Families of the particularly dysfunctional variety seem to be Kevin Wilson's forte, whether artistically constructed as in The Family Fang or experimentally psychological as in Perfect Little World. Despite a sense of head-shaking impossibility, Wilson somehow manages to make his make-believe believable--in between the inappropriate laughing and bittersweet empathizing.

Privilege, power and inequity whorl through Nothing to See Here. Back in their "fancy girls' school hidden on a mountain in the middle of nowhere," Lillian and Madison begin their relationship as assigned roommates. Lillian is a valley townie, the daughter of a single mother and missing father; she's poor but smart, and gains entrance on scholarship. That promise gets waylaid by big-money heiress Madison. Alas, the girls' friendship is temporary, canceled by a lucrative deal Madison's father strikes with Lillian's mother that insulates Madison and propels Lillian back to her "awful public high school."

Remarkably, the girls stay in touch, and in the spring of 1995, Madison summons Lillian to Franklin, Tenn., with "an interesting job opportunity." In the decade-plus since they last met, Madison has become a senator's wife and stepmother to his children. Settling into Madison's seemingly idyllic, sprawling compound, Lillian is placed in charge of the senator's 10-year-old twins, Roland and Bessie. "There's something I have to tell you about them," Madison warns. Their "affliction," as she describes it, is that they burst into flames. To keep the twins (and Madison and her senator's carefully curated lives--he's about to run for U.S. president, after all) safe will be Lillian's 24/7 responsibility. But first, she'll need to gain the children's trust.

When it comes to unconventional families, Wilson again proves himself a master of heartstring-tugging, drop-jaw shocking, guffaw-inducing, highly combustible entertainment. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

On March 16, 1991, 16-year-old Ava Matthews walks into a Korean-owned convenience store in South Central Los Angeles to buy milk. A scuffle ensues when the owner thinks Ava is stealing, and Ava ends up shot in the back of the head, bleeding out on the floor with two dollars in her hand. Her younger brother, Shawn, witnesses the entire incident, which is caught on tape, but the owner/shooter gets only probation and no jail time.

In 2019, 27-year-old Grace Park is still living at home with her parents and working in the pharmacy they own. She's the dutiful daughter, while her older sister is estranged from their parents for reasons unknown to Grace. One day something catastrophic happens, forcing Grace to reckon with the terrible secrets her family has kept from her.

Steph Cha's Your House Will Pay is based on the true story of Latasha Harlins, a teen shot dead in 1991 in a Korean-owned store. The fallout is believed by historians and Angelenos to have helped spark the L.A. riots the following year. In chapters alternating between 1991 and 2019--and between Shawn's and Grace's perspectives--Cha peels back the layers of race relations in a city with people who can suffer only so much injustice. The Matthews and Park families, on opposite sides of the central conflict, are both depicted with deep insight and empathy--and their flaws intact. There are no villains or heroes, only humans whose paths collided one tragic day, who are still paying for the damage done. The ending is a bit abrupt, but it offers hope that healing and forgiveness can begin. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

While male celebrity chefs and food writers seem to dominate the airwaves and column inches, food nevertheless starts with women. That is what this collection curated by journalist and food writer Charlotte Druckman strives to emphasize to readers, as she includes the voices of 115 women involved in every stage of food production and presentation.

In essays and in interviews, quotes and ephemera, Druckman raises questions about who is heard and seen and who is not in the contemporary landscape, who gets to have a voice, and where the food world erases people. Women on Food explores racism, the #MeToo movement, gender biases and ties between food and culture that we rarely hear about. The various formats spliced together help highlight who is visible, who is seen as odd and who is conspicuously missing.

In this collection, Druckman above all celebrates women's place in and shaping of the food industry of today. Women on Food considers how black female food writers encounter everyday racism simply by eating out, as well as experiences of connecting to one's hereditary food cultures in the face of major life changes, what it is like to be a female farmer or to reshape the culture of a city through food. What readers will find in this book are stories to enrich their connections to their own habits of consuming both food and food writing. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

Mark Morris's Out Loud is a "memoir not a cookbook." He "can't tell you the recipe exactly," but is masterful at describing the ingredients that influence his career as one of the world's foremost choreographers. Morris's influences are many and complex. He asked to flamenco at nine and at 10 won a guest role with Bolshoi Ballet. He loved The Lawrence Welk Show, opera, country music and the traditions and religious mythologies of cultures worldwide. His talent took root at a young age--he improvised shows in his Seattle living room and listened to musical pieces over and over again to decode them.

Inspiration intertwined with Morris's humor (battle-strengthened by the "queer humiliation" of junior high), style ("old men's overcoats and a different rhinestone brooch" every day), brash defiance and sense of self to form the foundation of his multi-faceted style. He beautifully exhibits these traits in Out Loud, which feels like a Morris composition--movements within movements, fits and flows, taken together to form an entrancing and hilarious whole.

Unsurprisingly, Morris is a superb storyteller. In addition to his many professional accomplishments (Mark Morris Dance Group, White Oak Dance Project, numerous awards and honorary doctorates) and high-profile collaborators (Mikhail Baryshnikov, Yo-Yo Ma), Morris shares his private life, friendships, delightful family lore and laugh-out-loud asides (how a bidet formed "the fountainhead of [a] lifelong obsession with water features"). One need not comprehend dance to appreciate Morris's impact or be a devotee to give this work a standing ovation. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

Maybe she never threw a television out a hotel window, but in terms of drinking, swearing and making outrageous personal demands, Broadway legend Elaine Stritch could have held her own against any rock star. No wonder Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch, the first book by writer-editor Alexandra Jacobs, is such a carousing entertainment.

Born in 1925, Stritch was raised in a Detroit suburb too small to hold her: "I wanted to be a nurse, a doctor, a whore, and a queen," she later told the press. "The only way I could think of to accomplish all of those endeavors was to go on stage." A convent girl, Stritch moved to Manhattan in 1943 to attend a Catholic finishing school and take acting classes, which led to parts suited to her low voice and older-than-her-years presentation. She understudied Ethel Merman and, in a feat of sublime casting, played tippler Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Stritch's reputation for alcohol-abetted irascibility cost her some choice parts. (Jacobs makes droll use of the fact that Angela Lansbury kept getting them.) Following an unfocused decade, Stritch was handed what would become her career-making signature role: Joanne in Stephen Sondheim's 1970 musical, Company. Jacobs is so adept at situating her subject in her place and time that when Still Here covers Stritch's final days--she died in 2014, at age 89--the reader can feel golden age Broadway and old New York slipping away. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Janis Joplin (1943-1970) gets a long-overdue definitive biography by an author who not only understands the music industry in the 1960s and early 1970s, but also has a firm grasp on the creative and emotional life of America's first female rock star. Music biographer Holly George-Warren's (The Road to Woodstock) vital, fascinating and deeply personal biography benefits greatly from interviews with Joplin's siblings, former bandmates and crew. Joplin's career ran just four years (she joined the established rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company in June 1966 and died of a heroin overdose in October 1970). But her husky, emotional and explosive voice, and her steely determination to steer her own career continue to influence new generations of singers.

Ignored or ridiculed in high school, Joplin found her voice and flamboyant fashion sense when she moved to San Francisco and embraced the proverbial rocker lifestyle of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Openly bisexual, Joplin's sexual relations were numerous but usually emotionally unsatisfying. Her huge appetite for alcohol and heroin were as strong as her musical drive. "The mix of confident musicianship, brash sexuality, and natural exuberance, locked together to produce America's first female rock star," writes George-Warren. Months before her death, Joplin said music was the one aspect of her life that had never let her down.

Although her life was brief, Joplin lived it with gusto. Readers will be enthralled by her adventures and her subversion of the men-only music industry. This compelling and inspiring biography captures Joplin's complex personality and immense talent. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

In Beyond the Valley: How Innovators Around the World Are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow, Ramesh Srinivasan--professor at UCLA's Department of Information Studies and director of the UC Digital Cultures Lab--examines the character of Silicon Valley's technological development. He scrutinizes the ethos of tech companies, allowing corporations to insulate themselves from the harm caused by their growth, and asks, "Shouldn't technology be people-centered, not in use and addiction, but in creation and application?"

There's an idea of an open Internet that obscures the reality of the network of privately owned architecture most people use to access the Internet. By probing this contradiction, Srinivasan (Whose Global Village?) tries to make his readers more aware of the reality of the digital infrastructure that has infiltrated and permeated their lives, and the implications of its extended reach.

Convenience comes at the price of privacy, creates more risk for vulnerable people, and contributes to economic inequality and political divisions. Beyond the Valley asks readers to imagine a technological future that balances connectivity and innovation with concerns about equity, diversity and democracy, thereby pursuing an "internet that acts as a 'global village.' " For an industry that deliberately keeps the focus off of its negative effects, Srinivasan's work is a necessary intervention and critique, while also shining a light on those working to come up with solutions to counteract the pitfalls of a technologically focused world. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

Meghan Daum is hardly the first writer to quibble with practices like so-called purity policing and virtue signaling. But liberals of good faith should take note: Daum is working from within. As she writes in The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars, "I felt an obligation to hold the left to account because, for all my frustrations with it, I was still of it."

Daum uses both personal experiences and of-the-moment news items to seed the eight essay-like chapters that make up her carefully reasoned book. Several stories play out on ideological-tinderbox college campuses. Among them is Washington's Evergreen State, where Bret Weinstein, a self-described progressive, was a biology professor until 2017. He resigned after his safety was threatened by student activists calling him a "white supremacist" for challenging the school's decision to ask white students and staffers to stay off campus during an anti-racism event. Daum writes of such goings on, " 'Social justice warriors' emerged on the scene with a self-proclaimed utopian vision that sometimes sounded a lot like authoritarianism."

The author of four previous books and the editor of the bestselling Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, Daum has a penchant not so much for going against the grain as for taking a magnifying glass to its fibers. She's releasing The Problem with Everything with some trepidation; in her introduction, she admits, "I've never been more afraid of writing a book." Open-minded readers may well find themselves grateful that she did. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Seventeen-year-old Rico Danger (pronounced "DON-gur") doesn't have a life outside of "school, work, and sleep" because she pulls 10-hour shifts at the Gas 'n' Go to help support her mom and nine-year-old brother. While at work one evening, she sells a lottery ticket that she later learns is a winner for a multimillion-dollar jackpot. Which of the lotto buyers could it have been: the middle-aged white guy who pays for his purchases with $50 bills? The cute elderly black lady with a light-up Christmas sweater? To find the winner and make sure they get their jackpot, Rico enlists the help of 18-year-old Alexander "Zan" Macklin, "varsity quarterback, all-around teen dream, and heir to the booty-paper throne" (his family owns a toilet paper company), who was also in the store that night. Zan and Rico's quest slowly moves their relationship beyond friendship, and Rico learns that, while money is a necessity, it doesn't necessarily buy happiness.

In Jackpot, Nic Stone (Dear Martin) excels at shedding light on low-income family struggles that aren't always obvious: Rico's mama won't apply for public assistance because "the stigma makes punches at her dignity"; Rico feels a "sense of unworthiness" whenever she's around Zan and "his nice clothes and... nice car." Stone also illustrates how the lack or excess of money can both offer freedom and restrict it. While having money would allow Rico a "normal high school experience," it keeps Zan from going to college ("a waste of four vital fiscal years," says his father). Smart, humorous and hopeful, Jackpot examines the effects of money and privilege on individual choice and relationships. --Lana Barnes, freelance reviewer and proofreader

When Celine flees Paris for New Orleans, leaving behind a terrible secret and her plans to design "gowns for the Parisian elite," she dreams of finding the city "filled with promise. And absolution." She's bound for the Ursuline convent, whose sisters will find her an "appropriate" husband. Celine tries to see her stay at the convent as a "newfound chance at life," but it's difficult to be excited when she, her friend Pippa and fellow convent resident Anabel are put to work peddling crafts to raise money for the parish orphanage. At least Celine's ability with "ruched silk and Alençon lace" allows her to contribute embroidered handkerchiefs to the wares.

On the trio's first day of peddling, "exquisite" Odette buys all of her handkerchiefs and asks Celine to make her a gown for Mardi Gras. At Odette's fitting, Celine encounters Sébastien, who is handsome in the way of "a prince from a dark fairytale," along with members of the dangerous and "otherworldly" Court of Lions. But, tragically, Anabel--who had been sent by the Mother Superior to follow Celine--turns up dead, and Celine and Pippa find themselves suspect. Until the murderer strikes again, that is, and appears to be targeting Celine.

Renée Ahdieh's (The Wrath and the Dawn) Celine is a strong, deeply conflicted character who attempts to balance society's confining roles for women with her own appetite for excitement. Bad-boy Sébastien, with his "inhuman" friends, is a suitable foil to Celine, and the vibrant city of New Orleans an evocative backdrop for this first in a darkly thrilling series. As the unnamed narrator points out to begin the story, "New Orleans is a city ruled by the dead." By The Beautiful's end, readers will believe it. --Lynn Becker, blogger and host of Book Talk, a monthly online discussion of children's books for SCBWI