Darya loves mathematics so much that she makes spreadsheets and graphs for each of her daughter's potential suitors. But Mina--still single at 25, unhappy in business school and longing to pursue her artistic dreams--wants her mother to stop the matchmaking. When an afternoon tea date with yet another potential husband ends in tears, Darya begins to question the effectiveness of her system, and Mina makes a bold decision. For the first time in 15 years, the two women return to Iran, to the city and the family they fled shortly after the Islamic Revolution. Marjan Kamali's debut novel, Together Tea, is the story of what they find there--both in the people they left behind, and in themselves.

Mina has always felt like an outsider, caught between the Iran of her family's past and the American culture of her teens and 20s. Darya, meanwhile, is proud of her children's and husband's success in the United States, but misses the social ties and the intellectual respect she enjoyed in Iran. Kamali deftly alternates between their perspectives, showing both sides of the cultural divide with grace and humor. She also weaves memories of life in Iran into the book's present-day narrative, underscoring the deep ambivalence both Darya and Mina harbor toward their home country: a place of beauty, warmth and color, but also of protests, bombs and danger.

Lighthearted but also deeply moving, Together Tea explores the intricate pattern of a mother-daughter relationship fraught with cultural expectation but undergirded by deep love and respect. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

I'll Be Seeing You is a gem of an epistolary novel celebrating the friendship of two women who have never met in person. Suzanne Hayes (The Witch of Little Italy) and Loretta Nyhan (The Witch Collector) should know their topic well--like their lead characters, these two best friends haven't yet met, composing their novel through e-mails.

As World War II rages, Rita Vincenzo worries about her two men in uniform: her husband, Sal, and 18-year-old son, Toby. In New England, Glory Whitehall tends to her toddler son and awaits the birth of her second child while her husband, Robert, fights overseas. Both women enter a pen pal program for wives of enlisted men, not knowing what to expect. Certainly, the level-headed professor's wife and the bubbly young homemaker aren't prepared for the deep friendship that will ultimately save them both from the unexpected turns of life in wartime.

In the absence of their loved ones, the women struggle. Rita finds herself saddled with the girlfriend she didn't know Toby had--a poor, spineless, uneducated slip of a girl she considers  unsuitable for her son. Meanwhile, Glory turns increasingly to her childhood friend Levi for relief from her loneliness, and in the process finds remaining faithful to Robert difficult. Letter by letter, the two women not only commiserate about rations and recipes, they unfold the secrets of their hearts.

This inspiring depiction of the power of friendship begs to be shared between girlfriends as well as mothers, daughters, and sisters, and it's the perfect pick for women's book clubs. Hayes and Nyhan are a winning team. --Jaclyn Fulwood, youth services manager, Latah County Library District; blogger at Infinite Reads

Is there an upside to your ex-husband dying (and taking his alimony with him), leaving your 10-year-old twins fatherless? For Evie Glass, there is: she'll finally be rid of the bleached, tattooed Nicole, her ex's mistress-turned-wife. Evie didn't count on being left penniless, though. Then Nicole offers a solution to her money woes--she, unbelievably, wants to cohabitate! So Nicole moves in, whipping the gossip mill into a frenzy in Evie's suburban Chicago town.

Amy Sue Nathan's The Glass Wives cooks up a Modern Family-esque premise as ex-wife and new wife come together to grieve their respective losses. Evie struggles to comfort her devastated children while she adjusts to living with her ex-husband's widow, who turns out to be shockingly sympathetic--with much more to her than one bad choice of husband-poaching. Soccer games and school fundraisers become comically horrifying encounters with nosy neighbors determined to judge the unusual arrangement and uneasy truce the two women have formed. The outcome of this unusual tale may come as a surprise, but Nathan's genuine characters, beautifully descriptive prose and her knack for creating a realistic portrait of an untraditional albeit loving family are refreshing. --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend

Richard Lange's Angel Baby starts with Luz literally busting out of the hellish life she has in Mexico with her abusive husband, Rolando. While he's away, she shoots her way out of the house where she's kept under guard, and hooks up with Malone, an American who will drive her over the border so she can reunite with her young daughter, Isabel, in Los Angeles.

The problem with this plan? Rolando is El Principe, a big shot in a drug cartel, and there's no way he's letting Luz get away. He puts his most dangerous man, Jerónimo, on her trail, threatening to kill Jerónimo's family if he fails to bring Luz back. Along the way, a crooked Border Patrol cop also gets involved, and Luz's dream of seeing Isabel again gets dimmer--as well as her hope that she'll survive Rolando's wrath.

As in his debut novel, This Wicked World, Lange showcases a cast of complicated, multidimensional characters. Jerónimo is a stone-cold killer, but he's also terrified for the family he dearly loves. Luz is a former drug addict who's made bad choices, but she's determined to go clean and start over with her child, if she's given the chance. Malone is a sad drunk, but will do the right thing when necessary. At times, the story digresses into the backgrounds of too many characters, but Lange's unflinching glimpses into people's hearts, where darkness resides alongside the light, make this a riveting read. --Elyse Dinh-McCrilllis, freelance writer/editor, blogging at Pop Culture Nerd

With her husband, author Bill McKibben, often traveling and their daughter away at school, Sue Halpern and her Labradoodle, Pransky, had time on their paws. They took on therapy dog training as their mission. Pransky, then seven, a good and smart pet, had spent her life romping off-leash in the Vermont woods, but after months of heeling, stopping, staying and coming, they earned Pransky's red bandanna.

In A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home, Halpern (Four Wings and a Prayer) entertainingly relates the often humorous anecdotes of Pransky's therapy-dog visits. But she also ponders their experiences, and intersperses amid Pransky's tales ancient and modern philosophies, the history of care for the elderly and discussions of the financial, medical and psychological ramifications of end-of-life care.

We get to know the nursing home residents and their relationship to Pransky, who could sense not only whose cabinet held Milkbones, but who needed a cuddle, or whose spasmodic hand longed to lie on her head. Sue was a willing conversationalist at the end of Pransky's leash, but "hope was the thing with wispy, tan tail feathers."

Halpern asks "What makes a good life?" near the book's end. She offers ample anecdotes from Pransky's work, along with religious and scholarly tenets, leaving readers with this inspiration: be charitable, and never underestimate the power of dog love. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, bookseller, Book Passage, San Francisco

While Tom Clavin's The DiMaggios would be any baseball lover's dream, it transcends mere fan adulation. It is a touching, penetrating look at the dynamics of family, a vivid evocation of a vanished time and a study of the corrosive effects of fame on the overly proud Joe DiMaggio.

While Dom and Vince DiMaggio never measured up to the lofty achievements of Joe, both brothers were talented big leaguers in their own right. Dom was a borderline Hall of Famer for the Red Sox, one of the most graceful and beloved center fielders ever to play in Fenway Park. Vince, the eldest, was the first to try his hand at baseball, partly for his love and aptitude for the game, but also to escape the backbreaking labor of their father's fishing trade.

Clavin excels at portraying the generational tension between hardworking Giuseppe DiMaggio, an Italian immigrant plying his trade off Fisherman's Wharf, and his sons' seemingly lazy pursuit of making it in America through a "boy's game." Even more pointed is his depiction of Joe's increasing estrangement and isolation from his brothers as his fame swells. Throughout The DiMaggios, Dom emerges as the bigger man, the one who constantly brokers family feuds sparked by the proud and isolated Joe.

Clavin's effort in The DiMaggios is comparable to great baseball writers like David Halberstam, but it is also spot on in its depiction on the price of the American Dream and its attendant joys and sorrows. --Donald Powell, freelance writer

The pollock fishing industry in the Bering Sea yields more than a billion dollars' worth of fish each year--much of it headed for the frozen food sections of supermarkets or between fast-food sandwich buns. In Billion-Dollar Fish, biologist Kevin M. Bailey shows us how the story of the pollock is as much about fishing rights as about the science of fisheries. Still, "from the point of view of the fish," he notes, "the problem is not who catches them, but how many are caught."

For centuries, the lowly groundfish pollock had no market; it was merely "one of the best baits known for cod." But when the cod population dwindled, the relatively easy-to-catch pollock became a lucrative substitute--so much so that pollock fishing became the basis of international wrangling among the Japanese, Russians and Americans. It was also the source of ongoing political squabbles in the United States among large fishing companies, environmentalists, marine biologists and coastal communities. As Bailey points out, however, "biology is messy"--no branch of it more than the ecology of fisheries. How many fish are really in the sea? How many die off "naturally" and how many through fishing?

As Bailey blends science with competitive fighting over a substantial pile of money, he tells a pretty good story. Never boring or entangled in scientific jargon, Billion-Dollar Fish practically makes pollock fishing out to be The Old Man and the Sea. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Dylan Dethier learned to play golf on a shoes-optional par 30 course near his grandparents' house on the Maine coast. Back in Massachusetts, he played on his high school team and got pretty good. He hatched a plan: after graduating, he'd hit the road for a year and play golf in each of the lower 48 states: "I would discover many different Americas and, eventually, find the way back to the heart of the game."

He sets up appointments with family, friends and acquaintances to play with--and stay with--then takes off in his Subaru for points west. His first course is Alder Creek, a "podunk two-buck municipal" in Boonville, N.Y.; in his experience, though, "rounds like this were the best kind." From there, it's off to Washington, racing against the cold and snow, a round at a great course in Michigan's upper peninsula, playing out of snow bunkers in Minnesota, the awesome courses at Oregon's Bandon Dunes, and a near-death experience on a cliff in Wyoming while hiking--along with lots of sleeping in the car, then sneaking into economy hotels for the free breakfasts.

Whether showering in truck stops, meeting Phil Mickelson and Michael Jordan, or playing at Sawgrass and Pebble Beach, the simple story of 18 in America is filled with youthful enthusiasm, honest and sincere. It's a lovely road story well told. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

From the opening image of this intricate, nearly wordless book, readers see the animals--predator and prey together--moving toward safety. Thunderclouds pour rain down upon a valley where red barns stand in contrast to the green rolling hills.

Cutaway views reveal foxes nestling in dens below the road, as a family drives a red pickup hauling a flatbed of hay bales above. We follow the family past a silo, where a lightning bolt breaks a line carrying electricity. A caption tells readers that it's Saturday afternoon, July 15, at 12:15. Like a cameraman, Arthur Geisert (Country Road ABC; Ice) takes readers close up and also pans the valley to show the scope of the storm. Geisert's etchings fill in a rain so dense it feels as if we are looking out of a window at a deluge. Readers will pore over the many details included in cutaway views of the family's cupboards, walls and yards. The family also models safety measures. As they resume their hay bale deliveries and the storm gathers strength, they take cover under a stone bridge. By 6:15, the storm clears; the sun is out and neighbors are already gathering to repair the damage.

Geisert chronicles how quickly Nature can destroy, and also how rapidly humans rebound. His beautiful book is timeless. No matter how much technology we may develop, it can never compete with the power of nature, nor the power of a community to band together. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness