Amanda Pellegrino's Smile and Look Pretty might seem familiar, given its nods to The Devil Wears Prada, The Morning Show and even She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story that Helped Ignite a Movement. But the New York City television writer and novelist's debut is a sizzling read that adroitly balances relevant headlines, girl-power attitude and surprisingly savvy humor.

Cate, Lauren, Olivia and Max are four best friends in Manhattan who work hard to "make sure [their] bosses have everything." Each is an assistant in a pressure-cooker industry (publishing, screenwriting, acting and broadcast journalism). Their bosses are monstrously inappropriate, from impossible demands for early-morning "vegan, gluten-free, sugar-free, nut-free" cupcakes to wanton genital exposure. "We can't speak up," writes Pellegrino. "Instead, we're told to be invisible but look presentable. To blend in but wear more makeup. To shroud our faces but put on tighter pants. To be grateful to have a job but barely make minimum wage." Male assistants, the women repeatedly observe, are treated otherwise.

The friends meet weekly to discuss "The Shit List" over margaritas, writing the worst offenses of just that one week and then burning their confessions so as to leave no trace. Finally, having had enough, they go public with Twentysomething, an anonymous tell-all blog of bosses who behave badly, that goes viral.

Pellegrino writes with absolute assurance and dexterous pacing. More than a delicious (and screen-ready) revenge narrative, the novel interweaves enough romance, family relationships, BFF fallout and (under/over)privileged characters to make the friends--and their friends--remarkably believable. The "whisper network" is about to become a resonating rebel yell. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

Commissario Guido Brunetti has been thoughtfully investigating crimes and pondering Greek philosophy for more than three decades now. In Give Unto Others, the 31st novel in the iconic Venetian mystery series from Donna Leon (Trace Elements), the case strikes close to home. Brunetti is approached by Elisabetta Foscarini, a childhood neighbor whom he has seen occasionally over the years, as one inevitably does in a small, pedestrian-friendly city like Venice. Elisabetta fears that something might be wrong in her daughter's marriage, and she would like Brunetti unofficially to investigate her son-in-law, a freelance accountant who works with several businesses in Venice.

Brunetti involves a few of his preferred police coworkers in a discreet, off-the-books series of inquiries into the lives of Elisabetta's daughter and son-in-law. Suddenly, the situation is far from casual: Brunetti realizes that, if it's discovered they were doing favors for him, his friends may see their careers jeopardized--all because of Brunetti's loyalty to childhood memories.

Give Unto Others is a perfect mystery read. The pacing is gentle and methodical, and characters are thoughtful. Brunetti and his fellow police officers frequently reflect on the effects of the pandemia on their beloved city. Give Unto Others is sure to resonate with readers who have experienced far too much real-life uncertainty in recent years. And with no crossover to earlier cases, this installment in the series could be the perfect way for new readers to be introduced to Brunetti's introspective, ethical investigations. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Flagstaff, Ariz.

Deep, everlasting love, grief and the mysteries of mental illness are undercurrents that propel The Perfect Other, a chilling, moving memoir by Kyleigh Leddy. A graduate of Boston College now in pursuit of her master's in social work, Leddy grapples with the life and loss of her older sister, Kait, a young woman affected by schizophrenia.

Leddy has spent a large part of her young life grappling with the sudden and unexplained disappearance of her 22-year-old sister, Kait, last seen on a frigid January night in 2014. Security cameras show that her older sister took a taxi to the foot of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia, Pa., ascended to the highest point and then disappeared. It is believed she jumped; however, her body was never recovered. Thus, her whereabouts remains a mystery--one that haunts Leddy and sets her on a course to make sense of the shocking tragedy, both personally and through a more psychologically clinical lens.

Through a sensitively drawn, stream-of-conscious narrative--spurred by a "Modern Love" column Leddy published in the New York Times--she stitches together remembered fragments and pivotal scenes from the life she, her mother and father shared with Kait. After sustaining a head injury, Kait started to exhibit concerning erratic behaviors that took inexplicable, unruly--often violent--turns. Leddy's raw search for understanding, meaning and peace grants readers a rare personal glimpse into the universal mysteries of mental illness and the long-lasting traumatic effects it has on those afflicted, as well as those in its orbit. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Historian Helen Rappaport tells the riches-to-rags story of a generation of Russian aristocrats, artists and writers who fled to Paris from the terrors of Bolshevism in After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War. In the years prior to World War I, the City of Light was a favorite getaway for the ultra-rich Russian nobility as well as progressive Russian artists and writers burning with experimental ideas. The French found their Russian guests to be "unfailingly entertaining, if at times incoherent" and welcomed their free-spending escapades. But the endless nights of champagne-soaked carousing came to an abrupt halt with war, the collapse of the monarchy and the rise of the Bolsheviks, who were quick to condemn high-born Russians and free thinkers as "enemies of the new state." Increasingly targeted by the new socialist regime, escape was their only option and Paris the most attractive haven.

Life proved to be a humiliating struggle for survival, however, which Rappaport (The Race to Save the Romanovs) details in several excruciating individual stories. Just like Russian nesting dolls, the nobility saw their status diminish with each low-paying job, whether taxi driving or sewing work. Artists and writers fought to maintain an identity and voice without a homeland. While many Russians met their straitened circumstances with stoicism (even creating businesses in fashion and writing masterpieces), the vast majority sought a return home that never came. Rappaport's engaging prose and prodigious research makes After the Romanovs a touching and enlightening experience. --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver

In the Margins collects four thought-provoking and sincere essays on writing from critically acclaimed and bestselling author Elena Ferrante (The Story of the Lost Child). Detailing the path she followed to become a novelist, Ferrante digs into the politics of gendered writing to consider the particular challenges faced by women who write, as well as the general challenge of how one writes. She chronicles the puzzles that led her to write each of her books, with a focus on the Neapolitan novels. Ferrante also offers fresh and pragmatic analyses of literary greats--Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, María Guerra--while describing how she approaches writing.

Ferrante is keenly aware in these essays of the challenge of articulating the project of "writing" to others. Rather than offering a how-to guide, she describes her process with all the lyrical yet clarifying prose of her fiction. For example, in describing the usefulness of genre structures, she explains that by evoking the constraints of particular genres, "really I am waiting for my brain to get distracted, to slip up, for other I's--many--outside the margins to join together, take my hand, begin to pull me with the writing where I'm afraid to go." Such an approach lauds the concept of creativity under constraint, something she sees as a distinct issue for women. While each essay in the collection engages its own topic, all four cohere along this thematic through-line, offering critical insight into the question of how one can "learn to use with freedom the cage we're shut up in." --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

The heart of Jos Charles's third book of poetry, A Year & Other Poems, is the titular poem "Year," in which each month, arranged chronologically, serves as both a heading and the gathering of a few stanzas. With only a handful of longer poems on either side of "Year," this spare collection reflects the yawning space that sits between bursts of creativity, a few lines emerging from any given stretch of time. The layout and design contribute to this feeling as well: abundant white space and large margins separate each poem. In some, the first line, or even just the first word, stands in for the poem's title.

Charles (Feeld), a trans author who dedicates this poetry collection to "the lost," writes from a sense of loss herself, though it is a tight-lipped, contained mourning. Each poem has a tangible tension, a sense of something carefully parceled out. The stanzas in "Year" move through the calendar, but they live more in the body than in the weather or seasons. At the same time, the poems tilt toward the passage of time, as seen in the "October" entry for "Year": "When was it/ I knew my house to be/ falling apart/ when did I lift/ an arm or bend/ backward corbel like swung you your back/ to mine When was it ever September tides pouring over/ When whales like men moved about the earth." Charles has been celebrated as a poet of startling power, and this collection is perfect for those readers interested in the exercise of control in a line, a stanza and a poem as a whole. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian

In Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water, named a Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year, Kazim Ali explores how a sense of place shapes one's identity. "I've always had a hard time answering the question, 'Where are you from?' " he writes. Born in the U.K. to political refugees from India, Ali eventually migrated to Canada with his family. There, his father worked as an electrical engineer for Manitoba Hydro, the province's electrical authority. Decades later, Ali finds himself recalling his childhood years in the remote town of Jenpeg with fondness, "drawn back to a place that for years I had not thought of."

Jenpeg, however, is gone, having been constructed to last only as long as Hydro needed employees in the area to build a dam across the nearby Nelson River. The town site, on unceded Pimicikamak Cree land, is hours from the nearest provincial town, but the town of Cross Lake, on the Cross Lake Indian Reserve, is much closer, and so Ali ends up visiting there to learn more about his childhood home. He is welcomed and embraced by the people of Cross Lake, who open his eyes to a place steeped in centuries of systemic racism and discriminatory policy.

In Cross Lake, Ali finds himself "awash in remembrance"--of his childhood memories, but also in the collective memories of the Pimicikamak Cree people who still live there and hold the memory of the land in their stories. This remembrance forms the backbone of Northern Light, as Ali moves from writing a memoir to something else, something larger than the story of one person, one family, or even one place. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Dan Frey (The Retreat) does a bang-up job imagining a scenario in which computers can communicate with their future selves and the impact that could have on society on a variety of levels. Cleverly told entirely via documentation (e-mails, blog posts, texts, reports, etc.) to avoid spoilers, The Future Is Yours is an "opposites attract" tale of friendship set in the thought-provoking and cutthroat world of technology.

Ben Boyce, a confident connection-maker with a gift for wooing venture capitalists, and Adhvan "Adhi" Chaudry, an intellectual genius with woeful people skills, become best friends while rooming together at Stanford University. The story begins with an e-mail sent by Ben to Adhi from a year in the future--immediately proving Stanford whiffed by not backing Adhi's Ph.D. thesis proposing communication with the future using quantum computing.

The engrossing road from college to rolling out their product, a computer-type unit called The Future, is centered on the transcript of a 2021 congressional hearing where the legality of The Future is to be decided. Despite a subpoena, Adhi is mysteriously absent from the hearing. Frey ups the suspense by putting limitations on The Future: it can see only into a one-year future window, to a reality that cannot be altered.

Unsurprisingly, data from The Future becomes problematic. As Adhi struggles with questions of morality, Ben drives passionately ahead, their friendship, relationships and the future of the world at risk. Frey's work as a screenwriter shines through in form and substance in this gripping work of science fiction. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

In Wingbearer, a luminously illustrated graphic novel, Marjorie Liu (Monstress; The Tangleroot Palace) crafts a captivating middle-grade debut about an enchanting world threatened by a Witch-Queen.

Zuli, a Black human child whose only connection to her past is a bracelet, lives in The Great Tree. The mystical birds of The Great Tree guard and watch over the leaves, each one the soul of a bird who will be reborn back into the world. Suspiciously, The Great Tree begins to bear regular leaves, causing Zuli and the birds to panic. Zuli and her farcical owl companion, Frowley, set off into "the world beyond" to find answers--and the missing souls. In their travels, they meet mythical creatures (griffins, dragons) and are joined by Orien the goblin and his flying squirrel-like companion. The group slowly learns about Zuli's past and the power she possesses, which doesn't save them from stumbling into the path of the evil Witch-Queen.

Storyboard artist Teny Issakhanian's glowing mixed-media illustrations direct the story's mood as the characters experience hope, worry, shock and curiosity. Her borderless panels give the individual illustrations a limitless feel--as if the reader is looking through a window into a larger world--and all her creatures are entertainingly expressive. Liu includes banter between Zuli and secondary characters (like Orien and Frowley) that is humorous while also featuring serious conversations that round out the characters and show their humility and courage. Wingbearer's shocking ending will surely make readers crave Zuli's return in subsequent graphic novels. --Kharissa Kenner, children's librarian, Bank Street School for Children

Who wants an old canoe? As The Red Canoe begins, it seems that no one does. But Anne Yvonne Gilbert's picture book ultimately proves soaringly hopeful, intimating that even human-made objects can, like aspects of nature, be part of "the endless cycle of birth and rebirth."

The story is told from the perspective of the canoe itself, "its fragile ribs grown brittle with age, its once bright paint faded, forgotten." From its roost in a boathouse, the canoe recalls the long-ago summer day when it arrived at a lake house, where a boy lovingly used it. A routine developed: each fall the boy would repair the canoe and store it in the boathouse, and each spring he would carry it "into the warm sun, remove its canvas cover, and wake it from its long sleep." But then everything changed: "A war was being fought in faraway lands," and the boy--a man now--doesn't return. The canoe is ignored for years until one day, the boathouse door creaks open....

The Red Canoe covers emotional territory reminiscent of that in picture books like The Old Truck--something is outgrown, abandoned, given new life--but Canoe's mesmeric illustrations are all its own. Veteran illustrator Gilbert (Robin Hood: The Classic Adventure Tale), here making her debut as an author, has earned a reputation for elaborately dense art that casts folklore and fairy tales in an idiosyncratic light; in Canoe, the scenes she creates, dusted with old-timey motifs, are no less enchanting for being earthbound. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author