Clare Hobbes believes in love: in fierce devotion and steadfast kindness. She's grown up surrounded by deep love--from her mother, her almost-mother, Cornelia, and the jumbled but joyous family they began constructing together in Marisa de los Santos's debut novel, Love Walked In. Now, as a young woman on the cusp of marriage, Clare finds herself facing a wrenching decision about whom, and how, to love. In her fifth novel for adults, I'll Be Your Blue Sky, de los Santos weaves Clare's story together with that of Edith Herron.

Days before her wedding, Clare meets Edith, an elderly woman whose wise counsel and compassion give Clare the strength to break off her engagement. Several weeks later, Clare learns that Edith has left her a house--Blue Sky Cottage--with a mystery attached. Captivated by the house itself and intrigued by the photos (taken by Edith) adorning its walls, Clare begins digging into the woman's background with the help of her best friend, Dev. The two trace Edith's movements all along the mid-Atlantic coast and back up to the Canadian border, while Clare struggles to navigate the shifting geography of her own heart. As de los Santos's two narratives unfold side by side, readers can see two brave women, decades apart, struggle to do the right thing for themselves and for those they love.

Tender and insightful, I'll Be Your Blue Sky is a richly layered story that will nourish both longtime and new readers of de los Santos's work. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Pearl has spent her entire life residing in a 1994 Mercury, in the visitor's lot of a Florida trailer park. Her teenage runaway mother parked the car, intending to stay temporarily. More than a decade later, the two still call the Mercury home. Pearl lives in the front seat and her mother in the back. Neither is unhappy with their situation, and their love for each other is unconditionally strong. Pearl attends school but has few friends. Her mother is all she needs--until Eli arrives.

The gun culture in Florida has always surrounded mother and daughter, but with the advent of Eli, it permeates the quiet safety of the sedan home and changes the entire trajectory of the pair's life.

Jennifer Clement's (Prayers for the Stolen) enchantingly poetic novel about family, love and resilience is plopped down in the midst of the debate about guns in the U.S. All around Pearl and her mother, people covet their firearms. The juxtaposition of these powerful themes, reflected subtly in the book's title, will strike readers forcefully, as will Clement's breathtaking use of language and imagery. Her sparse, well-chosen words have the force of a fired bullet: "I knew he was not a strong white flag of a person but was put together with scraps of Scotch tape and a few staples and glue."

Gun Love's ammunition piles up: dynamic, tragic characters, Pearl's strong voice, and a sense of place so acute, readers will cringe from the stench of the nearby dump. Clement has definitely hit the mark with Gun Love. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

Christine Schutt traffics in literary realism, but her stories are filled with ghosts. Death--past, imminent, right before our eyes--looms over most of the 11 stories in Pure Hollywood. In "A Happy Rural Seat of Various View: Lucinda's Garden," a newly married young woman accidentally kills an animal while driving a gardener's minicar; later, she disappears. In "Species of Special Concern," a man is certain that he understands a renowned lepidopterist and identifier of species better than the dying woman's husband does. In the title novella, a failed young actress, recently widowed by a decades-older comedian, loses her home to the grown children from his first marriage. Moreover, there's no scarcity of flawed parenting on parade in Pure Hollywood.

Schutt (whose novels include the seductive marital atomization Prosperous Friends and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist All Souls) leavens her dispiriting subject matter with the spryest of prose, arranging words in effortlessly euphonious combinations: "Leaf-fall, stomped to leaf-meal, dusts her shoes." A cranky woman makes "tough, irritated pickax sounds with words like crap, drink, think." The mother of a baby hears "the tuneless xylophone of his bottle banged against the crib slats." Schutt's extraordinary command of language can go only so far to vitalize her wispier pieces--one is two pages long--but hardly a sentence scuds by that's not like a bloom from one of Pure Hollywood's many gardens. Of course, flowers only affirm this collection's funereal air. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

The Fighter by Michael Farris Smith (Rivers and Desperation Road) is the story of the orphan Jack Boucher. His long road of institutions and foster homes ends on the 200 acres of the never-married Maryann, who raises him with the only love he's ever known. With few skills besides willfulness and a strong physique, Jack leaves at 17. He aims to make his way as a bare-knuckle cage fighter on the backwoods circuit filled with "men who killed dogs with other dogs." They are "a suffocating mass of the drunk and disturbed."

After some years of success, Jack sustains a massive concussion and, after self-medication with pills and booze, his battered body finally gives out. In his 40s, he drags himself back to Clarksdale to see Maryann as she lies with advanced dementia in a nursing home. Her multigenerational home is in foreclosure, and Jack owes $12,000 to the vicious local loan shark Big Momma Sweet. Good luck at a Natchez casino brings him enough to cover his nut, but bad luck rears its head when his truck crashes and the money disappears while he stumbles to get help.

Winner of the 2014 Mississippi Author Award and born in Mississippi to a Baptist minister, Smith writes with the Delta river silt and cotton fields in his blood. In the tradition of the Mississippi literature like Faulkner and Larry Brown, The Fighter is rich in character and landscape but, more insidiously, in the hard life and meager hopes of those who live there. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

As a little girl in Istria, Lidia Bastianich plucked figs straight from the tree for breakfast and tended her grandmother's goats. She fished in the Mediterranean. She played in the streets of Pola. Her biggest fear was that her grandfather would catch her sneaking cherries from his trees. But over the years, larger fears crept in; Bastianich lived in a part of Italy that had been ceded to Yugoslavia following World War II, under communist dictator Tito. Violence grew ever closer to home. Eventually, her family fled.

The Bastianiches waited two years at San Sabba refugee camp in Italy--formerly a concentration camp--for a country that would take them in permanently. "I didn't have an identity; I was neither Yugoslavian nor Italian. I was like a leaf in the wind."

But she became American. In her inspiring, vividly detailed memoir My American Dream: A Life of Love, Family, and Food, Bastianich explores how that came to be.

When her family moved to New Jersey in 1958, Bastianich immediately embraced her new country and growing identity as an American. She worked, saved, fell in love and started college. Then she started a restaurant--and then another, and then another. In the ensuing decades, she wrote more than a dozen cookbooks, starred in cooking shows and founded her own brand.

Her legions of fans know her as warm and effusive, and My American Dream is no different. Wisdom peppers her reflections on her life, infused with deep love for family and country--and food, too. --Katie Weed, freelance writer and reviewer

Apricot Irving's parents were farmers in California when they decided to be missionaries and move with their three young daughters to the north of Haiti. Over nine years, her father planted trees to combat deforestation. As he committed himself to the country and his own goals of saving it, he grew more distant from his family--eventually violent--and more resentful of their privilege and status as outsiders. While they had been poor for California and lived in a cabin without an indoor toilet, in Haiti they were treated as foreign dignitaries, a startling shift. They were also demoralized by the failures of their humanitarian projects, and the knowledge that even if they succeeded, their actions would never be enough to help everyone.

Set against a history of colonialism and political unrest, Irving presents a nuanced look at her childhood and the place where she spent it, both of which are too complex for her to describe easily. "The missionaries I grew up with were neither marauders nor saints; Haiti was neither savage nor noble," she writes. "The truth was far more complicated." She paints these contradictions thoughtfully, and while she both loved and hated living there when she was young, it formed who she is as an adult. With evocative prose and electrifying scenes, The Gospel of Trees shows how a woman reconciles the pain and beauty of the religion, family and country she was exposed to as a girl. --Katy Hershberger, freelance writer, bookseller and publicist

Essayist Gerald Weissmann has a storied career as a physician, so it's no surprise that The Fevers of Reason, a collection of new and previously published works, focuses on the moments where art and science intersect. The pieces expertly hopscotch across all sorts of topics--rheumatology, Viennese art in the early 20th century, the genesis of Sherlock Holmes, RNA sequencing. Throughout the book, Weissmann's humanist, sometimes sardonic, voice binds together disparate strands to show how all human endeavor is linked in one way or another.

There are particular subjects that are close to Weissmann's heart, and appear more than once; the Nobel Prize and the percentage of American winners who were immigrants is one. He makes strong cases for immigration throughout the book, showing how welcoming the refugees who fled Nazism created medical breakthroughs in the United States. But Weissmann also takes time to focus on unheralded women in medicine, especially Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from a U.S. medical school. "Dr. Blackwell Returns from London" charts her career, showing how she paved the way for generations of women physicians to come. Weissmann clearly sees how history obfuscates the work of women, people of color and immigrants, and tries to alter that.

While he can lapse into jargon on occasion, Weissmann's prose is usually polished and funny, and anyone with an interest in American scientific or literary history will enjoy this collection, especially if they're already medically inclined. --Noah Cruickshank, adult engagement manager, the Field Museum, Chicago, Ill.

