"Though these exhibits made my skin prickle with fear, I felt at home among such things," says Coralie Sardie of the human anomalies and sideshow items of her father's Museum of Extraordinary Things in Alice Hoffman's magical novel. In fact, at the age of 10, Coralie became an exhibit herself: the Human Mermaid. Her hands are webbed and she can swim with speed and ease; her father, "the Professor," trained her to use a special breathing device so she could spend an hour or more underwater.

The Museum of Extraordinary Things, primarily set over a few months in 1911, weaves real-life moments together with fiction in a fantastical story. One night, as Coralie rests along the northern shore of the Hudson during her evening swim, she spies a young man taking photographs in the dark: "Coralie felt something pierce through her, as if she were a fish on a hook, unable to break free."

The man is Eddie Cohen, an ambitious young immigrant Jew who escaped Ukrainian pogroms with his father. While taking pictures of the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist fire, he becomes involved in a woman's disappearance. Meanwhile, Maureen, the Professor's Irish housekeeper--loyal to her employer and totally dedicated to Coralie--will come to play a key role.

Populated with historical figures like Clement Moore and Alfred Stieglitz, The Museum of Extraordinary Things is a carefully rendered portrait of a city and people living in extraordinary times, with a strange and moving love story at its heart. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Some of the best contemporary Irish writing is about trying to come to terms with the financial boom and bust of the last decade. In his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, Donal Ryan writes about the construction frenzy of this period and what it cost so many people. Using varied voices, each chapter is told from a different perspective.

In one huge unfinished housing development, only two houses are occupied. Bobby, a builder, visits Réaltín there and starts doing odd jobs for her at no charge--at least, no money changes hands. It's that kind of a world now; everyone lives by his or her wits, no questions asked. The original moneymakers have all decamped, leaving behind broken lives, insurmountable debt and bleak futures.

"There's a red metal heart in the centre of the low front gate, skewered on a rotating hinge," Bobby says, describing his father's house. "It's flaking now; the red is nearly gone. It needs to be scraped and sanded and painted and oiled. It still spins in the wind, though. I can hear it creak, creak, creak as I walk away. A flaking, creaking, spinning heart."

The Spinning Heart is filled with hope, despair, poignancy and, sometimes, brutal disregard for fellow man--but it is all so beautifully rendered that the reader keeps hoping that, against all odds, someday all will be well. Ryan has painted a perfect portrait of these hardscrabble lives. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

Daniel Suarez's SF thriller Influx offers an unsettling reason for the apparently stagnant state of technological progress since the 1960s: over the last half-century, an increasingly tyrannical top-secret government bureau has abducted the greatest scientific minds and seized their fledgling breakthroughs. The Bureau of Technology Control sequesters humanity's most promising innovations, like unlimited energy, quantum computers and nano-machines to prevent the destructive chaos they believe such paradigm-shattering advances would cause. These hidden technologies have propelled the BTC many decades ahead of the rest of humanity, giving a handful of men god-like powers with zero accountability, even to their own government.

Eccentric physicist Jon Grady learns about the BTC's existence when he's abducted from his lab after inventing a type of anti-gravity machine. The singular triumphant moment in Grady's troubled life becomes a nightmare as he's forced to choose between continuing his research under an organization he considers morally repugnant or spending the rest of his life in "humane exile." His continual resistance lands him in Hibernity, a gruesome prison/laboratory where dissenting abducted scientists become test subjects. Even if he escapes, Grady must somehow contend with a nearly omnipotent organization led by an increasingly unstable megalomaniac.

Suarez (Daemon; Kill Decision) gives jargon-laden plausibility to the wondrous technology of Influx, and the rare muddling moments are quickly overrun by the pacing of a great thriller. Though Grady's transformation from helpless to heroic never quite completes, and other characters suffer from questionable shallowness, Influx as a whole is riveting. Fans of science fiction and thrillers will enjoy this engrossing combination of both genres. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

Justin Hocking contracted a disease in college: "I became obsessed with a book about obsession." In The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld, he writes about poet Charles Olson talking to a colleague about Herman Melville's Moby-Dick: "I see... THE WHTE DEATH... has descended... upon YOU... too." Like many others--including Laurie Anderson, Tony Kushner and David Foster Wallace--Hocking comes under its spell. (The title of this memoir comes from the masterpiece's pages.)

Hocking schleps Moby-Dick around with him, talking to anyone who will listen--a young mariner making his own journey. Passages from the novel serve as chapter epigraphs, leading to passages reminiscent of Melville's own digressions. These give Hocking's engaging story its structure, as his personal tale unfolds in short, episodic chapters that move back and forth in time.

But Moby-Dick is not Hocking's only obsession. He gets hooked on surfing while living in New York City, spending his free time in the waves off Rockaway Beach and Montauk. His lifelong passion is skateboarding; for him, it is freedom and excitement. He'd worked summers in Oregon as a skateboard coach and returned years later for an idyllic summer job. In a flashback of the return trip to Colorado with his girlfriend, Karissa, he read Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" aloud and experienced a religious epiphany: "I'd found a way," he writes, "out of the isolation chamber of my own ego."

Melville called Ishmael a "dreamy, meditative man." So is Justin Hocking. From his modern masthead, he sees a capacious and generous world, one he brings to life in this erudite and introspective memoir. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

The Tastemaker is a vividly detailed biography of Carl Van Vechten, one of the most influential American cultural figures of the early 20th century. Born in 1880, Van Vechten grew up at the center of attention in a family that indulged his every whim--particularly those that tended toward the artistic. After four years at the University of Chicago, which immersed him further in the emerging modern art world, Van Vechten moved to New York City at the turn of the 20th century.

Working first as a reporter and later as a novelist, Van Vechten continued to promote his beloved modernist art, along with the causes of many musicians--including African-American jazz musicians he met during his forays into Harlem. After publishing a series of controversial novels (and entering into a series of even more controversial relationships), Van Vechten turned himself into a hub of 1920s cultural life; his support and connections helped promote the careers of writers like Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Gertrude Stein. Until his death in 1964, Van Vechten rode the forefront of cultural trends, interested primarily in the development of art for its own sake.

Edward White interweaves anecdotes from those who knew Van Vechten with quotes and episodes preserved in Van Vechten's own diaries and letters. The combination produces not only an engaging portrait of an individual, but a vivid recollection of early 20th century New York society "as it was." --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Book Cricket

As a child dancing to disco music in her room, Jenifer Ringer never dreamed of a career in ballet. But after visiting a friend's ballet class, Ringer began taking lessons and soon enrolled at the School of American Ballet. At 16, she joined the New York City Ballet, where she has worked ever since, eventually rising to her current rank of principal dancer.

In Dancing Through It, Ringer writes with warmth and engaging honesty about the dazzling but highly competitive world of ballet, including nerve-racking encounters with legendary choreographers such as Jerome Robbins and Peter Martins. She chronicles her struggles with body image and eating disorders, which led to her taking a year away from the ballet, and the Christian faith that gradually helped her regain her equilibrium and sense of self. She also shares her fairytale love story with fellow dancer James Fayette and discusses the scandal that erupted in 2010 when a ballet critic denounced her as "fat" in the New York Times. The article ignited a public debate about ballet, weight and body issues; Ringer calls for a continuing dialogue about healthy body image among dancers.

Although Ringer's writing sometimes lacks polish, her voice grows lyrical when she writes about dancing specific ballets, such as George Balanchine's Serenade and Jerome Robbins's Dances at a Gathering. Ringer's three decades as a dancer have been marked by the roles she has performed, their complexity and beauty providing an apt metaphor for her personal growth.  --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Richard Overy's The Bombers and the Bombed recounts the Allied fight in the skies above Europe during World War II with an encyclopedic depth most appealing to readers who already have a strong interest in the war. Those willing to brave a barrage of statistical information, including everything from bomb tonnages and industrial output to civilian deaths and aircrew casualties, will be rewarded by a nuanced, truly objective understanding of European air operations and their consequences.

Most of The Bombers and the Bombed is devoted to the bombing campaign against Germany and its impact on the Nazi war effort and civilian life. Overy (Why the Allies Won; The Twilight Years) discredits deliberate falsehoods and popular misunderstandings that have propagated since the war, such as the ideas that firestorms in German cities like Hamburg and Dresden were unintentional products of environmental conditions or missed targets. In fact, the firebombing of civilian city centers was an explicit Royal Air Force Bomber Command strategy, with considerable effort spent studying how best to ignite German homes through various incendiary bombing patterns. Overy avoids moralizing these raids, focusing instead on their implementation and outcomes for both sides. He also applies this meticulous style to the much more constrained campaign in Italy and the politically tricky bombing of occupied populations.

