Long before Gossip Girl and its gaggles of precocious alcoholic teenagers, there was Pamela Moore's Chocolates for Breakfast. First published in 1956, the novel centers on 15-year-old Courtney Farrell, just pulling out of a failed crush on a teacher at her boarding school in New York. She then moves to Los Angeles to live with her movie-actress mother, where she spends her days with her mother's adult friends who pour her vodka drinks at 11 a.m. "To Courtney," they toast, "May she always rise late to find a drink awaiting her... and amusing men around her." This toast becomes something of a prediction for the rest of Courtney's high school years, as she bounces between Los Angeles and New York City, drinking highballs and smoking cigarettes and starting and ending love affairs and friendships.

Chocolates for Breakfast proves to be a coming-of-age novel of the most interesting variety. Courtney faces the adult world as little more than a child, but as she fakes her way to sophistication, confronting sexuality and alcohol and high society and depression and suicide, she starts to grow into the adult she is pretending to be. Though the writing can feel forced at times, Moore ultimately captures the essence of the teenage struggle to be recognized as an adult. Perhaps this is what makes the novel feel as relevant today as it did when published nearly 60 years ago, proving as shocking and important to today's world as it did in the 1950s. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

If the late, great William Gaddis decided to haunt a guy who was possessed by Joseph Heller, that guy would be Richard Melo. How else can one explain Happy Talk? There has to be some dark, supernatural force behind this dialogue-based satire saturated in humor and wit.

It's 1955, and the United States has sent a wild assortment of New York filmmakers to Haiti to produce a film about the island featuring the new sport of surfing--in order to create a new tourist mecca. There are actually no waves; however, the bureaucratic overlords are so obsessed with their plan, they push the filmmakers to absurd lengths, which garners the attention of locals and some strange voodoo competition.

The film crew's ringleader, with the Pynchonesque name of Culprit Clutch, is madly in love with a nursing student named Josie. Sent to a special nursing school to learn how to handle nuclear Armageddon, Josie and her fellow students have been forgotten by their Washington contacts and have turned to a farcical Lord of Flies way of life. These heavily armed anarchist health-care providers, the Nightingales (as they are called), find kindred spirits in the oddball filmmakers, and we get M*A*S*H-like pranks, Catch-22 exchanges and some divine comedy. But the love between Josie and Culprit, as well as the merrymaking of the group, are put to the test by voodoo and a power-hungry evil doctor.

Unabashedly hilarious and thoughtful in the way post-modernism used to be, Melo writes imaginative action sequences, delivers wonderwork prose and captures the voices of his characters like a fine tuned medium. Happy Talk is a rare feat--experimental and a joy to read. --Christopher Priest, marketing manager, Shelf Awareness

Told in alternating past and present tense, James Dupont's Shadow of the Corps is an exciting debut legal thriller. Former JAG attorney Dale Riley is down on his luck--unemployed, living back at home with his parents while trying to keep his marriage together and raise his infant son. Then, one morning, he reads in the newspaper that a fellow JAG officer was shot dead while eating dinner at home with his family. The officer was the opposing counsel in the case that ended Riley's military career--and it isn't long before the hit man who killed him comes after Riley.

Meanwhile, Riley's old friend from the Marines, FBI agent Eric Scholl, investigates a serial murder case with victims across the country. As the two cases move toward a head-on collision with no survivors, Dupont ramps up the suspense with flashbacks to the military murder trial that connects them. Shadow of the Corps maintains a heart-pounding adrenaline level, propelling the reader through the story while blocking out everything else. The action and intrigue are top-notch; the plot twists are well constructed. Dupont plays fair with his readers, with no pulled-out-of-a-hat solutions. Though there are some aspects to the prose that could have used another round of editing, this is still a stellar start to the former Marine's fiction writing career. Oorah! --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

Former Los Angeles Mayor Warren Burkett is in the middle of a Senate race when he unwittingly helps a woman steal a high-priced painting. Burkett hires Jack MacTaggart, the defense attorney Chuck Greaves introduced to readers in 2012's Hush Money, to help him in court--and find the titular woman who set him up and vanished with the art. The case gets sticky when she's found dead--an apparent suicide--and the painting is seen hanging in the home of Burkett's opponent.

As clues are delivered to MacTaggart on Etch-A-Sketches, he enlists the help of his partner Marta Suarez, his office secretary Bernie Catalano and Officer Regan Fife of the Sierra Madre Police Department. They race the clock, and the L.A. County District Attorney, in an effort to solve the mystery before a possible murderer is elected to the U.S. Senate.

Green-Eyed Lady is a lighthearted, funny legal mystery that integrates legal process without weighing down the plot. Greaves channels his inner Hitchcock with a quirky and convincing cast of characters, from the tax-evading accountant to the candidate's brother-in-law, "whose position at Archer Properties seemed to be vice president of Union Affairs and Cement Footwear." Whether readers are familiar with Hush Money or not, Green-Eyed Lady promises an engaging reading experience. It is a riotous campaign in the all-too-real world of political antics. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

Though she has a so-so voice and she's not particularly religious, Stacy Horn has sung with the choir of Grace Church in New York City for more than 30 years. Through the lens of a dozen beloved pieces of music, Horn's memoir, Imperfect Harmony, explores the deep pleasure she and thousands of others derive from the practice of communal singing.

Horn joined the Grace Church choir after her marriage ended, desperate for a reliable source of joy in a life that was proving less stable than she'd hoped. Over the ensuing decades, she has sung many choral masterpieces, including Handel's joyous Messiah and Bernstein's famously difficult Chichester Psalms. She blends biographical sketches of these and other composers with information about the history of singing societies in Europe and the United States. She also shares recent research about the physiological benefits of singing--as most singers know, making music can calm and strengthen the body as it soothes the soul.

Horn's best scenes are those describing the experience of singing at Grace Church, sharing vivid memories of rehearsals and performances. Though her historical research is thorough, it sometimes veers into the tangential. And she hits the dissonant note of her agnosticism repeatedly, making the reader doubt her early assertion that she has made her peace with not believing many of the words she sings.

But both Horn's storytelling and her experience bear out a simple truth: people from all walks of life--Welsh miners, American frontier settlers, today's urban dwellers--draw hope and strength from singing together. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Anyone interested in the footnotes and fanciful tales of American history will be in for a treat with Joshua Kendall's compulsively readable American Obsessives. Kendall is a bit of an obsessive himself, having written about the creation of Roget's thesaurus (The Man Who Made Lists) and a biography of dictionary creator Noah Webster (The Forgotten Founding Father). Here, he writes about men and women whose obsessive-compulsive tendencies, he argues, helped shape the nation, from Thomas Jefferson to Estee Lauder--exploring the connection between eccentricity and achievement.

Each chapter highlights an American luminary, touching on their odd behaviors, weaknesses and triumphs. Henry Heinz, of ketchup fame, became the country's foremost marketer, all the while lashing out at his family for not working hard enough. "An embittered Heinz would no longer consider giving upper management positions to anyone outside the family," Kendall writes; "even so, he wouldn't make peace with either of his titular bosses, his brother John and cousin Frederick." Controlling, passionate and hardworking to the point of breaking, the people Kendall focuses on have their eyes on the prize with no thought for the collateral damage--like Charles Lindbergh, who made his wife account for all household expenditures in detailed ledgers, or baseball great Ted Williams, who practiced on his swing and not his social skills.

As a whole, America's Obsessives falls short on the psychological discussion that would that prove that Kendall's subjects' behaviors (many negative) genuinely contributed to their nation-building legacies. All in all, however, this is a highly entertaining romp through our history. --Jonathan Shipley, freelance writer

"All swing thoughts decay, like radium," golfing enthusiast John Updike once wrote. The number of instructional books for the game is legion, but sports performance researcher Mark Smith has come up with what he thinks is a new approach. "Without a doubt," he writes in Golf Science, "your potential to [play better] can be boosted by your knowledge of the science at play."

First of all, no book, video or instructor will automatically make you play better. Only good fundamentals and practice can do that. However, Golf Science definitely has good advice woven into its question-and-answer structure. Every chapter asks a question--on topics ranging from the mind and body to the equipment, from the technology to the practice process--and answers it in two pages of text, photos and graphs.

The physics of the longer driver, we learn, explain why it's always better to play with a shorter one. Balls do fly longer in humid and warmer climates, and a brief, exercise warm-up before playing is definitely a plus. Aides and mechanical devices won't enhance your performance; tight pelvis rotation, good shoulder turn and weight shift are crucial to a good, consistent golf swing. Short shots are best hit using clubs with very little bounce (think a sharp, leading edge).

Some of the topics Smith covers are common sense and rather simplistic, but there's plenty good thoughts here to learn from, and then watch decay. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Werd, err, word nerds rejoice! David Crystal's Spell It Out is an accessible, engaging romp through the labyrinthine world of spelling. Why do we spell words certain ways? Why is there a there, a their and a they're? Why are there so many rules to spelling if so many rules are oftentimes broken? Crystal (The Story of English in 100 Words) answers these questions, and many more, in 37 bite-sized chapters that are a logophile's delight.

Running through Latin to French to Greek to Semitic in tracing the history of the English language, Crystal puts forth an interesting history of the delicate intricacies of letters and words. He even looks at the future, considering how Tweets and the Internet as a whole might affect our spelling. "Prophets of doom have suggested that, because the Internet motivates so much spelling variation," he writes, "a standard English spelling system has no future. They are wrong.... The Internet is the best guarantor we have of maintaining a standard spelling system, in all languages, because it relies for its efficacy on the accurate orthographic representation of words."

From the future of spelling on the World Wide Web to the world of the Etruscans who helped develop the rudiments of letters we now use, Crystal's Spell It Out is a delight. Shedding light on everything from Latin prefixes to Geoffrey Chaucer wishing disease upon a scribe for not copying his words correctly, Crystal's book will undoubtedly cast a spell on readers who love the English language. --Jonathan Shipley, freelance writer

The comical far-out adventures begin for narrator River, his friend Freak and their bus mate Fiona when they discover a sofa just down the road from the bus stop.

First-time author Henry Clark sets the surreal tone from the outset: "The sofa wasn't there on Monday but it was there on Tuesday." When the trio examines its contents, they discover, among other things, a dark green crayon labeled "zucchini." Fiona, the most enterprising of the three, discovers that the zucchini crayon could be valuable (only 500 were made for a special World War II limited edition called "Victory Garden"). As bids on eBay grow into the thousands of dollars, River becomes uneasy: "Technically, the crayon isn't ours to sell," he says. Their attempts to track down the crayon's owner leads to a mad scientist–type named Alf and the discovery that the sofa is sentient. Alf suggests that the thing has links to the nearby Hellsboro fires that have been burning for 12 years, and that the frequent singing flash mobs are actually mind-control experiments. That's just the beginning.

In a tale that's part detective story and part environmental tale with sci-fi overlays, Alf enlists the young protagonists to thwart a plot by an evil dictator to take over the Earth. Clark's Mad magazine background makes this hybrid between moral dilemmas and absurd plot twists mesh in unexpected and original ways. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Liesbet Slegers (The Child in the Manger) creates a puppy manual for preschoolers with this lighthearted, durable addition to the Kevin & Katie series. Rounded corners and laminated pages makes this just right for first-time pet owners.

Kevin holds up a picture of a puppy next to a calendar with the date circled for his puppy pick-up ("when he'll be old enough to come live with us"). He ticks off the items that he and his mother have purchased in preparation (food and water bowls, a collar and leash and lots of toys). "Finally it's puppy day!" says Kevin, who names his dog Ruff. Slegers lets youngsters know what to expect through Kevin's running commentary. Ruff sniffs his new surroundings ("Ruff is curious and wants to get to know everything"), and heads to the vet with Kevin and his mother. The boy also models patience when the pup has an accident ("Ruff doesn't know exactly how it's done yet, but we're going to teach him").

Slegers shows boy and dog in thick black outline and popsicle-bright illustrations. The two appear together in every picture--except for the one in which Ruff eats from his bowl, which emphasizes the safety precaution, "the vet said dogs don't like it when you pet them while they're eating." The author-artist balances out images of responsibility (giving Ruff a bath) with the joys of ownership (playing fetch). A great way to prepare for a new (furry) addition. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness