The Children of Red Peak is an unsettling, frighteningly ambiguous horror novel about a deadly cult and its traumatized survivors. As children, David Young, Deacon Price and Beth Harris were members of a religious group called the Family of the Living Spirit. In an event reminiscent of the mass suicide at Jonestown, the group self-destructed in extraordinarily bloody fashion near a mountain called Red Peak. Craig DiLouie, Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of One of Us, takes cues from Stephen King's It in his book's structure: DiLouie alternates between the past and the present, relating the events leading up to the cult's implosion from the perspective of his characters as children and jumping forward to their lives as traumatized adults.

The survivors are brought together by the sudden death of one of their number, eventually setting in motion a plan to return to Red Peak. Their trauma is compounded by lingering mysteries that they hope to settle: How did the cult members' bodies disappear? Was the pillar of fire that they saw a mass hallucination? DiLouie uses these mysteries to dwell on the cult's ambiguities: some of the survivors don't even agree that the Family of the Living Spirit was a cult.

The Children of Red Peak takes the desire to find meaning and the yearning for something beyond ourselves very seriously. The central question of the book is how to reconcile that yearning with its sometimes destructive results. The characters return to Red Peak hoping to make sense of these contradictions. The answers they find might be even more frightening than the questions. --Hank Stephenson, the Sun magazine, manuscript reader

Mumbai-born debut novelist Nev March raises the specter of a real unsolved case in this action-filled and richly detailed historical mystery, set in Bombay, India, in 1892, under British colonial rule. 

When two young ladies from a prominent Parsee household fall to their deaths from a university clocktower, an investigation fails to prove whether the tragedy stemmed from a suicide pact or foul play. Anglo-Indian Captain James Agnihotri of the Fourteenth Light Dragoons, convalescing in a Poona military hospital after Afghan soldiers ambushed his regiment in Kirachi, finds the case as captivating as the new Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of the Four.

After Adi Framji, the husband of one victim and brother of the other, publishes an impassioned letter in the Chronicle of India insisting neither woman would have killed herself, Jim offers his services as a novice investigator to the bereaved family to ease "the sharp burn of his grief." He believes that by using the Holmesian strategies of disguise and deduction, he can ferret out the truth behind the deaths.

March has created a likable, honorable sleuth whose humble origins and instinctive kindness make spending time with him a pleasure. A strong case of survivor's guilt and residual wartime trauma play counterpoint to his genial personality. The author sets an immersive scene, creating a detailed representation of the vibrant religious and cultural tapestry of Colonial India and the rigidly structured interlocking hierarchy of British rule and the Indian caste system. The story's resolution paves the way for further adventures, which March's readers will surely consider a welcome possibility. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

The arrival of a strange man and an even stranger vehicle upend an isolated community in Jonathan Lethem's post-apocalyptic Maine.

Sandy Duplessis was a successful Hollywood screenwriter whose life, along with everyone else's, was turned upside down by an event called the Arrest. "Without warning except every warning possible it had come." The Internet, television, phones, guns and all other forms of technology stopped working, and wherever people were at the time of the Arrest became their permanent homes. For Duplessis, his post-Arrest life in rural Maine includes a new name, Journeyman, and jobs delivering food from his sister Maddie's farm and helping the town butcher ducks.

Then comes a shocking arrival: a self-powered vehicle called the Blue Streak. The enormous machine, fueled by a nuclear reactor and capable of traveling over land and water, contains an even bigger surprise: Peter Todbaum, Journeyman's former writing partner, who drove the Blue Streak from Los Angeles to Maine. Bearing stories of his travels across the country, Todbaum holds court for the town's wary residents. For Journeyman and Maddie--who was romantically involved with Todbaum pre-Arrest but fled and never looked back--Todbaum's presence is worrying. What does he want?

Lethem (The Feral Detective) is a versatile writer known for presenting unusual perspectives, and The Arrest lives up to that reputation. And while Lethem's post-apocalyptic world is not exactly a dystopia--organic food and marijuana are not in short supply--low-level fear still permeates daily life. Brimming with offbeat characters and a distinct vision for a calamitous future, The Arrest is speculative fiction at its most intriguing. --Frank Brasile, librarian

The bonds among young women working at the mill in Lowell, Mass., are strengthened by a little witchcraft in this touching, fable-like historical fantasy.

The Factory Witches of Lowell by C.S. Malerich (Fire & Locket) has a simple but intriguing premise: increased costs for their board are the last straw for the young women working in the historic mill town. Their leader, Judith, turns for support to Hannah, who has a talent for witchcraft, in order to bind the workers to their promise to strike until their demands are met. As the strike drags on, the owners search for strike breakers and Hannah's health declines from years of working in unsafe conditions. Judith and Hannah must invent new ways to wield magic to shift the balance of power toward the striking workers, while also coming to recognize their feelings for each other.

This is a slight but thoroughly enjoyable book. There are hints at how magic works in the world on a larger scale, and how it is used to bind enslaved people on the auction block, but the attention remains focused on this strike and these two women. With underdogs fighting for their fair share and the beginnings of young love, this is an adult fairy tale that literally presents the mystical way in which women's work and power have often been portrayed throughout history. Malerich could easily tell stories in this world on a broader scale, but the glimpse readers get of it here is a treat. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

Before tucking into the cranberry sauce and turkey, readers may wish to pause and appreciate Sarah Josepha Hale. The New Hampshire author, born in 1788, campaigned for decades to have an official national day of gratitude.

In We Gather Together: A Nation Divided, a President in Turmoil, and a Historic Campaign to Embrace Gratitude and Grace, Denise Kiernan (The Girls of Atomic City) presents both the story of Thanksgiving, chock-full of historic tidbits, and well-documented support for the benefits of gratitude. Sarah Hale, widowed mother of five and dynamic "editress" of the esteemed and trend-setting Godey's Lady's Book magazine, embraced two causes: the education of women and the creation of an official day for the nation to express gratitude. "Festivals, rituals and celebrations" of thanks "permeates cultures," Kiernan writes. But "there was no 'first' " Thanksgiving, she notes, debunking numerous versions of the romanticized "Pilgrim-and-Indian" feast. Traditions evolved. Jefferson Davis set the Confederacy celebration for a week before Lincoln's pick; successive presidents declined to proclaim a holiday, decreeing annual dates. Retailers pressured President Franklin Roosevelt to name a day that would maximize the holiday shopping season, and in 1941 Congress proclaimed the fourth Thursday in November a legal holiday.

Through wars, expansionist policies displacing Indigenous people, the 1918 pandemic (Kiernan notes the irony of We Gather Together publishing in the year of "social distancing") and more--Thanksgiving survived. Kiernan hopes Hale's vision--to "exhibit the best of ourselves"--will thrive, through "appreciation. Inclusion. Compassion. Celebration. Charity." --Cheryl McKeon, bookseller, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.

Although most histories of those who escaped slavery in the United States focus on people fleeing north to free states or across the Canadian border, between 3,000 and 5,000 enslaved people from the south-central U.S. claimed their freedom in Mexico. In South to Freedom, history professor and debut author Alice L. Baumgartner combines their personal stories with a study of policies relating to slavery in Mexico, the Republic of Texas and the United States that provides new insight into how the progress toward the American Civil War was influenced internationally.

Much of the book focuses on what was the Mexican province of Tejas at the time this period begins. Many Anglo-American immigrants from slave states expected to be able to bring enslaved people with them, in spite of longstanding policies granting more protection to fugitive slaves than in the United States or even Canada. Some of this material is familiar in broad strokes to those acquainted with how Texas became part of the United States, but Baumgartner examines the details of the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, in which large amounts of territory where slavery was already banned were ceded to the United States. She convincingly builds a case that deserves to be studied at a level with the Missouri Compromise and Bleeding Kansas in the origins of the American Civil War. All United States history buffs would do well to read this book and consider Baumgartner's commentary on why this part of North American history is so often ignored. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend co-creator and star Rachel Bloom delivers quirky wisdom and plentiful laughs via energetic, heartfelt entries about her show-business journey.

Bloom structures her book based on how she differs from "normal people." She was bullied for oversharing and for her "Chuck E. Cheese" fashion sense in school, and her OCD manifested when she tasted her poop at age 9. In relationships--recalled via a fairytale-style entry--she believed she deserved sexual harassment. A musical number, a Harry Potter fan fiction and a satirical casting call relay the high-octane craziness she found in drama club as well as her experiences with "asshole guys" in sketch comedy and the "pompous yet cripplingly insecure" straight men of musical theater. These agonies of love inspired the music video that laid the groundwork for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's creation. But the night before pitches, Bloom's obsessive thoughts resurfaced, triggering insomnia--a cycle that would repeat regularly over five years.

By deviating from a typical narrative--she includes childhood diary pages, erotic poems, an interview between her 13- and 23-year-old selves, a schedule detailing her bathroom breaks, and a fantasized travelogue about defeating Internet trolls--Bloom inserts readers directly into key life moments. As she discusses overcoming anxiety, imposter syndrome and misogyny, she balances serious topics with her signature twisted humor. Her story, infused with compassion and hilarious acidity, will resonate with fans and the unacquainted. I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are is a work of silly genius touting the upsides of eccentricity. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer

Here's an idea: instead of publishing a cool book of archival interviews with several dozen famous women in music, publish an even cooler book of their insights organized around themed chapters (e.g., "Motherhood," "Sex," "Drugs"). This bright idea comes from pioneering rock journalist Lisa Robinson, whose Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Girls: Women, Music and Fame is part music history, part social history and no part minced words.

Robinson (There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll) began editing rock magazines in the 1970s, when "rock music journalism, just like rock music, was a boys' club." She spent more than four decades racking up interviews with heavy hitters, among them Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, Beyoncé and Adele. Some of the challenges that Robinson's subjects face are common to male musicians as well--how to be a good parent despite a rigorous tour schedule, say--but Robinson is attuned to the different expectations placed on women. In the 1980s, Joan Jett relayed to Robinson what radio stations were telling her: "We can't play you on the radio.... We're playing a woman already. We're playing Pat Benatar."

Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Girls touches on some of the positive changes Robinson has seen in the business, especially the fact that women, having all too often been exploited by their male managers, are increasingly taking charge of their own careers. Another improvement: there are many more female rock journalists out there now, although it's hard to imagine one as winningly blunt, unpretentious and on-target as Robinson. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Jerry Pinkney (The Lion and the Mouse) has mastered the art of the picture book rethink, and he comes through again in The Little Mermaid. Somewhere between Hans Christian Andersen's turmoil and Disney's pageantry, Pinkney has found the sweet spot, where one of folklore's most famous deals with the devil is struck in the name of not love but friendship.

Pinkney's Melody, the youngest of the Sea King's four daughters, would rather explore sunken ships than sing in a mermaid choir with her sisters. In one wreck she finds a figurine that "looked a bit like her, but for two cloth sticks where its tail should be"; it fuels her sense of wonder about "the world beyond her home." Melody's sisters remind her that their father forbids them to stray: he fears that the Sea Witch, who has been cast out of the kingdom, will seek revenge on his family.

The king entrusts an old sea turtle to be Melody's minder, and when it surfaces for a gulp of air, Melody tags along. She's beguiled by a girl on the beach with "two sticklike legs" who throws a genial wave her way. After Melody reluctantly returns to her father's kingdom, a sea snake cajoles her: "So sad.... Here you are, stuck undersea... but the Sea Witch can help."

Pinkney's The Little Mermaid is a princeless endeavor; it's the prospect of friendship that inspires Melody to trade her voice for a pair of legs. As he did in Little Red Riding Hood, Pinkney, working in pencil and watercolor, has given a fairy tale's traditionally white cast brown skin, and the rich umber hues round out his jewel-toned underwater color scheme and sun-kissed seaside palette. Readers are lucky: unlike Melody, they needn't choose between the two shimmery, color-drenched worlds. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author

With Shaun Tan's The Arrival (2007) and Cicada (2019), he has proved himself to be an author/illustrator acutely sympathetic to the immigrant experience. Eric, a breakout story from Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia, takes an inverse but no less compassionate approach to the subject--it looks at a visitor through the eyes of a kid from the host country--and the picture-book format gives Tan's masterful artwork the room it deserves, allowing the story to be accessible to young readers.

"Some years ago we had a foreign exchange student come to live with us," reports Eric's narrator, who goes unnamed and unseen. Much about Eric is perplexing--for one thing, he enjoys inspecting small objects (a button, a bottle cap) more than he enjoys his host's carefully planned sightseeing expeditions. What apparently doesn't perplex the narrator, who says nothing on the subject, is the fact that Eric is diminutive enough to sleep in a teacup (and does) and has a black tripointed head, triangular body and stick limbs. Presumably, the narrator has been tipped off that "foreigners" may look a little different.

When Eric unceremoniously departs, his host family frets ("Did Eric seem upset?") until they discover the thank-you gift he has left behind: an indoor gardenscape in which 30-odd bottle caps and other wee objects hold luminous little plants--the only injections of color in Tan's meticulous graphite art. The narrator's well-meaning mother trundles out her fallback line--"It must be a cultural thing"--but by now the reader has likely come to understand that it's an Eric thing. Eric is a cunning reminder of the uniqueness of every individual, "foreign" or otherwise. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author