The Bombers and the Bombed is not an ideal book for general readers. However, those with a strong interest in World War II will find this exhaustive exploration of the European air war thoroughly rewarding. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

Investigative reporter Christopher Leonard lifts the veil covering the powerful practices of the United States' industrial meat suppliers. Focusing primarily on the formation and expansion of Tyson Foods, The Meat Racket uses extensive research and firsthand accounts by farmers to expose how one company took control of and set industry standards for chicken production across rural America.

John Tyson, founder of Tyson Foods, knew that in order to make money and continue to grow, his company needed to control the ebb and flow of chicken, from egg-laying hens to the chicken farms and slaughterhouses onward to fast food menus. So the company bought up feed mills, slaughterhouses and small chicken producers until Tyson (along with one other company) controlled more than half the national chicken market. Defenseless, bankrupt farmers call this state of affairs chickenization, "a miserable state of existence [that] describes a system where massive federal subsidies help keep a company like Tyson afloat at the expense of working families."

Not content to stick to poultry, Tyson edged into the pork and beef industries as well, forming an oligarchy with the biggest meat companies in the country. As Leonard adeptly explains, even the Departments of Agriculture and Justice have little sway over these companies--their lobbying power makes mincemeat of the federal justice system. This eye-opening investigation into the semi-shady practices governing one of the nation's fundamental industries will make readers question how these megacompanies were ever allowed to grow so large and powerful. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Newbery Honor author Cynthia Lord (Rules) tells of one life-changing summer for 12-year-old narrator Lucy Emery and her friendship with Nate Bailey, whose grandmother is succumbing to dementia.

Lucy and her father, a famous nature photographer, spend the first morning at their newest home in New Hampshire photographing the sunrise, each with camera in hand. When Lucy discovers that her father is judging a photography contest of kids' photos, she's hurt that her father had not shared the contest information with her. Nevertheless, she begins to shoot photos, each of which demonstrates a word on a list of 25 required for the competition. At the same time, Lucy makes friends with neighbor Nate and his Grandma Lilah, who is on the Loon Patrol, which tracks the threatened bird's population. As Lucy spends more time with Nate, she recognizes that Grandma Lilah is losing her memory. A dilemma arises for Lucy when she takes an extraordinary photograph of Grandma Lilah that reveals the woman's loosening grip on reality. As Lucy contemplates whether or not to submit the photo for the competition, she wonders, "Did it belong to Grandma Lilah because she was in it? Or did it belong to me because I had taken it?"

Lord brilliantly juxtaposes the idea of moments captured with permanence on film and Grandma Lilah's tenuous hold on memory. The characters' daily monitoring of the loon family's cycle of life also introduces conversation between the generations about beauty and ugliness, life and death. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

This companion to Nick and Tesla's High-Voltage Danger Lab opens with a bang--literally--as 11-year-old twins Nick and Tesla work alongside their Uncle Newt in his basement lab, and the experiment, involving a compost-fueled vacuum cleaner, explodes. (This mystery--with five experiments readers can do themselves using household items and things easily retrieved at a Radio Shack--stands alone.)

It's still summer, and the twins remain with their uncle while their parents are in Uzbekistan. When the vacuum cleaner explosion drives the trio out of Uncle Newt's home, at least until the smoke clears, they head to Ranalli's for pizza. But it's 10 a.m. on a Sunday and the place is empty--except for a pizza dough–twirling robot. That gives the twins an idea. They head to Wonder Hut for supplies, and although the store doesn't have what the twins need, Uncle Newt meets scientist-owner Hiroko Sakurai and is struck by "love at first sight." Back at home, Nick finds supplies for a "wander-bot" and Tesla constructs a "semi-invisible bottle bot," but Uncle Newt is still consumed with Dr. Sakurai. When the mint-condition comic Stupefying #6 goes missing from their friend Silas's father's shop, the twins are on the case.

Pflugfelder and Hockensmith cook up a string of thefts and some AWOL robots in a mystery with many twists and turns. Nick, Tesla and Newt gain depth in this installment, and a closing cryptic message from the twins' mother will draw readers back for the third adventure. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness