What happens if you take a piece of Silicon Valley and drop it near Manhattan's Madison Square Park? In BuzzFeed culture writer Doree Shafrir's first novel, Startup, you get the same laid-back techie incubator open offices with nerf guns, iced coffee kegerators and lunchtime yoga classes--but you also get huddled sidewalk-smoking employees and 4 a.m. Uber rides to shotgun flats in Greenpoint. Hers is a funny, grittier New York version of kids in their 30s wearing fat do-not-disturb earphones while coding, Slacking, Tweeting and Instagramming to hustle a new app company from nowhere into that rarified billion-dollar unicornland.

Mack McAllister is the wunderkind founder/CEO of TakeOff, whose corporate motto is "Do good work, and the work will help the good." He's approaching a second round of a $500-million venture capital valuation when he inadvertently texts Isabel, the company v-p, a dick pic outside of their usual ephemeral Snapchat sexting. Katya, a young edgy journalist, sees it at a networking bar party when Isabel carelessly leaves her phone while on a bathroom break. With a screengrab of the pic, Katya has a story that could take her from trolling endless tweet and retweet gossip and "into that scrum... with the quote or angle that no one else has found yet."

As Shafrir's story unfolds, it moves easily from the sendup of techie emoji, acronyms, and marketing and business palaver into the more tangled politics of startups. She doesn't miss a lick and she's clearly having a good time. But Startup is more than entertainment--it pushes lots of the right buttons. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

In her debut novel, Amita Trasi addresses poverty, human trafficking and the power of true friendship through a story of searching and self-discovery.

In early 1990s Mumbai, two little girls from very different worlds are thrown together and form a deep bond. Quiet Mukta, a low-caste girl born to a destiny of temple prostitution, is rescued from her fate at age 10 by an upper-middle class foster family with an eight-year-old daughter, Tara. Although Tara's parents treat Mukta like a favored servant, their daughter treats her like a sister and helps her learn to read. But one night in 1993, a man kidnaps Mukta from the room where she and Tara lie sleeping.

Eventually, Tara and her family immigrate to the United States, where Tara's father commits suicide in 2004. She learns afterward that he believed Mukta was alive. Despite the enormity of the task, she returns to Mumbai in search of her foster sister, aided by a former street boy from her past who now runs a nonprofit. In alternating flashback chapters, Mukta reveals the truth of her disappearance to the reader in heartrending detail.

While Tara's narrative sometimes feels like an afterthought to Mukta's more compelling and dramatic history, Trasi breathes astounding complexity into both main characters, avoiding a simple victim/rescuer relationship. Themes of remorse, social taboos and family weave together into a surprising and affecting climax. The Color of Our Sky portrays India as a complicated society where tradition sometimes wars with human rights. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Michael Callahan (Searching for Grace Kelly) possesses a deft and winning skill at re-creating the dreamy romanticism and archaic sexual politics of America in 1949. He also crafts compelling and empathetic characters who capture the imagination and concern of readers. Callahan gives a contemporary edge to a nostalgic era, much like the way Todd Haynes's films Carol and Far from Heaven saluted and updated Douglas Sirk's great 1950s melodramas. Callahan essentially takes those wonderful Rona Jaffe page-turners about 1950s "working girls" and retrofits them with modern insights and sensibilities, without winking asides but rather loving attention to period detail.

To please her mother, 19-year-old Betty Jane Welch enters the Miss Delaware contest and wins. This propels her to Atlantic City and the 1950 Miss America pageant, where she meets and immediately falls in love with her pageant-assigned escort, Griffin McAllister. Betty is slow to realize that her dream man is more of a nightmare--psychotic with violent voices in his head. After she wins the pageant, Betty starts feeling hemmed in by its restrictive rules and, fearing she will lose the first man she's loved, she agrees to sneak away with him to New York City. When the newly crowned Miss America is reported missing and perhaps kidnapped, the police and press join the chase, and soon Griffin's paranoid delusions have flesh-and-blood pursuers--which leads to murder.

Callahan's fast-paced psychological thriller is exciting and entertaining. And the vintage Miss America pageant setting is as fascinating as the characters. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

Liza Jesse Peterson is a poet, actress and ex-model, a bohemian from Philadelphia, with an inspirational style and hard-nosed classroom control skills. All Day is her first book, about her year teaching a class of teenage boys full-time at Rikers Island after a few years as a visiting artist at the prison.

"I have quite a spirited group of drama kings, court jesters, flyboy gangsters, tricksters, and wannabe pimps all in my charge, all up in my face, to educate. Corralling this motley crew of bad-news bears to do any lesson is like running boot camp for hyperactive gremlins." Wild as the students are, she also sees them as confused children jailed as adults, with every reason to despair. Some work hard, some don't. She tries to give them fresh visions for their lives before they are released or sent to an adult prison. She is honest about her fears and mistakes, but her cultural understanding and experiences with teaching and performance serve her well. While preaching the gospel of education, she maintains order with her verbal fluency and rewards of music and magazines. An open letter from Obama in Vibe inspires an assignment to write back to him, and she includes several of the teens' letters here. Her work is ongoing, and she hopes to make a living from her art someday, but she makes a strong case for supporting creative sympathetic teachers for the most difficult students. "A little attention and compassion go a long way with a kid who's been ignored throughout his years at school and probably even at home. All kids want to be seen, heard, and encouraged, even the most thuggish of thug." --Sara Catterall

"Data is the new oil," argues Jonathan Taplin in Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. In this incisive work, Taplin makes the case that Internet monopolies have reshaped the online marketplace, via data mining and advertising, to enormous, unconstitutional profit. And as the title--a motto attributed to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg--implies, this is happening quickly and devastatingly.

Taplin posits that for Google and Facebook, "the difference between the supreme artistry of a Martin Scorsese short film and an amateur cat video lies only in the number of views that can be sold to advertisers." Quality no longer matters. Cat videos aside, Taplin quotes Zuckerberg again regarding his desire to spread free Internet to an untapped Third World market: "Who could be against it?"

Many, it turns out. The ramifications of modern colonialism in the name of "progress" and illegal online distribution have precedent. Taplin draws on his own experience in the entertainment industry, wherein he worked as a tour manager for artists like Bob Dylan and the Band, and as a producer for Scorsese. He employs a measured, persuasive tone, and makes a compelling case for re-envisioning the Internet and reinstating value in creating meaningful art. He considers solutions such as a universal basic income, artist co-ops and greater emphasis on community in order to salvage creative cultural output and assess its value.

Who could be against that? Again, the answer is likely many (especially the companies cited), but Taplin's topic is as important as his arguments are enlightening. --Katie Weed, freelance writer and reviewer

For most people, having their car break down on the highway during a stormy night would be a crisis. The mishap, however, inspired Laura Everett, a minister in the United Church of Christ, to abandon nearly all driving in favor of bicycling. With encouragement from "cycling sherpas" in her congregation and social circle, Everett began navigating Boston's labyrinthine streets as an all-weather cyclist, which quickly became an enjoyable challenge and essential component to her spiritual life.

"Runners, swimmers and rowers sometimes speak of this--the repetitive motion that allows one's mind to clear.... And so my time on the bicycle became reflective. My internal conversation became chatty, even. As I came to know Boston's roads better and better, my mind would drift and mull over my prayers: the triple-decker house with the foreclosed sign, the roadside shrine to a child killed by a stray gunshot, the despair that seemed to cling to every building on some blocks, the defiant signs of life on others."

Marrying practicality with philosophy, Holy Spokes provides detailed historical overviews of the sport, descriptions of bicycle construction (Everett has become skilled at building bikes), the mechanics of riding and the sport's physicality. With chapter titles representing various bicycle parts and their symbolic qualities to life ("Saddle ǀ Endurance," "Lights ǀ Visibility," "Brakes ǀ Limitations"), Holy Spokes is structured as a series of interconnected essays, blending Everett's appreciation for urban design along with mindfulness writings by a 17th-century monk named Brother Lawrence (a non-cyclist, to Everett's knowledge).

Although occasional repetition causes some narrative wobbles, Everett's insights gleaned from viewing Boston by bike can be appreciated by dedicated cyclists and non-athletes alike who seek a broader spiritual perspective to life. --Melissa Firman, writer, editor and blogger at melissafirman.com

In Climate of Hope, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg joins forces with former Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope to illustrate how climate change is a series of manageable problems that can be addressed not by the federal government but instead by local administrations, businesses and individual citizens. Their theme throughout emphasizes that "each part of the problem of climate change has a solution that can make our society healthier and stronger." Instead of focusing on politics or long-term consequences, they identify the most immediate threats and how the best solutions not only save the environment, but are economically beneficial as well.

Following George W. Bush's reelection in 2004, Pope stood at the helm of the Sierra Club as the organization worked tirelessly to block the creation of new coal-fired plants in the United States; about the same time, Bloomberg was leading the charge for PlaNYC, an initiative, among other goals, to help the city of New York combat climate change. Using these significant vantage points, Bloomberg and Pope alternate chapters sharing pertinent science and data, as well as their experiences with the various parts of the climate change problem. They address renewable energy resources, housing, food and transportation. Their divergent insights offer a three-dimensional examination of the crisis as well as accessible solutions, innovative suggestions and a plethora of benefits. Most importantly, their positive, forward-looking attitude is inspiring and attainable. Bloomberg and Pope's collaborative work epitomizes the unity needed to solve climate change, and they set an example to follow. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

In the tradition of Milton and Donne, Diane Gilliam's Dreadful Wind & Rain is an inspired collection of loosely connected poems derived from the Book of Genesis story of Leah and Rachel, and from a 300-year-old folk song of sororicide. Pushcart Prize-winner Gilliam's work is plainspoken and haunting, with an everywoman's voice of wanting and wondering. The narrator of the prose poem "Lots of Ships," for instance, learns with her "pens and pencils rowing for some kind of shore."

Gilliam pins her perspective in the first poem "Girls," describing a young woman's thoughts while peering out a window: "Whatever it is she is wanting, it is not/ too much to ask."

In "Tender" the wanting is to be out of a difficult marriage:

"Loving him is too much
cereal and milk
when what she wants

are platters of fried eggs and ham,
biscuits and gravy, fried apples
in big steaming bowls."

In the overtly biblical "Psalm of Leah," the protagonist laments her hard farming life: "the twisted grimace of husbandry,/ the face beaten like a plowshare/ into the shape of what happens to it."

Like the ragged abraded squares of an old quilt in "Oh, Honey" ("the wear and tear of what happens in bed"), the poems in Dreadful Wind & Rain tell an unforgettable story deep in tradition but singularly modern. This one belongs on the not-to-be-missed list. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

When Nazis conquer Poland in the fall of 1939, 16-year-old Abra Goldstein--known on the streets as the "Arab of Warsaw" ever since she forsook her "filthy-rich Jewish parents"--is determined to survive in any way possible. Tall, with blue eyes and chopped-off blonde hair, she masquerades as an Aryan boy, running with a gang of petty thieves. The occupation provides unlimited opportunities for her small-time black market business selling cigarettes and whatever else anyone wants, "from a Polish tart to Chopin's heart." Meanwhile, she keeps a discreet eye on her beloved younger sister, Ruthie, still living with their parents in the "posh" Jewish quarter. In her father's disgust at his older daughter's unseemly behavior--getting kicked out of her fancy school, stealing, joining a street gang--he has placed a gravestone in the cemetery with the inscription: "Abra Goldstein/ Gone and Forgotten." But Arab thinks of herself as "the girl who wouldn't die" and spends the early war years proving this truth again and again, even when she is asked to take part in a dangerous act of resistance.

In fluid, almost contemporary dialogue and action, Randall Platt (The Likes of Me) never flinches from the violent, heartbreaking realities of Nazi-occupied Europe. The Girl Who Wouldn't Die is about the measures Jews, gay people and allies took to survive in a savage time--Arab wearing cynicism like armor, for instance. "Trust me," she tells a fellow street kid, "evil trumps good every time." It's possible, though, that even seemingly cold-blooded Arab has a heart bigger than the entire Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. Riveting. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor

"Green green/ fresh and clean./ Brown brown,/ dig the ground." With a little digging, raking, planting and watering, a garden can grow just about anywhere--even in a cramped lot between city buildings. Green Green is husband-and-wife team Marie Lamba (What I Meant) and landscape architect Baldev Lamba's ode to a greener world, gorgeously illustrated by Barcelonian Sonia Sánchez (Here I Am).

The picture book opens with children frolicking in verdant meadows, butterflies and bees like confetti flung among them. With each passing page, though, the concrete and steel of a city encroaches, shrinking the "green green" to tiny spaces "in between." The city is growing and the children are in danger of losing their green play spaces altogether... until they see the potential in a vacant lot: "Squirrel gray,/ pigeon blue,/ weeds and wildflowers,/ litter, too." They ask the adults, "Brown brown,/ dig the ground?" and soon neighbors join together to create a beautiful community garden that pushes back against the gloomy gray of the city.

Sánchez's illustrations are full of sweet-faced multi-ethnic families in cozy cardigans and mixed-patterned outfits. There's always something new to catch among the pages: a watering can on a fire escape, an old refrigerator in the yard, gardening gloves hanging out of one mom's pocket. The final spread provides ideas to "Make Your World More Green Green" and explains how we can help bees and butterflies. With its simple text and lush artwork, Green Green serves as pure inspiration. Readers of all ages will want to run for their spades and seed packets as soon as the last page is read. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor