"One, Two, Three" are the "triplet shorthand" names Mab, Monday and Mirabel Mitchell call each other in Laurie Frankel's (This Is How It Always Is) heartbreaking yet heartwarming novel of a town destroyed by chemical pollution and its fight for justice, led by an unforgettable family of heroines.

The 16-year-old Mitchell sisters were born to a newly widowed mother in the wake of Bison Chemical's poisoning of the town's water supply. "Everyone here has survived what happened here," Mirabel explains (via a device mounted on her wheelchair). Monday, who speaks but without contractions, says "the only people who did not die or leave were the ones who could not." Mab, who peppers her speech with SAT study words, notes that Bourne Memorial High School "limps, rolls and motors in." Their mother, Nora, has been tenaciously building a class-action lawsuit for 17 years, while holding multiple jobs (one as the town's much-needed therapist); her daughters have a "sister-pact" to aid her fight. When Bison announces it will reopen in the town, and a handsome, suave boy--the grandson of its founder--enrolls in school, the sisters are dazzled yet pragmatic: maybe he's the key to the evidence Nora needs.

The story unfolds in alternating chapters, told by One, Two and Three, emphasizing the whip-smart girls' distinctive voices, sharp humor and mutual (yet never sappy) affection. Frankel adds a quirky but credible supporting cast of Bourne citizens. All the way to a fast-paced and heroic climax, readers will be rooting for them. --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.

"Even before agreeing to leave this world hand-in-hand on 29 March 2020, Kay and Cyril Wilkinson had long embraced the commonplace romance that if one of them died, the other would soon follow." Kay and Cyril committed to this "modest proposal" in October 1991: to guarantee they die with dignity, they will commit suicide on Kay's 80th birthday.

In her 15th book, Lionel Shriver (The Motion of the Body Through Space) repeats the literary structure of her 2007 The Post-Birthday World, here writing 12 alternative storylines whose (literal) "endings" evoke widely varied emotions.

The title Should We Stay or Should We Go forecasts Cyril and Kay's ambivalence in the parallel universes Shriver creates. Likable, sympathetic characters (even though Cyril, as a doctor, secured the lethal stash of Seconal, the couple's vision was mutual), their personalities remain consistent throughout. Philosophical Kay ponders "what it means to be alive in the first place," while Cyril is "all brutal brass tacks" and pledges his final time on earth to defeating Brexit. One version features a slip-up, in which Kay "goes" while Cyril stays; in another scenario, Kay discovers a surprising post-Cyril life. One disconcerting episode has the Wilkinson children discovering the plan and enforcing a "house arrest," followed by relocation to the draconian Close of Day Cottages. Shriver's speculation extends to the political and technological: when "Retrogeritox" grants eternal youth, Kay eventually bemoans the passivity of "unbridled freedom." Alternatively, by the year 2039, migrants and anarchists overrun Great Britain, or asylum seekers enrich a peaceful, multicultural nation. Sometimes discomfiting, often hilarious, Kay and Cyril's 12 stories consistently reflect their mutual love and commitment. --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.

As she demonstrated in her 2014 short story collection, American Innovations, Rivka Galchen has a taste for the fantastic. She puts that talent to good use in her second adult novel, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, a vibrant, provocative story based on real events that astutely holds up life in a small town in 17th-century Europe as a mirror for the present day.

Galchen's novel is set in the duchy of Württemburg, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, just as the Thirty Years War is beginning. Most of its action takes place in the town of Leonberg, near Stuttgart, and focuses on the prosecution of Katharina Kepler, mother of famed mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, for witchcraft. When she's not tending to her cow, Chamomile, Katharina is a well-known presence in the community, noteworthy for her interest in herbal remedies and her sometimes cantankerous personality.

A claim by fellow townswoman Ursula Reinbold that Katharina served her a poisoned cup of wine provokes Katharina to file a slander suit that's soon met by a formal accusation of witchcraft against her. What follows is a Kafkaesque legal proceeding that at one point lands Katharina in prison, where she must pay the guards hired to watch her.

Like Maggie O'Farrell's prize-winning novel Hamnet, Galchen's story succeeds in infusing a work of historical fiction with a completely modern sensibility, all without sacrificing any of the story's fidelity to its source material. Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is a consistently entertaining novel that casts its own memorable spell. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Mystery lovers will likely have two persistent questions as they read this reissue of Mabel Seeley's lost treasure The Listening House, first published in 1938: 1) "Who's the killer?" and 2) "Why can't all fictional sleuths be as wonderful as Gwynne Dacres?"

Twenty-six-year-old divorcée Gwynne is between copywriting jobs when she moves into Mrs. Garr's lodging house in fictional Gilling City. On Gwynne's first night at the house, she awakens to the sensation "not of my own ears hearing sounds, but of other ears listening, of the house listening." While she has previously been accused of having an active imagination, she's not imagining the dead body that she finds at the bottom of an incline behind Mrs. Garr's place. The victim has been shot, and everything points to his having fallen or been pushed from Mrs. Garr's property. This won't be the last corpse associated with the house, and, sure enough, each of Gwynne's fellow lodgers has a motive for murder.

The Listening House is a corking good mystery abuzz with bon mots, snappy comebacks and sexual tension, calling to mind the best screwball comedies of the 1930s. With her novels, Seeley (1903-1991) introduced early examples of self-reliant female sleuths, and Gwynne is a paragon: she more than matches wits with the men working the case. Even more unusual for a female protagonist of her time, Gwynne has un-leading-lady-like looks and couldn't care less: "I'm short and stocky, as a girl with Scotch peasant ancestry has a right to be." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Tony Oppedisano was Frank Sinatra's road manager, boy Friday, minder, mentee, surrogate son and best friend. Two decades after Sinatra's death, Oppedisano has another role: he's "one of the last living experts" on the mythic singer, which makes his lovely remembrance, Sinatra and Me: In the Wee Small Hours, an invaluable record.

The author, who was born in Brooklyn in 1951, was thunderstruck upon meeting the singer in 1972: Oppedisano was a Sinatra fan and a musician devoted to the American songbook. The men found common ground as blue-eyed Italians whose fathers had discouraged their artistic ambitions, but the 1992 death of former club owner Jilly Rizzo, their mutual friend, led to a new level of closeness: "Over the two thousand nights and mornings that followed... Francis Albert and I talked." Those recollected conversations, supplemented with notes that Oppedisano took at the time, fuel Sinatra and Me, which is organized around themed chapters, as on Sinatra's love life, his famous friends, and--let the record show--"the fiction that Sinatra was a major player in the Mob."

Oppedisano doesn't gloss over his subject's flaws: Ol' Blue Eyes could be spineless when it came to his fourth and last wife, whose tussles with Sinatra's children the author had to mediate. But Oppedisano leads with Sinatra's virtues, especially his generosity and ahead-of-the-curve work to erase the color line in the entertainment industry. Sinatra and Me may leave readers longing for a friend like Frank; they'd be equally lucky to have one like Oppedisano. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Tiya Miles (The Dawn of Detroit; Ties that Bind), a professor of history at Harvard University, does a difficult task incomparably well in All that She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. With gentleness and historical acumen, Miles explores the history of this sack, and why it is important in larger terms as part of African American history.

In 1921, Ruth Middleton embroidered a sack that had belonged to her grandmother Ashley, listing what the sack originally contained. Her great-grandmother Rose, an enslaved woman, gave the sack to her daughter Ashley when the nine-year-old girl was sold away from her in 1850s South Carolina. Miles carefully researches the items mentioned in the embroidery: a dress, a handful of pecans, a lock of Rose's hair, "my Love always." Miles explores what these would have meant to both Ashley and Rose, and how Rose was doing her best to care for her daughter, even when the terrible system of chattel slavery attempted to thwart Rose's basic humanity.

Little is known about Rose or Ashley's early lives, but Miles has found many contemporary accounts to enlighten readers as to what may have gone on in the lives of enslaved women of that era. And she elucidates how a sack was specifically important. As Miles says, "African American things had little chance to last.... How could people who were property acquire and pass down property?" All that She Carried will transport readers to difficult times in American history, and make them think more carefully about all the physical goods they take for granted in their day-to-day lives. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson, Ariz.

Elinor Cleghorn offers an epic yet approachable social, cultural and scientific history of women's health in Unwell Women, tracing the sexism and racism seen in modern Western medicine from ancient times through the present day.

"We are taught that medicine is the art of solving our body's mysteries," Cleghorn writes in the introduction. "And we expect medicine, as a science, to uphold the principles of evidence and impartiality." But, as she shows over the following chapters, medicine is anything but impartial, steeped as it is in social and cultural histories. From its earliest recorded days in ancient Greek texts, medicine has both inherited and reinforced the socially constructed gender binary, falsely reducing womanhood to a person's "capacity--and duty--to reproduce."

Drawing on extensive research, Cleghorn reveals medicine's long history of misdiagnosing--and mistreating--women, with sections on ancient and medieval times, the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the mid-20th century to today. The resulting tome is massive in scope, but in Cleghorn's expert hands, this long history does not feel unwieldy. Each chapter carries clearly into the next, as Cleghorn peels back the layers upon layers of misogyny and sexism baked into medical concepts of "unwell women"--and the corresponding "treatment" options that often did, and do, more harm than good. Throughout, she also acknowledges the depth of racism inherent in the already sexist system, calling out the horrors inflicted on enslaved Black women in the United States in the name of research, for example.

Unwell Women is a powerful and necessary work of social and cultural history. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

The 30 poems of John James included in The Milk Hours are haunted in one way or another; they carefully and soberly take account of what it means to be aware of the natural world, and the inherent cost of that knowledge. It's no wonder "Le Moribond" nods to French songwriter Jacques Brel--both James and Brel write works that are given over to death and the decay that follows it. However, James never treats death as something to be longed for, or as a sick joke. The language he uses to describe the discovery of the bodies of animals and grief over lost parents is sober and considered. This is a writer who has found clarity and delivered it through the poetic form.

Life is here as well, uneasily cohabiting with the dead. The title poem of the collection, "The Milk Hours," grapples with James's new fatherhood in the context of his own long-gone father. Throughout the collection, history frames the present, whether in quotations from Plato or Walter Benjamin, or simply in memory. The inherent tension between these subjects--past and present, life and death--animates his work and breathes life into it. Regardless of theme, however, James is a poet of staggering lyricism, intricate without ever obscuring his intent. Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Milk Hours announces the arrival of a great new talent in American poetry. --C.M. Crockford, freelance reviewer

Natasha Trethewey, two-term United States Poet Laureate, forges a serious, poignant work of remembrance with Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir. Trethewey's mother, Gwen, is the focus of this book: the daughter's memories and what she's forgotten, and, pointedly, the mother's murder at the hands of her second ex-husband. The murder took place just off Memorial Drive in Atlanta, Ga.; the aptly named thoroughfare runs from downtown to Stone Mountain, monument to the Confederacy, "a lasting metaphor for the white mind of the South."

Trethewey is the daughter of an African American mother and a white Canadian father. Their marriage was illegal; she was born just before the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case that struck down laws banning interracial marriage. Memorial Drive begins with her upbringing in Mississippi with her doting extended maternal family, necessarily recounting her early understanding of race and racism. This happy period ends abruptly with mother and daughter's move to Atlanta, when Trethewey's parents divorce. Atlanta has its strengths, such as a vibrant African American community, but very quickly, Gwen meets the man who will become her second husband. From the beginning, Joel is a sinister figure. Twelve years later, 19-year-old Trethewey returns to Atlanta from college to clean out her mother's apartment after Joel brutally murders Gwen.

While this central event is harrowing, Memorial Drive does not focus only there. Trethewey ruminates on memory and forgetfulness in this compelling, gracefully and gorgeously rendered memoir, a Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2020. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Author David L. Harrison and illustrator Kate Cosgrove join forces again (And the Bullfrogs Sing) to celebrate dirt in this lyrical nonfiction picture book. Cheerful images bursting with color accompany 15 playful poems that explore the mysterious activities happening "below the roots where green grass grows,/ .../ where boulders rest and tree roots drink."

Harrison invites his audience to imagine riding a magic elevator down below the surface--an elevator Cosgrove ingeniously depicts as a tree, burrowing into the earth. On this trip, the book's creators explain that dirt is made with a mixture of rock, root, dead things, insects, fungi and "at least a billion germs." A biosphere of life carries on thanks to this seemingly unpleasant concoction; Harrison's lively rhymes and Cosgrove's playful drawings make the insects appealing and fascinating: "Earthworm squiggles,/ earthworm squirms,/ earthworm dines on/ dirt and germs."

An extra-long portrait format emphasizes the below-ground setting and supplies Cosgrove with an ample canvas to tell each poem's story in her detailed colored-pencil and digital illustrations. There is a plethora of knowledge to absorb from Cosgrove's art, including such varied information as the patterns on the tortoise shell and the delicate webbing on the bumblebee's wings. The Dirt Book includes back matter that offers additional details, and a bibliography provides curious readers with resources for further exploration. This charming picture book is a splendid way to encourage an understanding and appreciation for nature and the often-unseen life that inhabits the planet alongside humans. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

Sixteen writers share candid, earnest stories about body diversity that celebrate people who are fat, who may also be queer, straight, cis or nonbinary, not to mention anxious, proud, rebellious, uncertain or joyous. In short: young human beings. Well, mostly. There's also a murderous mermaid in the mix.

Fat characters are placed front and center in Every Body Shines. They do things any human does: walk on the beach ("Letting Go" by Renée Watson); play softball ("Outside Pitch" by Kelly deVos); eat food ("Dupatta Diaries" by Nafiza Azad); and ride a school bus ("Unpleasant Surprises" by Linda Camacho). They also travel in space ("Weightless" by Sheena Boekweg) and rescue people from burning buildings ("Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire" by Rebecca Sky). Because that's the point of the anthology: people of any size, like people of any gender, ethnicity, personality or sexual orientation, can do and be whatever they want. Every author in this compilation has lived some version of their character's experiences, and their voices come through loud and proud, determined to make readers feel, as Your Fat Friend essayist Aubrey Gordon writes in the introduction, "understood, validated, seen, and celebrated.... My fat friends understood that fat people do everything thin people do--we're just not always given the space to do it." Here, in Every Body Shines, everybody is given the space to glow. After all, as editor Cassandra Newbould writes, "Readers, we get the happy endings, too. Don't forget it!" --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor