After getting in a spot of trouble in Dear Mrs. Bird, young journalist and aspiring advice columnist Emmeline Lake is thriving at Woman's Friend magazine. AJ Pearce chronicles more of Emmy's personal and professional adventures in her warmhearted second novel, Yours Cheerfully. 

In the fall of 1941, Emmy and her colleagues at Woman's Friend are doing their bit to help win the war. This means providing recipes, dress patterns and sound advice for their readers, but Emmy thinks they need to do more. When the Ministry of Information asks journalists to help recruit women for war work, Emmy plunges into a series on women working in factories. Her research opens up a few cans of worms, including the lack of childcare for female employees, and sparks some surprising new friendships. As Emmy juggles her new project with other work responsibilities and a blossoming romance, it all becomes a bit much, but it's nothing Emmy and her best friend, Bunty, can't handle.

Pearce sensitively explores issues facing women in the workplace, which feel timely despite the 70-year gap between Emmy's story and the present. She also draws a winning picture of wartime romance, but the real stars of Yours Cheerfully are Emmy's female friends: the factory workers trying to support their children, the female staff at Woman's Friend, and Bunty, who despite her own grief is the model of a stalwart best friend.

Witty, charming and full of very British pluck, Yours Cheerfully entertains readers while living up to its name. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Lyndsay Faye (The Paragon Hotel) reimagines Shakespeare's Hamlet in The King of Infinite Space, a mind-bending update on the classic tragedy that cleverly keeps its spirit intact while modernizing relationships and plot points. 

Lia Brahms would have an easier time getting over Ben Dane if he would stop pulling her into his dreams. Specifically, Ben dreams them into the burned-out remains of the World's Stage Theatre in New York City, where he and Lia practically lived as children, his father its owner and hers the manager. In one such dream, they learn Ben's father has died. Back in the real world, Ben finds the dream failed to mention that his mother, Trudy, has hastily married Claude, his uncle. Ben summons his best friend and constant "empathy factory," Horatio Ramesh Patel, from London to his Manhattan apartment, insisting something is rotten in his father's death despite the official ruling of suicide. When they uncover a video of Ben's father claiming Claude wanted him dead, Ben insists on investigating a murder that may not have even happened, while older mysteries lurk in the margins. Meanwhile, Lia copes with the loss of her relationship with Ben under the watchful eyes of three enigmatic, powerful women in Louisiana, and their puckish antagonist Robin makes plans for the Danes. 

Faye drops the Bard's best beats into a deliriously fun blender. However, readers unfamiliar with the source material should have no trouble following the plot or investing in the emotional stakes. An intriguing mix of the mystical and rational, The King of Infinite Space wears its heart on its sleeve down to its explosive and sentimental conclusion. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Thirty-two-year-old Heather Powell walks into a house and shoots two people dead in cold blood. So begins Claire Douglas's engrossing mystery Then She Vanishes.

Heather's sister, Flora, disappeared in the summer of 1994. In March 2012, an enraged Heather kills 58-year-old Clive Wilson and his 76-year-old mother, Deidre. Police go to arrest Heather, but find her unconscious and bleeding from a gunshot wound to the chest. She's rushed to the hospital, where she slips into a coma and can't be charged or interrogated until she awakens.

Heather's mother Margot's house is surrounded by reporters clamoring for a statement. Among them is Jessica Fox, a childhood friend of Heather, sent by her editor to exploit her relationship with the Powell family. Margot holds a grudge against Jessica for ghosting Heather right after Flora went missing, but Jessica convinces Margot to grant an exclusive interview to control Heather's story and make the other reporters back off. Jessica and Margot work together to find out why Heather committed murder. What they don't realize is that only Heather knows the truth about Flora's disappearance.

