Becoming Marie Antoinette, Juliet Grey's debut novel, recounts Maria Antonia's transformation from youngest archduchess of Austria into Marie Antoinette, dauphine of France. Grey tells the story from the perspective of Marie Antoinette herself, capturing the innocent and anxious voice of a young child in Austria, and developing it along with the character into a teenaged girl about to become one of the most powerful women in the world.

Grey's novel is grounded in the era, and the extensive research shines through on its pages. From interesting tidbits about life at Versailles (nobles relieved themselves in the halls) to rich and vivid descriptions of the court life, clothing and styling of the French royalty in the 18th century, Grey is diligent in representing this rarified world. She also shows us Maria Antonia's step-by-step makeover into a queenly figure, which included 18th-century orthodontia, careful recording of bodily functions and strict language instruction.

Though certainly not an original subject--histories and novels about the doomed queen abound--Grey has taken a well-known story and breathed life into it. The first in a planned trilogy, Becoming Marie Antoinette sets up both the history and personality of this intriguing figure in a suitably elaborate and extravagant manner. Lovers of this era will delight in the detail to be found here and look forward to more from Grey on the next chapters of Marie Antoinette's short but captivating life. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

This book takes readers to a grim time in history--16th-century Germany, where ignorance and fear led to many witch burnings. Hangman Jacob Kuisl, is one of the few who doesn't believe in witches; however, his job--an inherited position--requires a keen knowledge of herbs and techniques to cause as well as relieve pain, because he's also the town torturer and executioner. A man of contemporary sensibilities, he has taught his daughter, Magdalena, to read, and drinks himself comatose several days before every execution.

Three boys of an orphan gang are found murdered, each with a crude tattoo of what must be a witch's mark on their backs. The boys used to visit kind Martha Stechlin, the town midwife. Martha is jailed and will be tortured to make her confess to evil and name her confederates, because witches always work with other witches. In fact, some 70 years earlier, a local witch craze brought some 60 women to their deaths. Other disturbing events--the burning of a warehouse and the destruction of a new leper house--are attributed to the incarcerated Martha.

Martha's immediate burning would be more than a convenient political expediency for the town's aldermen--it would solve everything. That they know she is innocent is beside the point.

This work seamlessly merges brutality and compassion, and its elegant plot, appealing characters and satisfying conclusion will keep the reader wide awake and turning pages well into the night. --Judith Hawkins-Tillirson, proprietress, Wyrdhoard Books, and blogger at Still Working for Books

In The Magician King  Lev Grossman delivers the sequel that his 2009 novel The Magicians practically demanded, and delivers it with verve. This new book takes up the story of Quentin Coldwater two years into his reign as one of the rulers of the land of Fillory, the fictional kingdom summoned so vividly to life in The Magicians.

King Quentin embarks on a journey to the farthest reaches of his realm and finds himself consumed by a sometimes perilous quest ranging across the "multiverse" (including some unexpected, unsettling trips back to Earth) to find the Seven Golden Keys he must gather to save Fillory from ruin. Grossman ably draws on the same store of fantasy lore, from Narnia to Middle Earth, that formed the core of the first novel, and he leavens the homage with winks in the direction of pop culture icons like Monty Python and Bruce Willis.

The parallel, and more absorbing, plotline of Grossman's novel tells the story of Julia, Quentin's high school friend who failed the entrance exam to Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy years earlier. Through painstaking effort in a series of "safe houses" (reminiscent of crack houses), inhabited by a bizarre assortment of would-be magicians, she cobbles together the tools she needs to perform the magic Quentin had acquired in the "safe orderly system of Brakebills." Grossman manages to infuse the story with provocative explorations of the nature of heroism, the presence of magic in the "real" world and the eternal human quest for happiness and fulfillment.

In a recent Wall Street Journal profile on authors of literary fiction who've turned to fantasy and science fiction, Grossman asserted, "We are the mainstream. Literary fiction is a subculture." While that point is open to debate, if he and his colleagues keep turning out novels of this quality they'll doubtless attract a new cadre of avid readers. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

More than 40 years ago, when Chinua Achebe's daughter started preschool in Nigeria, the internationally famous author of Things Fall Apart discovered that all the school texts for African children were written by Westerners. To right this imbalance, Achebe created Chike and the River, first published as a pamphlet in 1966, the story of a Nigerian boy who overcomes fear and poverty to cross the mighty Niger.

Eleven-year-old Chike leaves his small Nigerian village to live with his uncle in the larger town of Onitsha on the banks of the Niger River. Despite his mother's warnings about the river, Chike longs to cross it in a ferry, but doesn't have a shilling to buy a round-trip fare. The plot unfolds through one mishap after another, as every plan to secure the money fails him. Accompanied by two school friends, bad boy Ezekiel and good boy Samuel, Chike avoids stealing and deceit, but when he finds a six-pence--half the fare--his hopes are dashed when he's cheated by the local magician, Professor Chandus.

Chike succeeds in crossing the river, only to find that he's missed the last ferry home and is trapped on the other side. Too late he discovers that the lorry where he's hiding is being used by small-time thieves to commit a robbery, and finds himself in the dangerous position of being the only witness to a crime.

Winner of the 2007 Man Booker International Prize, Achebe has a lean style to his prose, and the novel works just as well for adults as for children. Chike is a perfect little Everyman in his struggles. Without a single slip, this succinct reading delight is a slice of life that depicts hardship realistically as a likable young Nigerian boy learns the tough lessons of life and graduates with honors. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle

When Enaiatollah Akbari was 10 years old, on the night his mother was forced to abandon him in Pakistan, she made him promise her three things: that he would never do drugs, never raise a weapon against another human being and never steal. The harrowing adventures that follow in this superb little novel are based on the true story Enaiat told to author Fabio Geda in Turin at the end of his perilous, five-year odyssey through Iran, Turkey and Greece, all the way to Italy.

The novel opens in Quetta, Pakistan, where his mother is forced to leave Enaiat in a crowded warehouse of people waiting for traffickers to help them emigrate. He and his mother fled their village when it fell under Taliban control. Enaiat's life-and-death adventures are narrated in a matter-of-fact, childlike way, without being cloying or sensational. He goes from working for a hostel keeper to braving the bazaar working for a shoe seller, and is rescued from a group of Pashtun boys who steal from him by a group of Hazara youths who become his allies and friends.

Determined to keep his three promises to his mother, young Enaiat manages to survive. He crosses treacherous mountains and endures a three-day journey packed with 50 other children into a truck bed's secret false bottom, sealed in total darkness. He's shuttled from crowded warehouses to underground garages jammed with illegals, chased by wild boars, and forced to cross the turbulent sea from Turkey to Greece with four other boys in a dinghy with a hole in it. He stows away on a Greek freighter for three days without food or water to arrive finally in Italy, the land where, at last, people treat him kindly. --Nick DiMartino, Nick’s Picks, University Book Store, Seattle

When Glen Garber's wife, Sheila, is killed in a drunk driving accident, he's shocked and disbelieving when he learns that she was the drunk driver. Suddenly a single father, he struggles to reconcile Sheila's final act with what he knew of her, but things just keep getting stranger. One of Sheila's best friends is killed in another bizarre accident right after yelling at Glen's eight-year-old daughter, Kelly, for overhearing a phone call.

The intrigue mounts. Glen receives threats and inexplicable instructions from Sheila's friends; someone shoots out Kelly's window; and a sinister figure with ties to organized crime pays a visit to the Garber household. Glen's contracting business, already in financial trouble, may be on its way to becoming another victim. The background and setting are über-current, with small-town families struggling to survive a recession, tricky sub-prime mortgages and home foreclosures. Unsure of the local police department, Glen is forced to undertake his own investigations. Is someone trying to destroy his business? What questionable sideline dealing was Sheila involved in? And who or what, exactly, killed her?

Glen, a competent builder but a decidedly amateur investigator, is most importantly a loving father. After all the dust settles, this heart-pounding thriller is surprising family-oriented. Barclay's (Never Look Away) fast-paced, twisting plot keeps the reader guessing at who the good guys and the bad guys are. Allegiances shift. Glen isn't sure who can be trusted; and while we stay a step ahead of him, the ending still comes with a shocking crash. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pages of julia

Alex Shipley is a professor at Harvard when she's summoned back to her alma mater, Jasper College, for a murder investigation. In 1982, Alex took a special class taught by Professor Richard Aldiss--via video feed from his prison cell. Aldiss had been convicted of the murders of two female grad students, women whose bodies were found bloodied by axe blows and covered with novels by a reclusive writer named Paul Fallows. In his class, Aldiss hopes that his students will solve the murders and clear his name.

The only way to do this is by using Fallows's two published novels and to master a mysterious game called "the Procedure"--which you can't master until you've been invited to play. Through Alex's investigations in the course of the class, she cleared Aldiss of murder. But now there's been another murder; could Aldiss have actually been guilty?

Will Lavender (Obedience) unfolds his puzzling thriller by shifting between 1994 and the present, telling the story through the limited third-person perspective of Alex Shipley. By alternating the time periods, Lavender builds the suspense, creating cliffhangers and then switching back to the opposite time. He provides just enough information to lead the reader to the edge of the cliff and then throws in a twist.

By using Alex's perspective, Lavender creates a tone of uncertainty. Alex believes her professor is innocent, but so much evidence points to the contrary. Her internal conflict increases the plot's intensity. Alex poses the question to her classmate, "What if you could read a book and treat it as a competition between you and its author?" Lavender is challenging his readers with Dominance; can you defeat the master? --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

When a novel's cover features the protagonist standing bare-chested atop a mountain of skulls, sword in hand, you have a pretty good idea of what it's going to deliver, and Michael A. Stackpole's adaptation of the screenplay for the upcoming Conan the Barbarian film lives up to its promise. The story--which has broad similarities to the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, but is not a remake--begins with young Conan receiving his first training in the ways of the warrior from his father, until the day an evil warlord, Khalar Zym, comes to their village to steal an ancient artifact and kills his father. Years pass, and the young Cimmerian's desire for vengeance never cools; finally, an opportunity presents itself--along with a young woman who must be protected to thwart Khalar Zym's sorcerous schemes.

Stackpole works off the film's storyline and uses the descriptive passages to add tonal gradations to the characters, emphasizing elements like the young Conan's impatience to become a fighter or the perverse motivations of Khalar Zym's daughter, Marique. His version of the barbarian resonates well with Robert E. Howard's original conception of a cannily intelligent adventurer who could be grimly determined when pressed by circumstance. At the same time, his own voice has been well honed by years of writing epic fantasies (as well as media tie-ins for BattleTech and Star Wars), so this is no slavish imitation of Howard. If you didn't know there was a movie coming out, you could even welcome Stackpole's novel as a literary rebooting of the Conan franchise. (And who's to say we won't see some print-only sequels, at that?) --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com

In her latest, novelist Sophie Jordan (Firelight) introduces us to Grier Hadley, the illegitimate daughter of a London reprobate. Having made an obscenely large fortune through his various disreputable activities, Mr. Hadley decides it is time to purchase a bit of respectability through an advantageous marriage for his daughter. While doing her rounds on the Regency "marriage mart," Grier meets, and instantly clashes with, Sevastian Maksimi, the crown prince of a small European country who is in search of a highly pedigreed bride. Their attraction is immediate, intense and incredibly inconvenient, as neither is in any way what the other is looking for.

Relying on a standard plot of romantic literature, Jordan's novel could easily have come across as hackneyed and trite, but she breathes new life into the cliché through her personable and engaging main characters. The hero of the novel, despite being the quintessential fairytale prince, feels like a real person rather than just a collection of attractive qualities. Grier veers between grudging vulnerability and a refreshingly radical eccentricity.

Though she does employ a slightly jarring climax to tie off the emotional loose ends of the story, Jordan has imbued her work with a bracing touch of maturity. The relationship between Grier and her father, whom she simultaneously disdains and wants desperately to please, is particularly well drawn. Fans of Sophie Jordan, and of romance in general, will find Wicked in Your Arms to be a worthy addition to any collection. --Judie Evans, librarian

Every parent--and consumer--should read Bakan's work, which not only aims to protect children, but illuminates what "accountability" means in the U.S.

Bakan, who holds law degrees from Oxford and Harvard and wrote The Corporation, examines how the deregulation of industries as varied as pharmaceuticals, fast food, video games and environmental health has allowed "corporations... to incite and diminish fears in ways that serve their own purposes.... parents are systematically misinformed, and our fears channeled to serve the interests of... corporations rather than those of our children" Bakan explains how marketing aimed at kids has led to addictions to pet sites and video games, the current obesity epidemic, and exposure to BPA and other chemicals that are particularly hazardous for developing bodies.

While Bakan's assertions are well-documented (he includes 85 pages of end notes), he believes we should never discount our own intuition to guide our decisions. Since "watch dogs" are dependent on the industries they monitor, he reminds us also to use common sense to guide our purchases. For example, the gaming industry may refuse to admit responsibility for an increase in school violence, but what benefit results from young, developing minds spending hours killing and mutilating humanlike avatars?

However, Bakan does not simply require his readers to rely on common sense; he provides a compelling, well-documented study into the ramifications of allowing corporations to dictate the nutrition, entertainment, education and medications our children are led to believe they "need." --Kristen Galles, blogger at Book Club Classics

What if you contracted tuberculosis and there was no easy cure? Martha Brooks (Mistik Lake) tells the story of one feisty teenager, Marie-Claire, who, along with her brother and sister, is unwittingly exposed to TB by a favorite uncle, and must move to a nearby sanitarium for treatment. Set during World War II and based in part on the author's experience growing up on the grounds of a TB sanitarium in Canada, Queen of Hearts paints a vivid portrait of life in such a facility before the discovery of penicillin, when "chasing the cure" meant bed rest and more bed rest.

This is not the kind of existence a girl imagines for herself when she has just attended her first dance, met a soldier leaving to fight in the war, and experienced her first kiss. Even worse, Marie-Claire and her siblings must separate, and her brother Luc's condition deteriorates quickly. Marie-Claire writes notes to her brother, and receives answers from his roommate, the young musician Jack Hawkings, also a patient in the sanitarium, for whom she develops feelings.

Marie-Claire has a tough time adjusting to life in the facility. Visitors are few, as most outsiders, including her mother, stay away. But TB or not, Marie-Claire must learn to grow up. And like most teenagers, she is curious about life and love. Is there life after TB? Is there love? From the very first page, Martha Brooks draws us into her narrative. Rich in sensory details, every word adds to this compelling picture of life on the Canada prairie. --Lynn Becker, host of the monthly online discussion of children's books for SCBWI, Book Talk.

Jessica Warman touches on themes from her Breathless and Where the Truth Lies in a novel that powerfully explores how privilege and athleticism masked the deeper demons plaguing Elizabeth Valchar. Part mystery, part psychological study, the book begins with a bomb blast: by the end of chapter one, we learn that Liz has just turned 18, that she celebrated with six friends (including her best friend and stepsister, Josie) on her parents' boat, and that the birthday girl wound up dead in the water. Literally. And Liz narrates the story.

Another classmate, Alex Berg, who died a year earlier, joins Liz on the dock. He tells Liz that he believes they are in this purgatory-like state because they're "supposed to... gain some kind of deeper understanding." Liz was in the popular crowd, with lots of money but little love; her mother died when she was nine of complications related to anorexia, and her father married Josie's mother just months later. Alex grew up with little money but surrounded by love and faith. Why are these two thrown together?

Warman spins a spellbinding web of intrigue while simultaneously delivering searing insights about life in high school and the cruelty and negligence that often accompany a sense of entitlement. Like Samantha Kingston in Lauren Oliver's Before I Fall, Liz must confront some hard truths about herself before she can find peace. Just try to put this book down. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness