreys created the art using more than 300 handmade stamps composed and colored digitally. Their use of white space is effective, allowing each brightly colored stamp and background to shine on the page. At first, this appears natural, but as the garbage builds up, the pages become overly filled, forcing the eye to settle on the boat as the only place of calm consistency. The Old Boat is a picture book with simple, accessible text, an eye-catching palette and a universal message that would be perfect for both solo exploration and a story time read. --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness

The title A New Day sounds like a metaphor, and it is--partially. Brad Meltzer (Heroes for My Son) and Dan Santat (The Adventures of Beekle) also have a literal meaning in mind: their cheeky, chortle-worthy picture book is about an abdication crisis of calendrical proportions.

Sunday is exhausted: "Do you know how much work it takes to give the world a beautiful, free day...?" She quits her job, leaving the other six days of the week no choice but to hold auditions for--that's right--a new day. Among the qualities sought in Sunday's replacement: "Must be relaxing, tranquil, chill (though not as chill as Saturday)." Responding to the cattle call, a swarm of humans and animals suggest days like FunDay, RunDay, BunDay, DogDay and, of course, Caturday, but none of these wow the judges. Finally, a kid proposes "a day when people can show more kindness to each other." When Sunday hears this, she returns to her job, convinced that "with a little more kindness in it, every day can be a NEW DAY."

The book's exultant message follows a continuous parade of rhymes, puns and wisecracks, conveyed largely by dialogue balloons; a confetti-colored palette amplifies the funhouse atmosphere. Santat gives each day of the week its own color and personality, calling to mind an animated starter Crayola set. He does bang-up work keeping up with Meltzer's three-ring circus of characters, perhaps most memorably the folks proposing, and dressed for, GelatinSuitsDay ("Watch the way my ears wiggle!"). --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author