Douglas (The Sisters) explores how easily a happy family can fracture by failing to communicate with one another. Lies become bitterly held truths and everyone suffers in Then She Vanishes. Douglas slowly oozes out the plot by giving her main characters individual chapters to tell their own version of events. This Rashomon-esque technique can feel slightly repetitive, but this tantalizing story has so many plot twists that readers will be awestruck when they learn the dark motivations behind these characters' actions. --Paul Dinh-McCrillis, freelance reviewer

The Coldest Case, the 16th immersive, charming installment in British journalist Martin Walker's detective series, brings to light new evidence in a seemingly unsolvable murder case. Bruno Courrèges serves as police chief in an idyllic French town. When he visits an archeological exhibit at a local museum, he has a revelatory thought: What if the same artistic skill that brings ancient faces to life could help fellow police officer J-J learn the identity of a long-dead murder victim? While trying to crack this 30-year-old cold case, Bruno discovers possible connections to the East German Stasi and threats to national security that complicate the investigation. As always, Bruno proves to be a level-headed and competent investigator, making him a trustworthy character to follow on this journey.

But Bruno also has a softer side. In addition to his gritty career investigating homicides, he enjoys the finer things in life--expensive red wine, exquisitely prepared meals, long walks in the woods with his beloved basset hound. Parts of the book read like a diary of leisure rather than a crime drama, such as when Bruno and his companions go horseback riding past a vineyard on a summer evening and Bruno's "mood eased at the knowledge that these grapes were now being farmed organically." At times, the sprawling, mouthwatering descriptions of Bruno's meals are more intriguing than the murder investigation--but with historical surprises and engaging prose, this police procedural offers poolside escapism for the dog days of summer. --Angela Lutz, freelance reviewer

Suzanne Park (Loathe at First Sight) crafts another engaging enemies-to-lovers romance in So We Meet Again. Back in junior high, Jessie Kim and Daniel Choi were pitted against each other by their competitive Korean American parents as beacons of near-perfection. Both eventually escaped: Jess landed on Wall Street, Daniel in Silicon Valley. Now almost 30, both unexpectedly return home to Nashville: Jess was dismissed by her high-power investment firm ("you're not a leader"); the rumor mill insists elite corporate lawyer Daniel is fleeing a painful mismatch.

Two 50-pound rice bags (hey, they're on sale!) and a runaway grocery cart reunite the nemeses. Jess bitterly recalls the ways Daniel wronged her, but she also can't help noticing he's lost his chipmunk cheeks and his bowl cut--and that he's ridiculously hot. He's also "Confident. Cocky. Smug." No, thank you; Jess is too busy orchestrating her comeback: elevating premade food kits into easily enhanced Korean feasts. Her first live broadcast gets interrupted by her mother, but viewers are instantly enthralled by charming (on-screen, anyway) "Umma to the rescue!" Daniel even temporarily manages to make himself useful, but that quickly turns to distraction--and maybe even betrayal. Can Jess win this time?

Park might be adapting a tried-and-true formula, but she also ensures her rom-com has plenty of bite. Folded into the toothsome pairing are less appetizing reminders of corporate glass ceilings for women and minorities, blatant boardroom sexism, unchecked white male privilege and casual racism. After confronting and overcoming such challenges, success feels that much sweeter. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

Anyone who has read Ten Thousand Saints, Eleanor Henderson's first novel, may recognize her husband, Aaron, in her enthralling and devastating memoir, Everything I Have Is Yours: A Marriage. In it, Henderson says of writing Ten Thousand Saints, "For nine years I had been building a fictional universe out of the scraps of [Aaron's] childhood"; the story she crafted was "the one I wished for him." Everything I Have Is Yours contains Aaron's true story, and no one would wish it on anybody.

Throughout the 20-plus years bridging Henderson and Aaron's courtship and the Covid-19 pandemic, the vast majority of their time seems to have been spent seeking diagnoses and remedies for Aaron's medical problems. "Aaron describes his symptoms, a song he's long ago memorized. Anemic. Disoriented. Falling. Can't concentrate. Can't sleep. The flare every two weeks. The skin crawling. The stuff coming out of his hands." To introduce themselves at a Recovering Couples Anonymous retreat, Henderson and Aaron recap "the drugs, the suicide attempts, the childhood abuse, separation, recovery." Understandably, Aaron is often unable to hold a job, so he and Henderson get by, sometimes barely, with family money and her income, ultimately as a teacher at Ithaca College.

Perhaps particularly unsettling, and certainly humbling, Everything I Have Is Yours may prompt readers to consider whether they would have Henderson's fortitude to stick with her unceasingly difficult marriage. Her memoir has aspects of medical mystery and horror story, but most readers will leave it with the impression of having taken in a love story as blisteringly beautiful as it is truthful. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

The axiom that knowledge is power takes on new urgency in Forever Free: A True Story of Hope in the Fight for Child Literacy by Tracy Swinton Bailey, a Ph.D. in education and former high school English teacher. Part memoir, part call to action, Forever Free is an appeal to educators, organizers and parents who believe in the power of literacy to change lives. Recounting her earliest encounters with reading ("books have always been some of my most powerful and influential teachers"), Bailey pays homage to those who inspired her academic and philanthropic journey championing literacy skills in low-income communities. Frederick Douglass is her lodestar, whose own story of learning to read made him "forever free," leaving the shackles of slavery behind.

Mixing personal anecdotes and episodes from her years as both a student and an educator, Bailey shares sobering statistics from her research into the state of literacy in the U.S. today ("forty-three million adults are functionally illiterate and two-thirds of fourth graders read below grade level"). She also highlights the need for "radical care" of children in low-income areas. In 2010, Bailey eschewed the passive words of many educational colleagues in favor of action, founding the Freedom Readers after-school and summer literacy program. The winning formula of Freedom Readers (one-to-one tutoring, free books and a nurturing environment), is an approach Bailey believes can be replicated across the U.S. Forever Free is an inspiring appeal to make literacy among at-risk children a national priority. --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver, Colo.

In Learning in Public, Courtney E. Martin (Do It Anyway) grapples with questions of parenting, education and racial divides in the United States through the lens of her daughter's school: first selecting it, then attending it.

Martin and her two daughters had walked past Emerson Elementary in their Oakland, Calif., neighborhood nearly every day. But when it came time to enroll Maya, her eldest daughter, in elementary school, Martin and her partner were faced with school choice: place Maya in Emerson, a racially diverse school with poor test scores; enter the Oakland Public Schools lottery for a more highly rated, predominantly white school nearby; or flee the public school system altogether in favor of private school. Determined to live her values, which include not just eschewing racism but working to be anti-racist, Martin ultimately chose to send her daughter to Emerson--a decision informed by dozens of conversations with other parents, families, educators, school board members, neighbors.

In the opening chapter of Learning in Public, Martin writes about the making of this book, including the feedback from anti-racist educators and education experts. Martin brings to her perspective on her daughter's education a self-reflection that goes well beyond her one daughter and their one family, or even their one school, placing instead the story of her white family in the racial history of the U.S. and the gross disparities seen in the American public education system. This reflection, combined with Martin's willingness to admit her own mistakes and acknowledge where her actions may have harmed others, is what allows Learning in Public to live up to its title. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Elite athlete and motivational speaker Zion Clark, with the help of author and former New York Times journalist James S. Hirsch, displays his incredible agility and spirit in this lively, beautifully formatted middle-grade photographic essay.

Zion was born without legs, "a rare medical condition known as caudal regression syndrome." His incarcerated mother placed him in Ohio's foster care system as a newborn where, as an "African American, he faced the dual stigma of Blackness and disability." Even though he experienced "abuse or neglect in several homes," Zion became a "state champion in the 100-meter and 400-meter seated racing competitions." Photographs of Zion participating in various sports and activities--rock climbing, wrestling, swimming, competing in adaptive sports and working out--display his strength and will. "Tell me something I can't do," he writes in his author's note, "and I will do it or die trying." Wrestling without legs, he writes, "was like driving a car without back tires. I had to find a new way of doing it."

Throughout the essay, quotes from Zion's coaches, past foster parents, present adoptive parent and Zion himself show that the athlete is someone who changes the lives of those with whom he comes in contact. Zion aspires to continue to prove people wrong and inspire others to do the same, no matter their talents, strengths or abilities: "You just have to follow your dreams and be the best you can be," Zion's last quote in the book emphasizes. "If I can do it, so can you." --Kharissa Kenner, children's librarian, Bank Street School for Children