Breaking Wild is the first adult novel by Diane Les Becquets, author of highly praised young adult novels including Season of Ice and The Stones of Mourning Creek. Carefully crafted characters and measured pacing define this tale of two women's parallel personal journeys in the wilderness of northwestern Colorado.

Amy Raye Latour is a wife and mother, an accomplished outdoorswoman and a strong personality. She sneaks away from her hunting companions on the last morning of their trip to find the stillness and quiet required to get close enough to her prey to use her compound bow. When she doesn't show up again that night, her friends call authorities.

Pru Hathaway, an archeological law enforcement ranger, lives in the nearby town of Rio Mesa with her teenaged son, Joseph, and her dog, Kona, who is certified for search-and-rescue. When the local sheriff gets the call about Amy Raye, he turns to Pru.

The personalities of the two women shape the novel: they are both more complicated than they seem on first meeting. One of Les Becquets's triumphs is the tantalizingly paced release of new information: about Pru's personal history, about Amy Raye's troubles and the tangled web of her life, any strand of which may be implicated in her disappearance.

Les Becquets portrays a credible and compelling cast of characters, especially the strong women at its center. Breaking Wild is a rare novel in its mastery of both plot and character, with deliberate rhythm, thrilling suspense and a striking backdrop. Its breathless momentum carries through to a dramatic conclusion. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

"It isn't always blood that makes a family," says one of the characters in The Secret to Hummingbird Cake, a witty and heartwarming first novel by Celeste Fletcher McHale. The story is set in the small town of Bon Dieu Falls, La., and follows three 30-year-old women, friends since the age of five and a kind of family.

Carrigan, the narrator, is a fiery redhead who's been married for 13 years. She harbors suspicions about her handsome husband's fidelity--and she has partaken in a secret, regrettable indiscretion of her own. Carrigan's spitfire best friend, Ella Rae, married her childhood sweetheart and is still so madly in love with him that Carrigan swears the two of them "breathed in unison." Laine, Carrigan's other best friend, is the responsible, levelheaded one of the bunch. Still single, Laine, caring and good-natured, is a much-beloved high school English teacher, famous for the creamy icing and sweet pineapple of her Hummingbird Cake, a Southern staple. Yet, she refuses to share her recipe even with her closest friends, even though they beg.

Carrigan grapples with her troubled marriage, trying to repair what's broken through the encouragement and support of her friends, who also face life-changing challenges and heartrending secrets. Fletcher McHale blends the sassy and the sentimental--drizzling spiritual crises atop everything--and whips up a wholesome story about the transcendent, everlasting bonds of friendship and love. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

The 16 short stories in Peter Straub's Interior Darkness are pulled from many of his previously published collections and showcase his macabre sense of horror. To Straub, terror comes in many forms: an older man preying on a young boy at the movie theater; the kindergarten teacher with a penchant for fantasies featuring kings, queens and evil stepsisters; the truth that lies between dreams and reality experienced during childhood; and the manipulations by an older brother of his younger sibling, which lead to an intense and vicious incident in the attic.

Straub expertly manages ghosts, fetishes, perversions and violence in many forms, while his focus is on the interior, psychological dilemmas and battles each character faces, an emphasis reflected in the title. Though the stories are rich in concrete details that set the scenes, what Straub leaves out of these pieces is at least as disturbing as what he writes, allowing the reader's imagination to fill in mysterious and ominous blanks in the stories. Some readers may wish for more detail and find Straub's style of writing difficult to follow, but the effort needed to comprehend the plot line in each of these gems is well worth the investment. This is a fine collection for those who want to experience the best Straub has written. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

With Stanford degrees, plenty of drugs and alcohol, and a fragile sense of purpose, the four friends in Tony Tulathimutte's first novel, Private Citizens, struggle to succeed in early 21st-century San Francisco. A Stanford graduate himself, Tulathimutte is wise to the jargon, angst and self-centered preoccupations of these smart Silicon Valley millennials buzzing around the edges of adulthood. There's recently defunded post-doc scientist Henrik, who finds refuge with his generous friend Will, a "short Asian guy" with a vast digital porn collection and a fixation on the disabled entrepreneur and former teen pageant queen Vanya. Child of privilege and aspiring social-activist Cory is annoyed by her libertine former roommate Linda's seeming ease among San Francisco's underground--although would-be writer and transplanted New Yorker Linda has nothing nice to say about the City by the Bay: "This little ukulele-strumming cuddle party... was nothing but a collapsed soufflé of sex kitsch and performance readings, book clubs, writing workshops... [where] the little journals and bookstores were on a drip-feed of pledge drives, and the only thing to say about the McSweeney's tweehouse of interns was that they had nice packaging."

Tulathimutte transcends the easy potshots at millennial sanctimony to capture the sincerity of his protagonists' friendship, and their real desire and effort to be decent participants in an adult community. School's over, and it's time for them to be "private citizens" in a world they may not have made but which is all the world they have. He has put his hyper-critical generation under a magnifying glass and found compassion and generosity after all. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Tony and Academy Award-winning actor Joel Grey was 82 when he made international headlines in 2015 by announcing he was gay. A year later, his memoir Master of Ceremonies takes readers on a compelling and painfully candid journey through the highs and lows of his career and personal life. "It's taken me a lifetime to understand and accept my own particular set of contradictions," Grey writes. What makes Grey's journey of self-discovery so ceaselessly fascinating is his willingness to delve into his contradictions.

Although his first same-sex encounter was at 12, Grey was living at a time when homosexuality was not only against the law, it was labeled a psychological pathology and treated with electroshock therapy, chemical castration and lobotomy. As his stage career began to take off, he kept his affairs undercover. At 27, he fell in love with and married actress Jo Wilder and began the family he'd always wanted. He almost turned down the 1966 Broadway show Cabaret because he thought the master of ceremonies role was inconsequential. His wife urged him to reconsider, and he won a Tony Award for his signature performance. When he re-created the role for the 1972 film, he and director Bob Fosse were constantly at odds but Grey won an Oscar for his performance.

"If you don't tell the whole truth about yourself, life is a ridiculous exercise," writes Grey. After 24 years of marriage, Grey felt secure enough to tell Jo about his gay past. She filed for divorce. Grey's long path to self-acceptance is as entertaining as it is thoughtful and illuminating. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

The pick and shovel work of archeology sounds boring: all that careful mapping, scraping and digging. But when its artifacts are enhanced with anthropological legends from Arizona Amerindian cultures, intergenerational oral histories from descendants of the original Hopi and Tewa clans, and archival photos and maps, the resulting package is absorbing. Bancroft and Francis Parkman Prize-winning historian and anthropologist James F. Brooks (Captives and Cousins) pulls together a focused history of the massacre of the Antelope Mesa's Awat'ovi community in 1700.

Mesa of Sorrows begins with the Peabody Museum's archeological expedition to the site in the late 19th century, where important ceramic pottery sherds dating back centuries were eclipsed by a significant cache of human skeletal remains exhibiting signs of violent dismemberment and torching. Brooks then shifts to the centuries-long history of the Arizona Indian tribes that migrated in and out of the area's buttes and mesas in response to war, starvation, trade and drought. Hopi pueblo communities were already a multi-clan, multi-lingual territory when Spanish Franciscans came along in the 16th century to add a new disruptive element to the mix. Finally, drawing on stories of the Hopi historian Albert Yava (née Nuvayoiyava--Big Falling Snow), Brooks ties together science, history and legend to explain the seemingly uncharacteristic Hopi-on-Hopi violence at Awat'ovi. He speculates that the massacre fit a long tradition of periodic Hopi purging of Pueblos who had lost their way--concluding that the tribal leaders decided that "the corruption at Awat'ovi... must end so balance could be restored." Brooks makes archeology and anthropology fascinating. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

"I believe in the human capacity to innovate, to imagine, to create. Prisons are a failure of imagination in the most tragic sense of the term," says Baz Dreisinger (Near Black), associate professor at John Jay College and founder of Prison-to-College Pipeline. She spent two years visiting prisons around the world--Incarceration Nations is the astounding culmination of her undertaking.

Armed with compassion and a vast knowledge of incarceration history, Dreisinger explores facilities from Rwanda to Australia. She examines innovative programs implemented to reduce recidivism, such as restorative justice in South Africa, rehabilitation through music in Jamaica and reentry in Singapore. She works up-close and personal with inmates while teaching a creative writing course, a drama workshop and a nonfiction class. And the details of her travels are supplemented with related background and staggering statistics.

Dreisinger's zeal to change the penal system is contagious. Her optimism is reflected not only in her words, but also in the meaningful relationships she forms with prisoners, prison employees, even her taxi drivers. And her narrative illustrates the vital connection between those individuals, underscoring the enlightened theory she encounters in Norway, "Treat them like human beings and they will act like human beings." Incarceration Nations is crucial reading for the world's largest jailer (United States) and the rest of the global population because, as Dreisinger points out, "changed policy is a product of changed public consciousness. We all have a hand in that mission." --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

While typical books on tarot describe the meaning of the cards so one can interpret the future, Bookslut founder Jessa Crispin's The Creative Tarot does much more. Crispin (The Dead Ladies Project) begins by explaining the Major Arcana, the suite of 22 cards pertaining to big life changes, and the Minor Arcana, which consists of four suits, each with 14 cards that represent daily life activities and choices. From there, she designs a system to help people look at, and better understand, their creativity through tarot, using it to solve artistic conundrums. Her insights are sensible and easy to follow for beginners, and experienced readers will find new information and ways to reframe their readings.

In particular, Crispin recommends additional books, films, music and other works of art, up to four for each card, that can help readers better understand the tarot deck. These additional sources have been carefully selected to reveal a deeper meaning and greater understanding of the symbolism, themes and stories behind each card. To understand the Lovers better, her suggestions include reading Henry James's The Tragic Muse and watching the movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch. For the Star, she recommends David Bowie's album Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and David Cronenberg's film Dead Ringers. Crispin believes that readers can be better, more inspired artists after exploring such diversity of expression, and promotes the use of tarot as a means of self-reflection and self-awareness to further creative pursuits. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company

On a field trip to an Illinois art museum, 12-year-old Claudia Miravista sees a blue-eyed boy peering out of a 17th-century Dutch painting. When the boy appears again in her own bedroom, in a painting the budding artist has painted herself, she knows she's not just going crazy.

Behind the Canvas by Alexander Vance (The Heartbreak Messenger) is the story of Claudia's fantastical, sometimes comical adventures in the world "behind the canvas," where every oil painting ever painted is a gateway between realms. The Dutch boy from the painting is Pim, who tells Claudia that 360 years ago, he was cursed by a witch to live out his days in a perilous parallel reality. The two lonely children become fast friends, and Claudia vows to help him escape his unbearable prison. But to do so, she must break the witch's curse, which means venturing behind the canvas herself. Once ensconced in this realm of patchwork landscapes, Claudia learns that she may be a magical Artisti, and the scope of her mission escalates dramatically. Run-ins with a rash of Cubist clowns and the Mona Lisa, who says "like" a lot and spits on Monet's water lilies, keep things hopping as Vance explores the idea that art is its own sort of magic.

Extensive footnotes--funny and irreverent--document famous artists and movements, and while reading, it's fun to search for images to understand better, for example, why a person might not want to tumble into a grisly Caravaggio painting or meet Saint George's dragon (as painted by Rubens) in person. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness