With the rat-a-tat-tat declarative sentences of a modern Dashiell Hammett, debut novelist Patrick Hoffman jumps into the crowded pool of hard-core noir and makes a big splash. The White Van makes street-by-street turns through San Francisco's alleys and seedy neighborhoods. Hoffman, a private investigator for nine years, knows the Bay Area's crooks, weirdos and police ("a sea of pink skin and broken capillaries").

Emily is a wasted hustler cruising the streets of the Tenderloin district in search of drugs or a john to bankroll them. Elias is a bent, alcoholic cop about to lose his house in foreclosure. A shady broker in Chinese bootleg cigarettes, Benya fails to make good on a loan from the Russian mafia and finds himself indentured to the city's local pakhan, Sophia. She cooks up a scheme in which Benya will pick up a young druggie woman, ply her with meds ("crack and oxycodone to lure her... scopolamine, Estazolam, and amobarbital to break her will"), and then lead her into a bank branch to steal an interbank-transfer satchel with almost a million in cash. But Emily shakes her buzz long enough to hop on a bus with the money instead of the Russians' white getaway van. Elias catches the dispatch call and goes rogue, trying to find Emily and the money to solve his own problems. Hunted by both sides of the law, Emily turns to her only friend, Jules, a stripper who arrives "like an R&B singer in rehab... a pink warm up suit... big hair and bright nails."

The White Van is a story without heroes, but Jules is close as we get. Like Emily, she's a lifelong hustler. When her friend's back is to the wall, she at least shows up to help--even if a million in cash motivates her more than friendship. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Gray Marshall has spent his entire life scrambling to get by in the Kingdom of Britain. With no family or money, he depends on his natural talent for magick and the kindness of his teachers to stay at Merlin College in Oxford, although not all of his teachers like him. His academic advisor, Professor Callender, is invested only in gaining power for himself and has no interest in Gray's learning or success. After Professor Callender sends Gray on an errand that results in the death of another student, Gray is blamed and suspended from school. Before Gray can defend himself or tell anyone that he was operating under orders, the professor whisks the boy away to his own home for the summer.

Confined to the house, Gray meets the professor's daughter, Sophie, who convinces him to instruct her in magick--an art not taught to women. In the course of these lessons, the two young magicians discover Professor Callender's plays for power are not confined to academia and have far broader implications, both magickal and political. Gray isn't safe, but his life isn't the only one that hangs in the balance if they fail to get away from the professor.

What begins as a fantastical story of loss and betrayal becomes one of intrigue, politics and espionage. Debut novelist Sylvia Izzo Hunter renders both the setting and characters in vivid detail. The structured system of magick gives the fictional world weight, and Hunter manipulates the seemingly disparate plot elements to create tension that culminates in a satisfying conclusion. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company

When longtime home baker Samuel Fromartz began a quest for the ultimate baguette, he planned to go to Paris, but he had no idea how far his quest would eventually take him.

Finding himself short of freelance work, Fromartz (Organic, Inc.) pitched a story to a travel magazine: he'd work at a Parisian boulangerie. The magazine bit, and at Boulangerie Delmontel, Fromartz observed a team of master bakers, learning the secrets of their crackling, crusty baguettes. Upon returning home, Fromartz entered a competition sponsored by the Washington City Paper; his loaves won "Best Baguette in D.C." and garnered a catering request from celebrity chef Alice Waters. But his quest for the ideal loaf--or loaves--was just beginning.

Fromartz next headed to California, where he met artisanal bakers and refined his sourdough starter and technique. From there, he traveled to the Midwest--America's breadbasket--to visit family flour mills and learn about the history and production of different types of wheat. Eventually, chasing the memory of the rye bread he ate as a child in New York, Fromartz flew to Berlin to learn the secrets of baking rye. His journey ended where it began: in his kitchen, experimenting with different blends of flours, yeast and starters to create varied and flavorful loaves.

Part food science, part cultural history, part memoir, Fromartz's book blends a variety of ingredients (the history of wheat production, the science of yeast fermentation, half a dozen bread recipes) into a delicious, informative dish that will have readers reaching for their aprons. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Beginning in 1985, as a young child, Thomas Page McBee began to be abused by his father. In April 2010, at 29, he and his love, Parker, were robbed at gunpoint by a man wearing a black hoodie. Theirs was one in a series of muggings in Oakland, Calif., whose victims were always a man and a woman. Other men wound up shot, so did McBee's voice strike his assailant "as reedy: womanly" (as it struck him) and save his life? These two pivotal encounters with male violence become the loci of the lean, sinewy memoir Man Alive.

McBee unfolds his transition into manhood by paying smart, lyrical attention to the blurring emotions surrounding his determination to embody a masculinity recognizable to both himself and society. Man Alive deemphasizes many of the medical details of being transgender in favor of considering the social and personal implications of gender expression, especially when the gender in question has been associated with so much hurt.

In many ways, this book occurs at the eye of McBee's storm, a crossroads, a major pivot point in his life. He exercises a profound level of compassion to reconcile his past with his present on behalf of his future. Through conversations with his girlfriend, his mother, siblings, father and extended family, one thing grows abundantly clear: Thomas Page McBee is a man of astonishingly strong character, full of empathy and dynamism. Man Alive isn't a simple memoir; it is a culmination of, as much as it is a springboard into, a manhood that proves to be in the greatest sense alive. --Dave Wheeler, publishing assistant, Shelf Awareness

Perhaps no country besides North Korea is as opaque to Americans as Iran. With our widespread embarrassing confusion about its history and religion, many would rather not even think about Iran. In City of Lies, British-Iranian journalist and former Tehran correspondent for Britain's Times Ramita Navai lifts the traditional Iranian chador to expose the diversity and chaos of Iran's capital. It is a city of smells ("mothballs, dried herbs, earth and petrol... ambergris and musk"), mourners ("we embrace sorrow like no one else, wailing on demand"), eroticism ("it is impossible to escape sex in Tehran") and, most of all, lies ("morals don't come into it: lying in Tehran is about survival").

After growing up in London, Navai returned to her homeland in 2004 to profile eight modern Tehranis plucked from points along the city's diverse main thoroughfare. Vali Asr Street connects the wealthy estates and high-end shops of Tehran's north with the poverty, drugs and rampant prostitution of its south. Navai's subjects are religious fanatics, prostitutes, drug dealers, political prisoners, transgender radicals and skinny-jeaned, Chuck-Taylored teens. Filled with verbatim dialogue, police violence, religious extremism, street hustling and a pulsing undercurrent of sexuality, City of Lies uncovers the story of modern Tehran with all the drama of a good novel. It's neither a pretty picture nor a strictly Iranian one, but rather a window into the tensions and challenges of urban life under authoritarian political leadership and intolerant religious hierarchy--wherever it may be. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Good study habits seem like common sense: we should dedicate a single quiet space to uninterrupted periods of intense concentration. Decades of psychology studies, however, reveal these seemingly intuitive truths about the learning process to be far from optimal. In How We Learn, New York Times science writer Benedict Carey explores these potentially groundbreaking but underreported studies, explaining how new understandings of the human brain can be directly applied to education with minimal additional effort.

Some of these new methods appear counterintuitive: Carey suggests we should ditch our dedicated study spaces and schedules, instead varying the times and circumstances during which we review material. The research backs up the notion that spacing study time out over longer intervals (days or weeks ahead of a test) leads to better retention than cramming; taking breaks, including for a full night's sleep, facilitates subconscious learning processes, which surface via the type of "eureka" moments that overcome roadblocks in large academic or creative projects.

The insights of How We Learn apply to far more than just academic situations. Anyone looking to learn a musical instrument would benefit from understanding what frequency and type of practice is most effective. Even readers with little practical use for Carey's information will likely find much of it fascinating, such as how intuition can be a teachable skill, or that giving practice exams at the very beginning of a semester improves grades. How We Learn is a valuable, entertaining tool for educators, students and parents. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

Public-school teachers are widely regarded as a valuable influence on children's lives. But in the U.S., they are subject to a frustrating set of challenges: low pay, limited ability to organize, negative media attention and byzantine curriculum requirements often tied to standardized testing. In her first book, education journalist Dana Goldstein illuminates the present state of American education by reviewing its tumultuous history.

Goldstein traces the origins of teaching in the U.S. from the 19th-century trend of genteel female "missionary" teachers to the rise of "normal schools" that trained educators. She weaves together stories of teachers' unions, suffragettes and civil-rights workers to explain the complex relationship between educators and organized labor. Along the way, Goldstein highlights the historical roots of not-so-recent innovations such as merit pay, complicated teacher evaluations (often based on student performance) and nontraditional paths to becoming an educator such as Teach for America.

Goldstein poses a series of timely questions: How can the education system hope to combat poverty and racism without help? How can administrators effectively evaluate teachers without drowning in paperwork or dismissing problems in the classroom? Are charter schools a solution to the problems facing neighborhood schools? And how can the system empower teachers to use their knowledge and gifts to help students?

Well-researched, highly readable and full of dynamic, colorful characters, The Teacher Wars is both a useful primer on education in the U.S. and a starting point for lively debate on the issues facing education today. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Romantic notions of the natural world fold under the churning surf of Sara Eliza Johnson's debut book of poetry, Bone Map. Here the ecological is physical, stark and often violent, but never less magnificent for it. Johnson's poems draw from a mindful amazement over plant, animal, sky, water and humanity. "Listen--I am," she writes in "Elegy Surrounded by Water," "trying to send you/ a human sound,/ which is bones." Her spare, versatile diction gives these slender poems the intractable grip of a sudden riptide. Each one vivisects its subject to better appreciate its force of beauty, its startling nature, with novel grace and curiosity.

In "Märchen" (German for "folktale"), Johnson writes of a wolf carcass, its neck lacerated, "the wound a cupful of rippling/ black milk, where maggots curl star-white," translating this dead animal into the night sky as if partaking in the astrological legacy of naming constellations to guide lost travelers. Later, in "Primordial Sea," she describes how "Night flowers open/ like white gills to breathe." These lines couple into possibility within a series of three poems called "Pathfinder," where she delineates the evolution of embodiment and the relationships between bodies. Is it mere plant life or the night itself that flowers with white gills? The pieces can be arranged in numerous ways, leaving Bone Map a vibrant cosmos to be charted again and again. Winner of the 2013 National Poetry Series, judged by Martha Collins (White Papers), this collection is poetry to behold, as though it were itself a force of nature. --Dave Wheeler, publishing assistant, Shelf Awareness

In this charming story, two next-door neighbors find a way to form a friendship, despite their dramatically different schedules.

"Deep in the woods, there are two houses," Japanese author Mayuko Kishira begins. "Chicken lives in the house with the red roof. No one lives in the house with the blue roof." Japanese artist Jun Takabatake paints the homes as mirror images, with the blue door of the blue-roofed house on the right; Chicken's red door is on the left. He shows Chicken's daily routine, with rectangular panels joined together like a quilt: waking at sunrise, eating breakfast, taking a nap, etc.: "By sundown, Chicken is sound asleep." One morning, Chicken finds discovers that a neighbor has moved in (a chair sits outside and laundry hangs on the line). Day after day, Chicken keeps watch for his neighbor, "But no one comes out" (though the laundry on the clothesline of the blue-roofed house changes). Then Chicken gets an idea: he'll leave a letter on his neighbor's door. Readers see who opens the door before Chicken does: "Owl is overjoyed to find the letter." Owl has been keeping watch each night for his neighbor. He leaves a reply and finally they meet.

The two neighbors remain true to their natural rhythms, yet find a way to stay in close touch. It's a gentle reminder to children that there are many ways to keep a friendship, and makes an ideal conversation-starter with children who are moving, or even assigned to a different classroom from their friends. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Newbery Honor author Kirby Larson (Hattie Big Sky) follows up Duke, also centering on a child-dog bond and set during World War II, with a story of a girl sent to the U.S. internment camps for Japanese-Americans.

Mitsi is a typical fifth grader--until the attack on Pearl Harbor. Suddenly, she is a target of harassment and racism. However, her dearest friend, her beloved dog, Dash, remains loyal: "He was a soft, furry blanket of love, keeping her warm and safe. Usually, he helped her forget her problems." Soon Mitsi's family is forcibly moved to Camp Harmony, where all is far from harmonious. Mitsi cannot take Dash and is heartbroken, but brightens when her neighbor Mrs. Bowker offers to care for Dash. While Mitsi struggles with the living conditions and a strained relationship with her family, she is strengthened by cheerful letters she receives "from Dash." They are her lifeline to her lost friend. Mitsi learns through adversity that "There were some things that could not be helped.... But she did have a choice about what she made of it."

Larson addresses the issue of the Japanese internment with age-appropriate facts and without being too graphic. She imparts an important history lesson--inspired by a true story--and softens its harder edges with Dash's charismatic and comforting presence. The book will appeal to history buffs as well as fans of Cynthia Kadohata's Weedflower. --Jessica Bushore, former public librarian and freelance writer