We are taught that analytical thinking is the appropriate response to situations that require a problem to solve. However, a deliberate, step-by-step approach is not particularly well-suited for the rapid changes of the 21st century. Instead, physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow urges us to embrace elastic thinking if we want to thrive in this unprecedented age of change.

Thanks to our advanced brains, elastic thinking was key to the evolution of the human species. In today's world, where "we consume, on average, a staggering 100,000 words each day from various media," our tolerance for new information, constant progress and creative solutions is achievable thanks to elastic thinking's bottom-up approach to problem solving. While our top-down analytical brains dismiss unusual or seemingly illogical solutions to problems, our elastic brains allow us to consider ideas from different angles. Daydreaming, or "thinking without thinking," is crucial to the development of new ideas; Mary Shelley was unable to rise to the challenge of telling a ghost story until she let her mind wander and conceive Frankenstein. Just as important, frozen thinking--or thinking that resists "accepting nonconformist ideas"--stands in our way, as illustrated by General Stanley McChrystal's analysis of how Israel failed to anticipate obvious warning signs leading up to the Yom Kippur War. 

With humor and insight, Mlodinow (a former writer for MacGyver and Star Trek: The Next Generation) takes readers for a tour of the brain and provides opportunities to test our own thinking with riddles, puzzles and quizzes. With elastic thinking, you'll never approach a problem the same way again. --Frank Brasile, librarian

"Mama, is it summer yet?" a little boy asks his mother as they look out the window at bare tree limbs, a pair of mittens warming on the radiator under the sill. "Not yet, my little one./ But the buds are swelling./ Soon new leaves will unfold."

In a lyrical ode to the sweet anticipation of a new season, the board book version of Nikki McClure's Mama, Is It Summer Yet? will captivate readers young and old. Striking cut-paper artwork balances beautifully with McClure's gentle, almost old-fashioned text. As winter gives way to spring and beyond, the boy and his mother clear the garden space, plant seeds, build a windsock and wait for the fruits of their labor--strawberries, for starters. Nature's changes are at the center of McClure's book. Swallows swoop with fantastically long, intertwined tail feathers. A squirrel builds her nest on a branch with tiny buds. The boy and his mother paddle through a marsh where ducklings "grow big and bold." Eventually, the two enjoy books on a blanket under the now blossoming tree. Throughout, the boy's refrain returns: "Mama, is it summer yet?" Again and again, his patient mother responds with "Not yet, my little one. But..." until, inevitably, the answer turns to a joyful yes.

Nikki McClure (To Market, to Market; In; Waiting for High Tide) captures the loving, playful bond between mother and son. Black-and-white art is accented with splashes of color that grow ever bolder as summer draws near: a lilac windsock, pink blossoms, red strawberries. This thoroughly pleasing board book offers young readers an opportunity to absorb themselves in the simple, hopeful gifts of the seasons. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor

A "treasure trove of all our passions and obsessions," the periodic table of the elements is more than a turreted catalogue of the different kinds of matter in the universe. "The periodic table is... an anthropologic marvel, a human artifact that reflects all of the wonderful and artful and ugly aspects of human beings and how we interact with the physical world." In this young readers edition of his bestselling The Disappearing Spoon, science writer Sam Kean (Caesar's Last Breath) presents the wide-ranging history, conflict, rumors and science behind each element, from discovery to present-day use.

Kean tells of bitter custody battles over element discoveries; fierce competition among nations and individual scientists to claim naming rights; and sometimes humorous, often insanely dangerous exploits in the name of science or power. During the 1990s, a 16-year-old Boy Scout decided to try to solve the world's energy crisis by building a nuclear reactor in his backyard shed. In the sixth century BC, a Babylonian king had his palace walls painted yellow with an antimony-lead paint mixture and went mad--antimony (element 51) is highly toxic. And, yes, it is possible to make a spoon disappear in your cup of tea, as long as that spoon is made of the easily meltable element 31, gallium.

The Disappearing Spoon reveals how gloriously and dangerously intertwined everything truly is, and not just chemically speaking. Kean wraps his exploration of elements in history, politics, mythology, warmongering, philosophy and more: "I realized that there's a funny, or odd, or chilling tale attached to every element on the periodic table. At the same time, the table is one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind. It's both a scientific accomplishment and a storybook...." This "storybook" will encourage young readers to brave the elements of science. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor