American fans of Norwegian author Per Petterson's novels, like Out Stealing Horses and To Siberia, will be delighted that Graywolf Press has decided to publish the collection Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes, the book that marked Petterson's literary debut in 1987. These spare, outwardly simple stories offer an early glimpse of the psychological acuity that's distinguished his entire body of work.

Ashes comprises 10 stories set in Oslo in the early 1960s, each portraying an episode in the life of young Arvid Jensen, the protagonist (as an adult) of Petterson's 2010 novel, I Curse the River of Time. Arvid lives in a row house with his family: his father, a shoe factory worker turned toothbrush assembler; his mother, a Dane who cleans a music school at night; and an older sister.

If there's a theme to the collection, it's Arvid's loss of illusions, as in the affecting tale "Like a Tiger in a Cage," where he first senses the inevitability of time's passage, noticing that "it was time that had happened" when he compares a photograph of his mother before his birth to her appearance in the present. "The Black Car," which deals with the unexpected death of Arvid's grandfather, is a complex meditation on the reality of generational succession.

As in his novels, Petterson's prose is uncluttered, evoking comparisons to Raymond Carver, to whom he's acknowledged his literary debt. Though his novels inevitably are more complex, Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes possesses all the qualities that make Per Petterson's larger works so impressive. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Zoe Chambers is a paramedic and deputy coroner who works hard "to find answers for the dead" in Vance Township, a tight-knit Pennsylvania farm community. In her first two books of the series, Circle of Influence and Lost Legacy, Zoe tracked the killer of a prominent town board member and investigated the suicide of a local farmer. In book three, Bridges Burned, Zoe stops a man from re-entering his burning house in an attempt to save his wife. When the raging fire proves fatal, Zoe empathizes with the homeless, unemployed widower, Holt Farabee, and his 10-year-old daughter, Maddie. She offers lodging to the pair in the dilapidated 1850s farmhouse she shares with her aging, infirm landlady. In exchange, Holt, who has handyman skills, agrees to do odd jobs.

Zoe soon forges a bond with Holt and identifies with Maddie--Zoe lost a parent, her father, when she, too, was a young girl. But when police chief Pete Adams--a man whom Zoe has kept at a romantic arm's length for years--learns of the living arrangement, he's not pleased, as his investigation is leading to suspicions about the deadly fire and Holt's past. When Pete tries to caution Zoe, she refuses to listen. Will Zoe's stubbornness lead to further peril?

Small-town dynamics color a suspenseful, well-plotted story rife with red herrings, but it's likable heroine Zoe--her vulnerabilities and deepening challenges--who makes this another winning entry in Annette Dashofy's series. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

The story of Chucky Taylor is a grisly study in nature versus nurture. Chucky's future was not necessarily bright--he was raised by his Trinidadian-American mother in Orlando until age 17, in Pine Hills, nicknamed "Crime Hills," a neighborhood more like an inner city than a suburb. Chucky was a troubled teen whose defiance landed him in a disciplinary high school, until a phone call from his estranged father, Liberian rebel Charles Taylor, turned Chucky's slow downward spiral into a fiery tailspin.

The Taylors reunited in the midst of Liberia's 1990s civil war. Chucky visited his father's stronghold in the Liberian countryside, where Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia battled other rebel groups for control of the country. Chucky returned to Orlando briefly before a felony gun charge forced him to flee back to Liberia.

Charles Taylor's ascent to the presidency brought Chucky immense power. He was appointed leader of the Anti-Terrorist Unit, a paramilitary brigade and instrument of state terror. Chucky devolved into an unstable drug addict who casually inflicted the worst tortures imaginable on innocent people. He was finally brought to justice in 2009, six years after his father's downfall, when he was sentenced to 97 years in prison.

American Warlord, journalist Johnny Dwyer's first book, skillfully untangles the previously obscure threads of Chucky Taylor's life with a treasure trove of original reporting. Dwyer's fluid prose paints the compelling portrait of a troubled young American made monstrous by his own demons and his father's demonic influence. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

Social media users have real power to judge and punish strangers. They have ended careers, destroyed reputations, burned close relationships and threatened the physical safety of their targets.

At first, journalist and documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson (The Psychopath Test) thought that "the renaissance in public shaming was a good thing." He describes the bliss of feeling supported and vindicated as a participant in online attacks, part of a new "democratization of justice." He began to research public shaming in the U.S. and U.K., and over the course of three years, his perspective shifted and expanded. In So You've Been Publicly Shamed, he examines public shamings of the past and in modern courts and prisons; the sketchy science behind "group madness" and the Stanford Prison Experiment; the effects of various shamings on specific victims and perpetrators and their attempts to resist and recover from it. He repeatedly shows how shamers act from a sense that they are serving justice, maintaining the feeling of their own goodness and humanity by dehumanizing their targets. As always, public shaming is used to enforce compliance with community standards, and in response, individuals begin to censor themselves. "We see ourselves as nonconformist," Ronson writes, "but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age."

Ronson leavens his serious material with humor as he leads the reader through his investigations and developing thoughts. Although his focus is on social media, what he discovers is relevant to all of human society. --Sara Catterall

When journalist Carla Power sat down in a café with Islamic scholar Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi to study the Quran, she confessed that, despite her degree in Middle Eastern studies, she had never read it. He replied, "Most Muslims haven't read it either."

Power and Akram first met over a research project at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. Power is a liberal secular American with a Jewish mother; she grew up in St. Louis and various cities in the Middle East. Akram grew up in rural northern India, and has lived most of his adult life in the U.K. Twenty years after their first meeting, Power proposed a project that would become If the Oceans Were Ink: to study and discuss the Quran with Akram for a year, to understand its influence on the world and in his life, and to challenge what she calls her own post-Enlightenment "fundamentalist beliefs."

Akram is a conservative who promotes education for women, and has written an unpublished 40-volume biographical dictionary of 9,000 Muslim women scholars. He teaches at madrasas and at Oxford, and values critical creative thinking rooted in the study of original texts. Power visits his home village, gets to know his family in Oxford, sleeps over at a mosque during Ramadan and reports on the family's umra pilgrimage. Their conversations break down stereotypes and illuminate fewer differences than she expected. Power displays the diversity and intellectual richness of the practicing Muslim world, and shows how much we have to gain from mutual understanding. --Sara Catterall

When freelance journalist Rachel Swaby (Wired, Runner's World) read a New York Times obituary about rocket scientist Yvonne Brill that began, "She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job, and took eight years off to raise three children," she realized how skewed coverage was for women in science, where accomplishments are too often framed in the context of domesticity and marital status. Swaby's response is Headstrong, compact profiles of 52 women who made critical contributions to science and technology.

She describes how Rachel Carson's research into environmental toxins became the driving force behind the Environmental Protection Agency; how female doctors (Helen Taussig) founded the field of pediatric cardiology and developed a test for assessing newborns (Virginia Apgar); how female scientists deduced the orbital theory of electrons (Maria Goeppert Mayer), nuclear fission (Lise Meitner) and the helical structure of DNA (Rosalind Franklin) and coaxed added payloads from chemical propulsion systems (Brill). And actress Hedy Lamarr co-invented a secret communication system that would develop into wireless communications.

Swaby highlights the obstacles these women faced in dealing with their male counterparts, often working for peanuts to stay in the game, and the difficulties they continue to confront in a world where only 15% of women major in the sciences, even though in high school, girls take as many math and science courses as boys.

"If we treat women equally as scientists," writes Swaby, "we can introduce a new generation of chemists, cardiologists, mathematicians while revealing a whole hidden history." What a gift this would be for the next generation. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

Nick Davies (Cuckoos, Cowbirds and Other Cheats), professor of behavioral ecology at Cambridge, knows that science today is more likely to depend on DNA analysis than stomping about in a field with a notebook. However, when Davies decided to study the cuckoo bird, he knew more traditional methods were in order, and so he observed wild cuckoos in a marshy area known as Wicken Fen.

In England, the beginning of spring is marked by the first call of the cuckoo bird. Newly returned from wintering in Africa, the cuckoos and other migratory species set about the business of reproduction, but while the other birds build their nests and raise their young, the cuckoo cheats. It lays its eggs in the nests of other species, and when the cuckoo chick hatches, it ejects the hosts' eggs or hatchlings. Then, as an only child, the chick ensures that the host parents will lavish all their attention on it, and the con is complete. Just how exactly does the cuckoo get away with it?

Davies's obvious adoration for his feathered subjects can hook even the most casual of readers, whether or not experimental methodology usually grabs their attention. Written in a series of essays, each addressing a different facet of the cuckoo's life or exploring a question about the bird's behavior, the account skillfully pulls together poetry and lore about the cuckoo, scientific theories from ancient history to modernity and Davies's own experiments and conclusions. Tidy as a woven nest and filled with genuine love for the English countryside, Davies's exposé of the bird world's trickiest customer will astound. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

In the 2012 movie Trouble with the Curve, Clint Eastwood played Gus Lobel, a worn-out, grizzled baseball scout at the end of his career, bouncing from sandlot to sandlot looking for the next hotshot arm. Gus is as far from Sandy Alderson, the general manager of the New York Mets, as one can get and still be in the ballpark. In Baseball Maverick, Steve Kettmann--former San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter and ghostwriter of Jose Canseco's autobiography, Juiced--describes Alderson's build-from-the-farm approach as a "tightly run, analytically efficient, organized system for developing minor-league talent." A Vietnam Marine vet and lawyer from Harvard, Alderson was hired in 1981 by the Oakland A's when the Haas family bought the team and wanted a more businesslike approach to running the franchise.

Alderson transformed the lowly A's into a powerhouse of the '80s and '90s as he mentored his successor Billy Beane to be the sabermetric miracle man made famous in Moneyball. For nearly half his book, Kettmann explores whether that same low-key, analytical, business-focused approach can work in the biggest baseball market in the world with a Mets team that began as a laughingstock in 1962, had several superlative years (1969 and 1986) but had many more miserable seasons and September collapses. Now, with "a critical mass of talent," 2015 is the do-or-die season for Alderson and the Mets: "It's a car with some power under the hood: it's time to do some driving." Baseball Maverick is not so much about Sandy Alderson as it is a savvy story about the business side of baseball--a side that sometimes seems to be doing all the driving. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Yellow is the derogatory term often used to describe Asians and to represent cowardice, but it is celebrated as the color of royalty, wealth and prestige in Asian cultures. Yellow is also the running theme of Amy Uyematsu's collection of prose poetry, The Yellow Door, which contrasts her experiences as a Christian-raised Sansei (third-generation) Japanese American with the cultural traditions of her Buddhist heritage. The first piece, "Riding the Yellow Dragon," celebrates yellow in all its Asian glory; later pieces examine the alienation and insecurity of her Asian American duality through the metaphor of a dance. She writes in "Carnival Nights in the New Country" of her visit to Japan's Buddhist Obon Festival, hovering on the periphery as a spectator of her own cultural heritage: "Nobody knows me here and I feel safe..../ I am a stranger here only by accident/ of two generations and grandfathers/ who weren't firstborn sons."

Uyematsu (Stone Bow Prayer) touches upon the same alienation in "From Tatsuya to Little Willie G.--An Argument for Dark-Eyed Romeos," as a child asked to a dance by a white boy: "I can't forget that long night/ when everybody stares--/ the message so clear,/ till I'm mad at sweet Andy/ for ever asking." This racial tension appears again with "In Our Yellow Boats," where the endless horizon of azure seas upon which her grandfathers journeyed from Japan fades into the arid desert of a World War II internment camp, in a painful courtship of bitterness and acceptance over livelihoods lost and remade.

The Yellow Door reads like a prose-painted Hokusai woodblock that illustrates the pain of the immigrant experience, but it is also a celebratory dance of acceptance and courage in recognition of one's dual heritage. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

Hollywood starlets have captivated audiences for decades, and so many have passed on before their time. In Dark Sparkler, a sizzling collection of star-studded poems, Amber Tamblyn (Bang Ditto)--an accomplished actress herself--writes hauntingly of Marilyn Monroe, Brittany Murphy, Sharon Tate, Jayne Mansfield and numerous others. She treats both big names and obscure with deserved gravitas, teasing apart authenticity from gossip, critiquing conventions of desire, unraveling presumptions of femininity, demonstrating agency in a subculture that often renders women as objects.

Tamblyn imagines a full life for child star Samantha Smith, killed in a plane crash at age 13. Barbara La Marr, the 1920s actress widely recognized as the most beautiful girl in the world until her death at 29, receives the phone number for the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Dynamic and poignant, Dark Sparkler poses this question from its outset: "When you find a skull in the woods,/ do you leave it alone because it disturbs you/ or do you leave it alone/ because of what's still living/ inside?"

Facing--and sometimes incorporating--provocative lines like, "I'm not interested in going out with a bang./ I'm interested in going out/ with your father," are peculiar and inspired pieces of original artwork by David Lynch, Marilyn Manson and others. Together they fashion a book glittering with jewels fallen from the silver screen. These poems aren't meant to titillate, however. Instead, Tamblyn employs an extended epilogue to grapple with her own role in the Hollywood pantheon, ultimately crafting in Dark Sparkler an empathetic coda for women whose limelight has suddenly and tragically burnt out. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness

Literary heroes come alive, thanks to Billy Gillfoyle's imagination and some brilliant engineering on the part of the mysterious Dr. Libris, a worthy successor to the mastermind in Chris Grabenstein's novel Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library.

Billy's parents are undergoing a trial separation, so Billy is spending the summer with his mother in a cabin belonging to Dr. Libris while his father stays in their New York apartment. With no TV and a cell phone that died when it fell from a tree, 12-year-old Billy peruses Dr. Libris's bookshelves, and he hears--and sees--the books' characters. The characters seem to be housed on the island, so Billy heads out there and is soon aided by Poseidon. The cast of characters grows as Billy's reading expands. Billy joins forces with Hercules (after helping him defeat Antaeus), Robin Hood and Maid Marian, and they best the Sheriff of Nottingham. One-page "Theta Project" notes penned by Dr. Libris let readers know more than Billy does about the professor's grand plans. When Billy brings neighbor Walter along to see if he can see and hear the characters, too, Billy plays right into Dr. Libris's plans.

The mash-up of stories results in some original twists. Walter suggests they read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland so Alice can give her shrinking potion to the Sheriff of Nottingham. And Billy borrows from H.G. Wells to try to rekindle what drew his parents together by sending them into the past. Though the plot grows pleasingly farfetched, Grabenstein grounds the novel in Billy's authentic emotions. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

What at first appears to be a book of simple rhymes and arresting acrylic paintings of spotted creatures turns out to be a fascinating nature study.

Susan Stockdale starts with something easily recognizable: a butterfly. But its "Eyespots" pattern (which potential predators mistake as the eyes of a larger creature) may not be so familiar: It belongs to the buckeye butterfly, found in the Caribbean, Mexico and southern U.S., according to Stockdale's endnotes. The author-artist continues to balance the familiar (ladybugs, chipmunks, cheetahs) and the unfamiliar (the Montezuma Quail, the nudibranch sea slug, the Helmeted Guineafowl), and to reveal unusual members of familiar species, such as the flamingo tongue snail. The carefully arranged juxtaposition of colors, patterns and angles speak to Stockdale's background as a textile designer. The black-and-white polka-dot back and cornflower-blue-spotted snout of a blue boxfish (native to the Indian and Pacific oceans) swimming downward through spotted sea plants, pick up on the coloring of the blue poison dart frog, moving upward in parallel on the opposite page. A double-page spread of a "charging" cheetah accentuates its speed, while a double-page image of "creeping slugs" shows off the colorful coral, sponges and anemones that provide its diet. Children will savor the image of an anaconda ("Spots on snakes") that fills an entire frame.

Endpapers that tease to a jaguar ("way up high") stalking a chipmunk ("on the ground"), a matching game of magnified spots to its animal, plus detailed notes about habitat and class (e.g., mammal, fish, insect, bird, etc.) make this a complete package. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

This tale of teamwork is spot-on for toddlers just discovering the world around them.

"One little chooky chick/ pulling at a worm./ Clucky cluck, worm's stuck./ What should chooky do?" The chartreuse-colored chick is soon joined by a rust-colored companion: "Two little chooky chicks pulling at a worm./ Huffy puff, worm's tough./ What should chookies do?" Jan Whiten varies the text just enough, with onomatopoeic words children love to say, and a few vocabulary stretchers (they form a "chooky queue"), always with illustrations to help. As the worm grows longer ("What's wrong? Worm's long") and the chooky chicks increase into a one-sided tug of war, a mystery unfolds. The chicks' wide eyes register surprise in Sinéad Hanley's double-page spreads of a rural scene. She makes an impressive debut, with a springtime palette, gently recurring patterns and screen printing that may put remind readers of Caldecott Honor artist Margaret Chodos-Irvine's work.

Juicy language ("Feathers fly, dusty squall./ Flap, flop--chooky sprawl!") builds to the climax, and the artwork reveals one last laugh for littlest book lovers, who will want to repeat this delectable rhyme over and over. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness