Jack Wang, a Vancouver, B.C., transplant who teaches at New York's Ithaca College, confirmed he could write exquisite short fiction in his debut collection, We Two Alone. He underscores that prowess in a gloriously absorbing first novel, The Riveter.

Six months after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Josiah Chang arrives in Vancouver. He's his family's fourth Canadian generation--his "great-grandfather had been a forty-niner, but a poor one"--and yet Josiah can't call himself Canadian, can't serve the country of his birth. "At the start of the war, Chinese had been allowed to enlist" until "Victoria and Ottawa realized that the Chinese might expect something in return, namely citizenship." Josiah's Chinese features mean the rooming house claims no vacancies, leaving him to set up camp in the wild woods. At least he's "fighting the good fight" as a shipyard riveter.

When he falls in love--requitedly--with co-worker Poppy Miller, marriage isn't an option because antimiscegenation laws will render Poppy stateless. Racist, impetuous violence causes Josiah to flee east. In Toronto, despite his noncitizenship, the local recruiting station agrees he can risk his life as a paratrooper. "Your people are rather... meek," the army psychiatrist posits, but Josiah's--and his comrades'--valor never wanes. His dream of returning to Poppy is what will keep him alive.

Wang is a potent storyteller, unblinkingly combining horrific history with an aching love story. He intimately intertwines the worst and best of humanity as his narrative seamlessly moves back and forth between Canada and various European fronts. Astoundingly accomplished, Wang's virtuoso novel haunts with poignance and grace. --Terry Hong

The River Has Roots is an impressive first solo novella from Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Amal El-Mohtar (This Is How You Lose the Time War, with Max Gladstone), taking readers to the very edge of Faerie in a gripping tale of love, sisterhood, and those who would break those many and varied bonds.

The river Liss winds from Arcadia to the town of Thistleford, where sisters Esther and Ysabel are charged with tending to the enchanted willows on the edge of the realm. They sing to the trees, thanking them for their magic. Esther and Ysabel are as inseparable as they are different, and their two voices harmonize with a magic all their own. But when Esther catches the attentions of two suitors, her choice will have consequences for both sisters' lives.

The character-driven narrative presents snapshots of Esther's and Ysabel's lives in nonlinear ways. El-Mohtar emphasizes who the two are as people and who they are to each other, despite whoever else might cross into their lives. This reworking of a 17th-century murder ballad about two inseparable sisters includes echoes of "Tam Lin."

El-Mohtar has crafted a haunting romance that's as transformative as the river that runs through her characters' lives. The poetic nature of her language brings the world of the novella to life, its rhythms drawing readers further and deeper in. The River Has Roots is sure to become a fantasy favorite with appeal across a wide range of readers, and could even be an accessible, engaging introduction to those new to the genre. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

In her remarkable novels that confront the realities of climate change and environmental destruction, Charlotte McConaghy (Once There Were Wolves) insists on hope despite the darkness. With Wild Dark Shore, the talented Australian writer takes readers to the fictional Shearwater Island. Shearwater is a haunted place, recently home to a research station, a global seed vault, and the Salt family, who serve as caretakers of the island. With rising tides reclaiming the land, Shearwater has been decommissioned, and Dominic and his three children are preparing for departure when 17-year-old Fen pulls from the water a nearly-drowned woman named Rowan.

Rowan's arrival changes everything, especially coming at a moment already full of uncertainty and loss for the Salt family. The narrative alternates between characters, deepening and complicating the reader's understanding of what happened in the days before Rowan washed up on shore. As she bonds with this unusual family, Rowan must reckon with her past and consider alternatives to a desolate future.

Her grim assumptions are warranted in the face of fire, drought, and species loss. But nine-year-old Orly, with his encyclopedic knowledge of the seeds in the vault and the life they promise, becomes the beacon of hope that might prompt more to adopt Dominic's stance: "Maybe we will drown or burn or starve one day, but until then we get to choose if we'll add to that destruction or if we will care for each other." Wild Dark Shore asks readers to keep making that choice, to note, as eldest child Raff does: "There is such peril in loving things at all, and... he just keeps on doing it." --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian

I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong (Flux) is a funny, bittersweet, heartwarming story about family, love, and making every minute count.

Readers first meet Jack Jr. in what he is slow to realize is a hospital room. He wakes up intubated and gagging. His nurse is thrown into a full panic: Jack Jr. has been in a coma for 23 months and was not expected to regain consciousness.

No one will answer when he asks for his husband. Jack Jr. has missed his 30th birthday and the first 18 months or so of the Covid-19 pandemic. A few weeks into this remarkable recovery, he returns home--not to his Manhattan apartment, but to his father's home in New Jersey. He goes back to the family business, a struggling Korean-Japanese sushi restaurant, which was once meant to be his life's work and which he has not seen in 12 years. Jack Jr. has lost everything, and he finds himself in an unfamiliar, masked world.

Jack Jr.'s painful new challenges are wrenching, but his love for his wacky family, and theirs for him, are unmistakable throughout. Alongside the flavors of carefully prepared nigiri, dak juk, and plenty of pork belly, humor and off-kilter love shine brightly in this tale of making the most of one's own time. While recovering from his physical injuries, Jack Jr. must also navigate old fractures with a family he hasn't seen in years, let go of a relationship with no closure, and remain open to a surprisingly promising future. The story winds up delightfully warm and soothing, for all the bumps along the way. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia

An archivist with the Getty Museum in Los Angeles becomes ensnared in a dubious government surveillance program in Laila Lalami's The Dream Hotel. Set several decades in the future, Lalami's bracingly resonant drama strikes at the very heart of the consumer privacy debate and the freedoms people forfeit to data-hungry conglomerates when we use their products.

Moroccan-American art historian Sara Hussein and her husband, Elias, are the parents of twin infants. When the twins were born, chronically sleep-deprived Sara signed up for a popular "Dreamsaver" implant that helped her get deep restorative sleep in just a few hours. The terms of service allow Dreamsaver access to users' dreams but, like most customers, especially exhausted new moms, Sara ignored the fine print.

The Dream Hotel opens at Madison, a remote women-only "retention" facility in Ellis, Calif. Sara is being held for observation under the jurisdiction of the Risk Assessment Administration, an agency tasked with reducing violent crime. It relies on algorithms to target individuals at risk of harming others. The RAA reviewed Sara's dream data after she arrived home from a business trip to London and determined that she was a threat to Elias. It matters not that a person has no control over their dreams. The RAA cares "only about the data, not about the truth."

Lalami (Conditional Citizens; The Other Americans) imbues her propulsive narrative with a sense of foreboding, and Sara's voice is captivating. Ideal for fans of Hum by Helen Phillips, The Dream Hotel is part of an emerging genre of literature exploring motherhood in an age of unforgiving, digitally enhanced surveillance. --Shahina Piyarali

Penny Haw's moving novel Follow Me to Africa imagines pioneering British archeologist Mary Leakey at the beginning and end of her career. In dual narratives, Haw explores the 1930s genesis of Leakey's career and marriage, as well as her tentative friendship, much later, with a struggling teenage girl named Grace, and their attempts to care for Lisa, a wounded cheetah who needs their help.

In 1983, Grace grieves her mother's death and struggles to interact with the father she resents, who has brought Grace to spend a summer at rugged, beautiful Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where Leakey has lived and worked for many years. Intrigued by her interactions with Lisa and determined to help the cheetah, Grace soon realizes she has much to learn--about wild animals and the world beyond her cramped childhood in England.

Haw (The Woman at the Wheel) paints a sensitive portrait of a woman dedicated to her chosen career and her complex relationship with her brilliant, mercurial husband and fellow archeologist, Louis. Leakey grows from a shy young illustrator into a confident woman determined to forge her own path, no matter how far she has to travel to do it. Together, Leakey and Grace care for Lisa, and Leakey shares pieces of her experiences with Grace, empowering the girl to begin to imagine a life in which she, too, could be responsible for her own future.

Set against the harsh beauty of the Serengeti, Follow Me to Africa is a fascinating fictional account of a real-life trailblazer and a thoughtful depiction of multigenerational friendship. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Brianna Labuskes explores union politics, gender and power dynamics, and the role of artists in society in her sweeping third historical novel, The Boxcar Librarian. Through the lives of three determined women whose paths cross in Montana during the Great Depression, Labuskes (The Librarian of Burned Books) examines the power of stories to move people, provide a balm for losses, and inspire a new way of living.

Labuskes begins her narrative in 1936 with Millie Lang, who travels to Montana to unravel a mystery: the Federal Writers Project's Missoula staff submitted a box of blank forms and near-gibberish essays for the FWP's series of U.S. travel guides. Twelve years earlier, in 1924, Alice Monroe creates a library housed in a train boxcar to deliver books to workers and their families in Montana's far-flung mining camps. Colette Durand, who spent her life listening to her miner father, Claude, quote Shakespeare and fight for his fellow miners' rights, applies for the librarian position. She convinces Alice to come along on the boxcar library's inaugural journey, which brings life-changing events for both women.

In 1936, Millie is eager to recover the missing travel guide material. As she travels around Montana with her coworkers, Millie uncovers long-buried secrets related not only to Alice and Colette's stint as librarians, but to the work of unions and to Claude Durand's murder.

Labuskes paints a dynamic portrait of a rough-and-tumble Montana, but her focus is on individuals. With engaging characters and a layered plot that combines political events, personal journeys, and a love of literature, The Boxcar Librarian is a treat for history fans and book lovers. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Nesting is a heartbreaking read that ultimately brings healing. Talented short story author Roisín O'Donnell writes with assurance in a first novel that's gorgeous, moving, and thought provoking.

Ciara is trapped in an abusive relationship. Her husband, Ryan, has isolated her, edged her out of the workforce, and cut her off from financial independence. When she becomes pregnant with a third child, she reaches a breaking point and walks out, along with her two young daughters, on a sudden impulse, despite how impossible it seems. But when she tries to fly from Ireland to England to stay with her mother, she discovers she can't: Ryan has put a hold on their daughters' passports, and she doesn't have his written permission to leave the country with them.

Cut off from support, Ciara falls into a vividly rendered and deeply broken system of temporary housing in hotels. She struggles to navigate the byzantine systems that stand between her and a safe home for her and her children. Through it all, O'Donnell beautifully writes Ciara's internal struggles as she tries to escape the tide of self-hatred Ryan has been systematically inducing in her: "Her own internal monologue, erased. Replaced by his voice."

Nesting is profoundly affecting--a story of survival and recovery that exposes the dysfunctional systems that fail to care for those desperately in need. At its heart is a woman trying to reclaim her identity while being swept up by the currents of father's rights and a housing crisis. It's the kind of novel that will break readers' hearts but ultimately offers them hope and healing. --Carol Caley, writer

Saint of the Narrows Street emerges as more than "an oddly named block" in William Boyle's exceptional epic about a working-class Brooklyn, N.Y, neighborhood whose generations of residents rarely leave. Boyle's lean prose depicts this "western edge of Gravesend" as a place of broken dreams and unwise choices, where "the terror of regret" festers.

Boyle's ambitious novel spans 18 years as violence, loss, and secrets rule the neighborhood. It opens in 1986, when 28-year-old Risa "feels old and worn out already" and regrets marrying Saverio "Sav" Franzone; her only joy is her eight-month-old son, Fab. Sav's brutality emerged quickly in their marriage. Risa never thought she could leave until the night he pulls a gun on her while she is holding Fab, then threatens her sister, Giulia. Trying to protect her sister, Risa unintentionally kills Sav when she hits him in the head with a cast-iron pan. The panicked Risa seeks out Sav's best friend, Christopher "Chooch" Gardini, who helps the sisters bury Sav. The three of them tell everyone that Sav took off--a rumor easily believed.

Risa, Giulia, and Chooch maintain their silence as the novel returns to them in 1991, 1998, and 2004. Risa dotes on Fab even as she begins to see, by 1998, that he has "trouble in his blood. His father breaking through in him," and he grows obsessed about what happened to Sav. Meanwhile, Boyle (City of Margins; The Lonely Witness) depicts how a murder-suicide, mobsters, a blackmailing priest, marriages, and deaths all affect the neighborhood, and the area itself changes due to real estate developers.

Boyle's sympathy and understanding for his damaged characters, accented by crisp dialogue, elevate the engrossing plot and show how a place shapes people. --Oline H. Cogdill, freelance reviewer

In Sophie Stava's stylish debut thriller, Count My Lies, truthfulness can be limiting, and for the two women at the center of the story, it's really not necessary.

In an upscale Brooklyn neighborhood populated with beautiful people, fancy private schools, and covetable brownstones, Sloane Caraway knows she is an outlier. She and her disabled mother live in a tiny rent-controlled apartment, the reality of their quiet, isolated existence wholly unsatisfying to the 30-something narrator. To make ends meet, Sloane works as a spa nail technician servicing the pampered matrons of Brooklyn. It's bad enough that this is her reality, but does she have to bore others with it?

While spending her lunch break reading in the local park, Sloane has the good fortune to cross paths with handsome Jay Lockhart and his adorable young daughter, Harper. Sloane's boundless capacity for inventing falsehoods surprises even herself, and before she knows it she has seamlessly insinuated herself into the Lockhart family and a friendship with Jay's gorgeous wife, Violet. Soon Sloane is a regular visitor to the Lockhart home, a nanny to Harper and a confidante to Violet. She is deeply attracted to Jay, flattered by his attention, but her loyalties remain with Violet. Sloane begins to copy Violet's style, her imitation made easier by the gifts her friend showers on her.

Stava's ingenious plot takes an unexpected turn when the story turns inside out. Whatever conclusions readers may have reached thus far, when it comes to falsehoods, Sloane is a mere amateur. Count My Lies features thrilling detours, idyllic settings and deeply flawed yet attractive personalities for whom telling the truth is strictly optional. --Shahina Piyarali

Kate Alice Marshall (What Lies in the Woods; No One Can Know) finds fresh angles within a common domestic-suspense premise--a young woman warily meeting her new boyfriend's megawealthy family--in her exciting thriller A Killing Cold.

Theodora "Theo" Scott and Connor Dalton are engaged, having fallen quickly and deeply in love after meeting only five months earlier. Now Connor wants Theo to spend two weeks over Christmas at Idlewood, his family's vast estate to which outsiders are seldom invited. Despite her feelings for Connor, there are aspects of Theo's past she hasn't revealed to him: she was adopted at age four, has lingering gaps in her childhood memories, doesn't know what her birth parents named her, and experienced a dark and violent episode as a teenager. Theo worries that staying at Idlewood will be overwhelming, particularly because she's been receiving anonymous text messages. Some warn her about being involved with Connor, while others threaten to expose her secrets. Connor's family's reaction to Theo is mixed, and some accuse her of being a gold digger. As Theo explores Idlewood, she begins to suspect she's been there before and has a connection to the Daltons.

Marshall bestows distinct personalities on each of the Daltons and their longtime caretaker, with the family dynamics propelling the plot. A sense of danger permeates Idlewood as Theo wonders how far the emotionally cold and entitled Daltons will go to protect themselves. Marshall ramps up the tension as she leads A Killing Cold through deliciously unsettling twists and turns. --Oline H. Cogdill, freelance reviewer

Poet and novelist Andrea Eames (The White Shadow) writes across genres and age groups, and A Harvest of Hearts is her first foray into cozy fantasy. Readers are sure to be hooked--snagged, even, like the victims of the sorceresses in this novel.

The beautiful sorceresses that visit Foss Butcher's sleepy village on the outskirts of the kingdom come with the intention to steal bits of people's hearts in exchange for the magic that is supposed to keep the kingdom safe. Despite their beauty and glamour, they remind Foss too much of everything that she is not, and so she is more resistant to being "snagged" (having her heart stolen) and unsympathetic to those who find themselves in that position.

But one day Sylvester, a sorcerer, appears--the first time that anyone in her village has seen a male magic-worker--and he accidentally snags Foss's heart. Angrily, she follows him to the city in the hopes of getting him to restore it. To prevent the distance from him from destroying her, she becomes his housekeeper in his magical house. In the process, she befriends his talking cat and stumbles upon secrets about the kingdom she could have never dreamed of.

Eames's earnest worldbuilding and engaging, sympathetic characters will charm readers. Foss's blunt honesty and rugged stubbornness bring a delightful frankness to the usual soft edges of the cozy fantasy genre. Eames's story has echoes of different fairy-tale retellings but in a wholly refreshing way that does not feel derivative. A Harvest of Hearts is a welcome addition to the fantasy landscape: comforting but with a bit of a bite. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

A wildlife biologist is dropped into an interstellar reproductive study in I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I'm Trapped in a Rom-Com, the first volume in a madcap sci-fi romance series by Kimberly Lemming. Lemming (That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Human) is known for her novels' over-the-top silly and sexy shenanigans, and this romp is no different.

The heroine, Dorothy Valentine, is filming warring meerkat clans when she and a lion she calls Toto are beamed up by aliens. They crash-land on an Earth-like planet, where the climate and some plants are familiar but the bright-pink T-Rex and hot alien men are new. After not one but two of the horned, tailed men start competing for Dory's attention, a small owl-like alien shoots them with darts containing a serum that triggers the men's mating bonds.

Dory didn't ask for any of this. Even if her new mates are extremely attractive and highly skilled, she is determined to find the head researcher in charge of the study, "punch him right in the face," and escape the billboard- and dinosaur-covered planet. What follows is a fast-burn romance with plenty of jokes about research funding, snack foods, and the importance of studying a habitat thoroughly before trying to re-create it. Plenty of action scenes and a nice sequel setup keep the plot moving.

Fans of Lemming's distinctive brand of humor, characters with specialized anatomy, and wacky but detailed world-building will be thrilled. --Suzanne Krohn, librarian and freelance reviewer

Rebecca Romney (Printer's Error) does some riveting detective work in Jane Austen's Bookshelf, an investigation into the women writers who made an impact on Austen--and why readers know so few of them. Along the way, she asks who gets to decide the canon, how does it evolve over time, and are readers themselves complicit?

Romney is not only an expert antiquarian book dealer and a passionate and knowledgeable reader, but also a marvelous writer. Her journey begins with the 1778 novel Evelina by Frances Burney, discovered on a house call to a collector like herself. Another title by Burney, Cecilia, appears in a passage from Northanger Abbey, a book that Romney has reread a number of times. So why hadn't Romney read Burney, or Ann Radcliffe, or Maria Edgeworth, all of whom are mentioned in that same passage? That passage gives Romney the outline for a new collection: Jane Austen's Bookshelf.

Assembling this collection's criteria (e.g., Austen's favorite women writers; which books and editions; condition; etc.), she notes, "A reader falls in love with the story in the book. A collector falls in love with the story of the book." Romney offers brief bios of Austen and the eight women writers who influenced her enough to earn a place in it, such as Charlotte Smith, who wrote to free her gambler husband from debtors' prison. Many concrete examples emphasize Romney's point about the importance of women's agency in "courtship novels" or the romance genre, as it's called today.

With humor and candor, Romney gives readers much to ponder about a favorite author and why her books are of such importance today. --Jennifer M. Brown

In Propaganda Girls, biographer Lisa Rogak presents a well-researched, approachable, and captivating account of four women's lives and careers, each instrumental to the "black propaganda" efforts of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)--the precursor to the CIA--during World War II.

Rogak introduces Elizabeth "Betty" MacDonald, a reporter from Hawaii; polyglot Barbara "Zuzka" Lauwers; Jane Smith-Hutton, the wife of a naval attaché in Toyko; and actress and singer Marlene Dietrich (yes, that Marlene Dietrich). Rogak depicts the many trials these women faced, professionally and personally, in their journeys to work with the Morale Operations branch (MO) within the OSS, a division whose job was to break the spirits of Axis soldiers in both the European and Pacific arenas. Rogak's four subjects forged reports, newspapers, letters, and broadcasts that cunningly counteracted victory narratives put forth by the Axis powers.

Rogak (Rachel Maddow) takes readers behind the scenes as Jane navigated Tokyo at the beginning of the war, and as Marlene insisted on performing for soldiers at the front even when declared a target--even making recordings specifically encouraging German soldiers to surrender and defect. Zuzka used her multilingual skills to interrogate defectors in order to glean information to start new rumors for the MO's black propaganda, and Betty's former journalism career gave her the know-how to tell the stories that would encourage the surrender of the opposing forces. These women found innovative and courageous ways to rebrand how the narrative of war was told even as it was happening in front of them. Rogak's sweeping work brings readers into their lives, and makes their stories known for the first time. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

For anyone surveying the exceedingly polarized landscape of American politics and asking how it got this way, seasoned journalist Katherine Stewart (The Power Worshippers) lays out a clear answer in her extensively researched and thoroughly documented investigation into the origins and rise of an "antidemocratic political movement" that is "best described as a new and distinctly American variant of authoritarianism or fascism." Stewart blends accounts of her attendance at rallies, meetings, and worship services with her analysis of the groups and institutions behind these gatherings, straightforwardly dispelling any notion that this movement isn't the result of a systematic, well-funded, long-term shift guided by a collective of individuals "who amass tremendous personal power by mobilizing others around their agendas."

Although they have been historically conflated in wider cultural narratives, Stewart clearly distinguishes between Christians of sincere faith and Christian nationalists, showing how the movement has weaponized some beliefs held by the former but added to them new, false narratives in order to drum up an ardent base of supporters. By sorting "a complex grouping of people into admittedly simplistic categories" and breaking down the steps followed to create an indoctrinated base of supporters, Money, Lies, and God reveals that the novelty of this movement lies in its extremism, its willful denial of reality, and the fact that it "isn't looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy; it wants to burn down the house." While there's no happy ending to Stewart's necessary, sobering work, she concludes by outlining observations and actions that--while tempered by realism--give readers something to hold onto when looking to the future. --Kristen Coates, editor and freelance reviewer

In Disposable, senior New York magazine writer Sarah Jones brings readers the stories of essential workers and those connected to them, whose lives were forever changed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Written with brutal honesty, Disposable is an unflinching look at a country that does less than nothing to protect its most vulnerable people.

Deborah Smith, who "was never without a job--sometimes two at once," and had a "slight intellectual disability," wasn't able to achieve a stable living situation until late in life, but remained incredibly optimistic about the future. She died of a heart attack that was suspected to have been caused by Covid-19 after she delayed care due to the high cost of an emergency room visit. Richard Proia lost his job as an accountant in the 2008 financial crisis, and never recovered his former middle-class status. Proia became ill in 2020 but was sent home from the hospital without being tested for Covid-19, due to his financial status and lack of fever. He died later that month after finally being admitted and testing positive. 

These are just two of the many heart-wrenching cases Jones recounts with care and compassion. Through interviews with the families of those who died--who are often essential workers or impoverished themselves--as well as activists and community organizers, Jones paints a clear picture of people who were left behind by their government. She urges readers to remember that "injustice is a human creation" and that treating people this way is a choice. Infuriating but vital, Disposable will be especially appreciated by readers of The Anti-Ableist Manifesto and Evicted. --Alyssa Parssinen, freelance reviewer and former bookseller

A. Kendra Greene (The Museum of Whales You Will Never See) offers a magical, mind-expanding selection of observations in No Less Strange or Wonderful. Greene employs a delightful, often childlike wonder in this essay collection about discovery. Her perspective is fresh and inventive, open to all possibilities, and the results are surprising and wondrous.

Greene's essays vary in length and take place around the world. "Wild Chilean Baby Pears" considers a crime: in 1979, a museum visitor stole a specimen of the extinct ivory-billed woodpecker from the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History. Greene, who has been a museum visitor as well as a museum worker and a teacher, explores this act from several angles. Brief and spellbinding, "The Two Times You Meet the Devil" describes encounters on a country road in Argentina and in a bookstore of unnamed location. "Until It Pops" details a dress made for the author out of balloons, and her experience of traveling to Chicago for Twist and Shout (the annual balloon twisters' convention).

Greene is always present, participating in the action and dialogue, postulating philosophies and understandings. Greene is an artist in several media (book arts, photography, illustration); this collection is illuminated by her own illustrations and images. The scope of her essays (26 in total) is mesmerizing, her language glittering, and her ideas exuberant and profound. She says it best herself: "It is a thing the essay loves: to tend, carefully, painstakingly, to the fact of the world." As for what we communicate with art: "everything resonant and whole and shining, all at once, perfect, every bell ringing, yes." Yes. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia

Growing up, Haley Mlotek knew all about unsuccessful marriages: not only were her parents and grandparents divorced but her mother was also a certified divorce mediator. None of this made Mlotek's own divorce less incomprehensible, and she's dogged in her search for clarifying light in her invigoratingly intelligent first book, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce.

When she was 16, Mlotek met the man who would become her husband; they were together until they were 29, having been married for that final year. (Because Mlotek and her husband wanted to live and work in New York City, their visas required them to marry, reports the author, who is a Canadian citizen.) No Fault finds Mlotek frequently stepping outside her story to look at divorce as an evolving social phenomenon--something once viewed as a sign of moral failing that became commonplace in the U.S. by the 1970s, when marriage counselors "began to wonder if they should be helping people adapt to divorced life rather than pressuring them to stay married." Mlotek also probes books, films, and books turned films--Heartburn and Eat Pray Love among them--that consider divorce or employ it as a storytelling device.

Mlotek reserves a more or less uninterrupted flow of personal ruminations for the memoir's last hundred-odd pages: she recounts the painful period after her husband moved out and her forays into the thorny dating scene. Pertinaciously researched and ceaselessly curious, if structurally a little scattershot, No Fault is a sui generis memoir of heartbreak and that nebulous, nameless period right afterward. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Alison Hawthorne Deming's spare, luminous sixth poetry collection, Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower, takes readers across the world: a farmer's market in Arizona, a small Canadian island, a handful of archeological sites in Greece. In each place, Deming considers the complex relationship between humans and the natural world, as well as the intricate interconnections among nonhuman living things. "Old birches lead complicated lives," she notes in "Encountering Trees," describing the ways trees can support and strengthen other organisms. She writes of bumblebees learning "how to handle a flower" in "Field Studies" and, elsewhere, of a startling encounter with an onyx-eyed deer.

But Deming's reflections go beyond mere appreciation of nature: she examines the effects of human presence (and politics) on all sorts of landscapes, such as Cuba in the aftermath of Fidel Castro's death and an abandoned dulse camp whose "tidal pull" is "deeper than all the history/ that produces flags." She turns her steady gaze onto the scars of human activity, but she refuses to give into despair: her optimistic "Letter to 2050" imagines the healing of a river ecosystem, and "The Bog" celebrates renewal after a flood, noting, "it is the way of the world to mend." The collection's last poem, "Dear America," pleads with the U.S. to "let your civil war go" and to "quiet them, the voices/ that deceive." Deming's poetry offers a hopeful alternative: "a pond gone fugue/ in autumn" twilight, an orchard's worth of tart wild apples, and the nuanced, ongoing work of care for people and planet. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Animal-loving kids will devour I'm a Dumbo Octopus!: A Graphic Guide to Cephalopods, Anne Lambelet's charming, colorful, and funny guide to everybody's favorite eight-armed sea creatures. 

Grimpy the dumbo octopus knows everything about the other cephalopods in the ocean. Grimpy knows how underwater camouflage works, which octopuses can use tools, and how cephalopods master all kinds of escapes. Grimpy even knows that "cuttlefish use up to 75 different color combinations to communicate," which is approximately the same "number of words a human toddler can say." But Grimpy can't fly like the Japanese flying squid, squirt ink, or produce light. Is there anything that makes a dumbo octopus special?

Not only is I'm a Dumbo Octopus! laden with cool facts--such as the difference between octopus arms and octopus tentacles--but Lambelet's trademark art style makes every squid, octopus, cuttlefish, and nautilus a cuddly friend. Lambelet (Dogs and Their People) uses expressive character design to create a quiet and agreeable fictional story within her work of nonfiction. Grimpy's emotional struggle with what makes being a dumbo octopus interesting may be familiar to some children and will hopefully encourage readers to embrace their own--and everyone else's--uniqueness. Backmatter includes a useful guide to the anatomy of a cephalopod as well as a photo of a real dumbo octopus (which is specially "built to survive in one of the deepest, darkest environments on the whole planet!"). I'm a Dumbo Octopus! is humorous, exciting, and perfect for fans of Sharks: A Mighty Bite-y History or the Narwhal and Jelly series. --Nicole Brinkley, bookseller and writer

Ben Clanton (Narwhal and Jelly series), Andy Chou Musser (Search for a Giant Squid, with Amy Seto Forrester), and Corey R. Tabor (Simon and the Better Bone) join forces to create Papilio, the inventive story of a black swallowtail butterfly, scientific name Papilio polyxenes. The charming and informative tale is divided into three sections, each representing a stage in Papilio's life: "Caterpillar," "Chrysalis," and "Butterfly."

Readers first meet Papilio in Clanton's "Caterpillar." The endearing caterpillar, with two dot eyes, perky antennae, and a warm smile, goes in search of food. When a friendly mouse helps her, she discovers the world is "full of surprises!" Tabor's "Chrysalis" depicts Papilio inside her "cozy chrysalis" where she "dissolves and turns into goo," prompting her to ponder how "weird" growing up can be. There's danger when birds argue over the tasty-looking chrysalis snack, but once again, the mouse saves the day. In Musser's "Butterfly," the still-hungry creature learns to navigate flying with her big new wings, avoids becoming a spider's meal, and shares a sweet treat with her mouse friend.

The stories flow seamlessly and blend cohesively into a unified whole, with each illustrator's distinctive style shining through. Occasional speech bubbles and panels give the book a slight comic-book feel. The backmatter includes "A Flutter of Facts," a short section about butterflies, and an authors' note that explains how the collaborators decided to work together. The result is a must-have for elementary science classrooms and libraries, as well as an ideal story for children curious about the natural world. --Julie Danielson

Trang Thanh Tran's sophomore novel, They Bloom at Night, may be best described as Annihilation meets Speak. Tran develops a deeply unsettling narrative that takes place in a frightening version of our world where living creatures take on unknowable, monstrous forms.

The small town of Mercy, La., has been almost entirely claimed by a red algae bloom. Anyone who remains survives by the skin of their teeth, including 16-year-old Nhung ("Noon" to non-Vietnamese locals) who ekes out a living by fishing the dangerous tides in her father's boat, Wild Things. Noon's mother refuses to leave Mercy, believing her lost husband and son are still there, alive in different, aquatic forms. When a government scientist goes missing, wannabe despot Jimmy Boudreaux, legal owner of Wild Things, uses the boat as leverage to force Noon and her mother to do his bidding: find the thing that is stalking people from the water or lose their home. Noon's mother wants to refuse, convinced the creature is "gia đình. Family"; Noon simply wants to survive.

As in Tran's first novel, the Bram Stoker Award-winning She Is a Haunting, the author's brilliant, visceral descriptions slink over the skin and dig into the marrow: "One eye has been picked from its socket, leaving the hole bloodred.... I recognize the angle of her pale, peeling jaw." The horror grows as Noon's home, relationships, and even body are broken down and reformed to suit the new environment. Tran fluidly builds a novel that incorporates family trauma, sexual assault, gender identity, and climate change amid a lethal environment where, Noon learns, "the monsters have always been human." --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness

Readers of Shawn Harris's Caldecott Honor-winning Have You Ever Seen a Flower? have every reason to hope for another effervescent, imagination-stoking fantasia, and that's precisely what they get with Let's Be Bees, a picture book full of noises that isn't really a book about noises.

Let's Be Bees begins with an adult reading to a long-haired child. "Let's be bees," says the text of the picture book in the caretaker's hand. (The book is called, that's right, Let's Be Bees, and it has Harris's book's cover.) Obligingly, the grown-up says to the kid, "Let's buzz," and they do ("Buzz!"), becoming bees who fly out of the collars of their shirts. When the book within Harris's book says "Let's be birds," the adult is back in human clothing but with a bird's head and wings, and again the grown-up obliges--"Let's chirp"--and off they fly ("Chirp!"). On it goes, with the book's ever-morphing duo carrying out increasingly challenging imperatives: "Let's be lofty, leafy trees," "Let's be snow," and more.

Let's Be Bees features bold and chunky illustrations that Harris (illustrator of the Newbery Medal-winning The Eyes and the Impossible) created with crayons, and the fuzzy outlines seem to invite the physical adaptations that the text requests. The book may well provoke noisemaking from the littlest readers to match the adult's and child's efforts, and when the caretaker finally pulls everything together and says, "Let's make every sound," it's not hard to imagine readers of all ages letting it rip. --Nell Beram, freelance writer and YA author

Ashley Hope Pérez's Out of Darkness "became one of the most banned books in the U.S." in 2021. The removal of her books from libraries and schools and the vitriolic hatred she received from strangers unlikely to have read her writing galvanized Pérez to create Banned Together: Our Fight for Readers' Rights. This powerful compilation of essays, stories, comics, and poetry features 15 authors banding together over being banned; their work is enhanced by Ignatz Award-nominated illustrator Debbie Fong's graphics. The goal here, Pérez says, is "to talk about what is happening to books in libraries, why these vanishing stories matter, and how you can empower yourself and others to resist."

Maia Kobabe, whose Gender Queer was "the most challenged book in the United States in 2021 and 2022," captures the disturbing data behind the bans, specifically that "most of these challenges are to books with diverse characters and LGBTQ themes." Nikki Grimes contributes a verse response ("Extraordinary Hazards") to challenges to her award-winning memoir-in-verse Ordinary Hazards, calling out "the kangaroo court of/ hate-mongers masquerading/ as sweet mama bears."

In between the broad range of contributions, Pérez inserts informational interstitials: examples include Book Ban FAQs, enriching book lists, "Ridiculous Reasons Books Have Been Challenged, Removed, or Banned" (for example, Ruta Sepetys's Between Shades of Gray was mistaken for the adult erotica Fifty Shades of Grey). Ellen Hopkins reminds readers in her personal piece "Imagining the Unimaginable" that "knowledge is power. And that is what they fear." --Terry Hong