Ben Fountain (author of the story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara) has written a truly wondrous first novel in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. On the face of it, this is the story of Bravo Squad, eight brave survivors of a horrendous firefight with Iraqi insurgents who are being celebrated at Texas Stadium on Thanksgiving Day. They are feted, made part of the halftime show and projected on the Jumbotron--then dropped when their marginal utility has been served.

One subplot covers an agent's attempts to get Bravo a movie contract--$100,000 for each of them. It's an unimaginable amount of money for these kids to imagine. Another set piece is Bravo's visit to the owner's box--a glimpse of Valhalla for young men who have known nothing but privation, fear, mud and field rations for months. The panoply of riches on display, with huge tables of food and booze and incessant bonhomie and jingoistic blather, are all heady stuff for 19-year-old Billy Lynn and his comrades.

Billy is the centerpiece of the novel. The steady thrum that beats through every page is his realization that he will be back in Iraq in 36 hours. We see everything through the lens of his experience, at the center of which is the loss of his good friend, Shroom, in the firefight.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is a sad story about what war does to us, all of us. If it doesn't bring you to your knees, read it again. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

Casi never loses a case. The 24-year-old Manhattan public defender bobs and weaves his way through the intricacies and inanities of the New York legal system as nimbly as a lightweight champ, scoring plea bargains and dismissals for a long list of drug offenders, petit larcenists and immigrants selling hotdogs without a license. Despite his talent, Casi's life is far from ideal. At work, he faces circular and surreal discussions with clients and judges as well as the passionate but illogical philosophizing of his coworkers. In his private life, financial debt piles up and he struggles with inexplicable ear pain, while his preschool-aged niece frightens his family by ceasing to speak, and his neighbors begin bizarre psychological experiments involving The Honeymooners.

When a client turns police informant, Casi becomes privy to a $10-million drug deal. His coworker Dane, whose moral compass always points to himself as true north, approaches Casi with a scheme to snatch the dough, but Casi refuses to participate, until he finally loses a case and his entire world begins to unravel.

At nearly 700 pages, A Naked Singularity is no casual read, packed with Socratic dialogues, ruminations on the nature of the time-space continuum and legal satire. Nonetheless, it's a sometimes heartbreaking, always hilarious romp leading up to its ultimate heist. Challenging, addictively entertaining and not to be missed, A Naked Singularity heralds the arrival of a tremendous talent. --Jaclyn Fulwood, graduate assistant, University of Oklahoma Libraries

Fourteen-year-old Mattie Sullivan walks into private investigator Spenser's office looking to set the record straight on her mother's murder four years earlier. Mattie is convinced the wrong man was convicted, but the combination of Mattie's age, her mother's history of drug addiction and prostitution, and the evidence compiled against the convicted man all cause the police to turn a deaf ear. Spenser listens, takes the case and soon finds himself embroiled in a dark element of Boston no one's willing to talk about.

Ace Atkins has proven an exceptionally talented writer through his own fiction (Wicked City; The Ranger). With Lullaby, the first Spenser novel written by someone other than Robert B. Parker, Atkins opens himself up to a high level of scrutiny, but the results showcase his skills at a greater level than ever before. Taking the essence of everything that made Spenser one of crime fiction's iconic PIs, Atkins adds an arresting new chapter to the wisecracking, food-loving, former boxer's story. The sharp, witty and engaging dialogue echoes Parker's, and Atkins remains true to the characterizations of all the series' supporting cast--Susan, Hawk, Rita and Quirk--as well as its star. Atkins's sense of Boston is especially impressive; unlike Parker, Atkins is not a native, but that doesn't impair his ability to give the city as much life as any of the characters.

Taking on the challenge of continuing the much-loved Spenser series is a daunting task. Ace Atkins responds with a knock-out punch in round one. Parker would most definitely approve.  --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

Alison Bechdel's new graphic memoir, Are You My Mother?, confirms what anyone who has read Fun Home already knows: Bechdel is the premier master of graphic comic narrative. Having explored her father's secret gayness and suicide in her first memoir, this second volume takes on her sometimes chilly, smart and ambiguous mother--a poet who gave up her art for love, an actress and a housewife with three children.

As the reader jumps backward and forward in time, Bechdel relentlessly explores her relationship with her mother, peeling back the layers of the onion in a visually exhilarating manner. Her double-page spread of five old photographs of mother and child spread on a desktop is a mini-masterpiece of subtle emotional depths with a dramatic trajectory from first snapshot to last. She masterfully sets up a sequence where she hangs up on her mother and then breaks down crying, perfectly arranged graphically for maximum impact--you'll gasp at the expertly delineated pain.

On one level Are You My Mother? is a psychoanalytic plunge into the mystery of that intimate bond between mother and child. Each of the seven chapters begins with a hauntingly visualized dream sequence expressing one of Bechdel's anxieties or repressed emotions about her complex, elusive parent. She taps into the universality of the mother experience with extraordinary revelations, engaging the thoughtful reader with her insights, using comic book tools to take you to terrifying places. Together, Bechdel's memoirs form one of the most detailed, entertaining and harrowingly honest portraits of parents in gay literature. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle

When Dr. Victoria Sweet began working at Laguna Honda, she knew the hospital's monastic turrets and arches, peeling paint and lively aviary distinguished it from its gleaming modern counterparts. But Laguna Honda wasn't just a hospital: it was an almshouse, with its roots in the medieval French "Hôtel-Dieu"--God's hotel. Populated with the poor and homeless, the ill and addicted, Laguna Honda was at once hospital, shelter, rehabilitation clinic and halfway house.

"Laguna Honda is a gift," a colleague told Sweet during her first week of work. But Sweet quickly learned it wasn't just the building, high on a San Francisco hill, that was special. As she witnessed a remarkable spectrum of resilience and defeat in Laguna Honda's open wards, Sweet came to understand that it was the hospital's inspirational patients, caring staff and slow, healing pace that made it unlike any other.

Part professional memoir, part meditation on the nature of medicine and part argument for a dramatic reframing of health care, God's Hotel is the story of Sweet's 20-year tenure at the hospital. Sweet, also an expert on medieval healer and mystic Hildegard of Bingen, merges modern training with her study of Hildegard's "slow medicine," a practice of intuitive observation that is striking in its effectiveness and in its opposition to the impersonal efficiency of modern healthcare.

But modernity eventually reaches Laguna Honda, and Sweet must negotiate the inevitable challenges and changes it brings. Still, the hospital remains "God's hotel"--and Sweet's book is a moving tribute to the place it was, and is. --Hannah Calkins, Unpunished Vice

Poet and essayist Judith Kitchen opens a door into her past with short vignettes of family life in Half in Shade. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but when Kitchen delves into boxes of inherited family photographs and scrapbooks, she discovers that more words would have been useful in deciphering the who and the why behind each picture. Using her skills as an observant writer, she examines each black-and-white photograph from edge to edge, but can only partially decipher the context behind each image. She yearns for more information to understand the full significance of the time, the people and the places. For instance, in one snapshot of nine women hanging off the running boards, roof and rumble seat of an old car, Kitchen questions why the message written on the back says "note car," instead of a list of the women.

Kitchen opens windows of speculation with her minute inspection, especially with those photographs that could be of her mother. Was she really so full of spunk, with such a "sense of play?" Kitchen remembers her as "a chide. A disappointment. A silence at the core." When Kitchen is diagnosed with cancer, she questions her own existence and searches for deeper meanings in the photos and journal entries written by her teenage mother; anything to help link the past with her current condition. Kitchen's ruminations linger long after Half in Shade is finished, leaving readers to question how much we really know about the people who become our parents. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Behind the high-blown, overwrought classical French style of Albert Cohen's Book of My Mother lurks an inconsolable son grieving over his mother's death. "My mother had no me. She had a son," says Cohen, and the subject of his bittersweet memoir is, in some ways, the stereotypical Jewish mother: urging her son to go to synagogue once in a while just for her, suggesting some nice, quiet girls that the rabbi recommends, quizzing her son if he's been eating the Unmentionable (pork), then stopping him from answering: "Don't tell me--I don't want to know."

Though laughter and drolleries ripple through this little elegy, behind it burns a son's aching, unhealing regret for every careless selfishness or neglect. Albert Cohen at the age of five came to Marseilles from the Greek island of Corfu, grew up in France, and ultimately became a Swiss citizen, living in Geneva, where his mother visited him until her death. Strangely intimate, playfully classical, his little book is Cohen's therapy, its creation his comfort in the face of her loss, the healing joy in the act of writing.

The utter sweetness of his recorded memories is somehow a result of the exquisite sadness behind the words, the finality of their permanent separation. That anything so sad can also be witty and sublimely comic makes la mère Cohen into a triumph of literature with her curly hair, large nose, small hat, swollen ankles and magnificent eyes. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle

Many of us are already well-versed in the how-tos of wedding planning, from the purchase of the dress to the color of ribbons that will wrap the bouquet stems. There are hundreds of books to guide brides through the stress-inducing, mother-in-law-ridden, over-pressured world of weddings, but what comes after the party--when all the guests have left, and the newlyweds are left alone with each other and a boatload of gifts to unwrap and thank-yous to write?

This is the question Kim Perel and Wendy Sherman ask, and aim to answer, in Wedding Cake for Breakfast, a collection of essays about the first year of marriage. Their 23 contributors--including bestselling authors like Joshilyn Jackson and Jill Kargman--leave no stone unturned in exploring those first 365 days, with all of the hope and joy and difficulties they can bring. The stories represent a range of experiences, from the doubts that come with such a lifelong commitment to the humorous tale of spending a honeymoon without luggage, from the loneliness of a newlywed who has lost her parents to the joy of two newlyweds receiving the unexpected (but welcome) news of their first child.

All of the stories are written by women, which can make the collection feel a little one-sided. Ultimately, however, Wedding Cake for Breakfast proves a delight to read, whether you are newly engaged, newlywed or just celebrated your 50th anniversary. Or, of course, if you are just looking for a gift for your next bridal shower. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Narrated by high school senior Rosaline Caplet, this emotionally authentic debut novel inspired by Romeo and Juliet will keep readers engrossed.

Cousins Rose and Juliet Caplet, along with neighbor Rob Monteg, were inseparable as children. But 10 years ago, Rosie's father and his brother, Juliet's father, fell out. Rose recalls a Christmas visit that ended in a scene--horrifying to a seven-year-old--in which Juliet snapped off the head of Rose's brand-new Barbie. Now Juliet is back in town for Rose's senior year, and ups the stakes: she sets her sights on Rose's newly minted romance with Rob.

Serle gets the nuances just right. The optimism of new love, the concerned friends after Rose's heartbreak, and the dynamics of a triangle--not just the love triangle between Rose, Rob and Juliet, but also the friendship triangle of Rose and her two female best friends. Teens will appreciate Rose's anxiety in risking a best friendship to try out romance. So to have Juliet show up and quash it feels doubly cruel. Readers will also sense a more than platonic interest in Rose from offbeat Len, who delivers some of the novel's pearls of wisdom: "Sometimes the hardest part about letting someone go is realizing you were never meant to have them," he tells Rose.

With Serle's credible dialogue and snappy pace, no previous experience with the classic is required to thoroughly enjoy this contemporary novel. Readers may know the outcome from Shakespeare, but the real drama here plays out as the evolution of Rosaline's thinking. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness