Bohemian Gospel, Dana Chamblee Carpenter's debut novel, involves magic and religion, and a young girl named Mouse, who lives at the intersection of the two. Mouse was given no proper name and handed over to the Church as an infant to be raised by the monks and nuns of the Teplá Abbey. With the power to sense things that others cannot and to manipulate the world around her in mysterious ways, Mouse has always known she's not a normal girl--just as she's known she couldn't remain at the Abbey forever. When young King Ottakar arrives at the Abbey injured by a traitor's arrow, Mouse does everything she can to save his life. Caught up in keeping the king alive, she soon finds herself the object of his attention and is swept off to court. There, she is forced to come to terms with the power that lies within her as she fights to take control of her life and her destiny.

In Bohemian Gospel, Carpenter expertly combines elements of gothic fantasy with historical details of 13th-century Bohemia. The combination creates an atmosphere of mysticism and tension: a setting that mirrors Mouse's own struggles to understand herself. As the novel moves through Mouse's life--loves and losses, births and deaths--it quickens in pace, ultimately charging ahead toward a surprising conclusion that is as epic as it is emotional. With a strong and nuanced central character and a rich sense of mystery, Bohemian Gospel is breathtaking. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

In Charmed Particles, first-time novelist Chrissy Kolaya incorporates physics, cultural assimilation and family friendships into a story of small-town political conflict.

When the U.S. Department of Energy announces that it is considering building a Superconducting Super Collider that would replace the National Research Accelerator Lab in Nicolet, Ill., theoretical physicist Abhijat Mital is excited by what it could mean for his career, but many of Nicolet's citizens don't share his enthusiasm.

Mayoral candidate Rose Winchester opposes the SSC, and popular opinion, fueled by fear of the project's environmental impact and resentment over the potential loss of homes to its construction, seems to be on her side. However, Rose's scientifically inclined teen daughter, Lily, aligns herself with Abhijat, the father of her best friend, Meena, in support of the project. Meanwhile, Meena and her mother, Sarala, more attuned to their community than Abhijat is, both have reservations. Sarala has spent more than a decade since moving from India trying to assimilate into the Midwestern suburbs, and is torn by understanding both her neighbors' concerns and her husband's hopes for the project; Meena just wants to fit in with her high-school class.

The early chapters of Charmed Particles are largely episodic and focused on developing the characters; by the time the SSC proposal is introduced, the reader has become invested in these people's lives and how they will be changed by it, no matter what the outcome. Kolaya's emphasis on personal relationships helps her portray the public controversy over the SSC with sympathy to all sides, and the result is a story that engages both heart and mind. --Florinda Pendley Vasquez, blogger at The 3 R's Blog: Reading, 'Riting, and Randomness

The 6:41 to Paris chronicles a train ride in which two people seated next to each other by happenstance recognize one another immediately. The story is told alternately by Cécile and Philippe, both in their 40s, who haven't seen each other in some 27 years. They once dated for three or four months. They shared one painful, embarrassing, cruel week in London, a youthful dating disaster. They are both desperately trying to pretend they don't know each other.

Once a golden boy, Philippe has become flabby and amounts to nothing more than a TV and VCR salesman in a superstore. Once plain and forgettable, Cécile has become a very attractive workaholic who has scarcely missed a day of work in 20 years and founded a hugely successful Parisian shop selling organic beauty products.

Will they talk? Will they acknowledge each other? Jean-Philippe Blondel has created a realistic and delightfully familiar dilemma as a springboard for his bittersweet comedy about two people mildly dissatisfied with their lives, who share an unhealed moment in their pasts. It's told almost entirely in thoughts. Their two intertwined interior monologues are braided through the narrative, interrupted periodically by the few words they actually exchange over an accidental bump or a dropped pen.

Their poignant attempts to reconcile themselves to their past mistakes, and their struggle to come to terms with their awkward forced proximity, create a compelling and touching suspense throughout this delicate, tightly controlled little anti-romance. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.

In this refreshingly innovative detective novel, Hammett Unwritten author Gordon McAlpine follows the life of a character cut--via the vicious blue editing pencil--from a novel. 

Takumi Sato is a Japanese-American in the Manzanar relocation camp during World War II who has written a novel featuring Sam Sumida, a Japanese-American sleuth investigating his wife's murder. In order for the book to be published, Sato has to agree to change his own name, his protagonist's ethnicity and various other elements of the work. But Sumida has come to life and simply will not die.

Sumida walks into a movie theater on December 6, 1941, to watch The Maltese Falcon, and emerges after what he believes is a few hours to discover it's January 22, 1942, and his world is in complete chaos. No one knows who he is--in fact, there's no evidence he ever existed--but everyone is hostile toward him. With nowhere to go and a million baffling questions, Sumida sets to work unraveling this isolating conundrum.

Woman with a Blue Pencil is the intricate plaiting of excerpts from Sato's novel, The Orchid and the Secret Agent, published as William Thorne; correspondence from Sato's editor, the woman with the blue pencil; and a novella merely labeled The Revised. McAlpine ingeniously blends the three plots to create a multi-dimensional, absorbing mystery, simultaneously examining the shameful incarceration of Japanese-Americans in camps by the U.S. government. He also takes hilarious, yet subtle, jabs at the tropes of "commercial" fiction. 

McAlpine's creative talent is rare and this novel is an exceptional literary treat. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

Columbus, the hit man known as the Silver Bear in Derek Haas's Assassin trilogy, is back in A Different Lie, juggling work, life as a husband, and being a father to his three-year-old son. Conveniently, his wife, Risina, is also his fence, the liaison between client and assassin. Columbus is employed by the "dark men," shadowy figures in the U.S. government, and his latest assignment is to take out the young hotshot assassin Castillo.

Though Columbus is famous for pulling off hits deemed impossible by most, he soon realizes he's more than met his match with Castillo. It's like going up against himself, for Castillo has even studied Columbus's methods. And Columbus, with a wife and kid, has vulnerabilities, while Castillo has nothing to lose.

A protagonist is only as strong as his opponent, and Columbus and Castillo are a formidable pair. A screenwriter for movies such as Wanted and 3:10 to Yuma, Haas keeps the action flying while deftly juxtaposing Columbus's work with the realities of his home life. The assassin is seconds away from taking out a target when he learns his pregnant wife's water has broken. While he's on another assignment, Risina calls to say "I love you," adding, "Kill this man so you can come home to us." The duality makes him an accessible antihero; when he comes to a difficult decision at the end, he's not doing it as the infamous Silver Bear but as just a regular dad. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

History teacher Jack Felter returns to his hometown in Ohio to care for his sick father. While he is home, he picks up the trail of his old friend Tony, a psychiatrist who went missing three years before. As he pursues the truth about what happened, he meets Cole, Tony's last patient, who could very well be at the center of one of the largest conspiracies ever fathomed.

What if history was neither the official narrative nor shared memory at all? What if history was everything that had been forgotten?

The Great Forgetting proposes an alternative reality where the United States lost World War II and the Nazis conquered America. A world where Nikola Tesla invented the atomic bomb and Stephen Hawking invented a machine that allowed everyone to forget the past collectively. In search of these histories' origins, Jack and Cole wind up in far-flung reaches of the Earth--from a secret underground facility in the Catskills to a lost island in the Pacific--in order to discover the truth about their own pasts and the project known as "The Great Forgetting."

This novel is a conspiracy goldmine. Working their way through this heady plot are aliens, Area 51, HAARP, 9/11, fluoride, Malaysia Airlines flight 370, the lost continent of Mu and a whole lot more. There is a conspiracy for everyone at play here, and it is evident Renner had as much fun putting them together as readers will have figuring them out. --Jarret Middleton, author, freelance editor

Unlike most retellings of fairytales, with familiar plots and characters in a different setting, Catherynne M. Valente's Six-Gun Snow White offers readers an entirely new story that gestures toward the original without taking on the traditional trappings. In Valente's version, readers find no dwarves, poison apples or prince, but the tale maintains a deep connection to the original. In an American West as mythical as Snow White, narrated in rough dialect, Valente firmly nestles readers in an unpredictable, gun-toting adventure.

Mr. H makes his fortune in Nevada's silver mines using his supernatural knack for finding precious gems. Just as the earth gives itself to him, so, too, he expects people to do what he wants. Mr. H forces a Crow woman to marry him by threatening her family and their land, but the woman dies after giving birth to their daughter. He keeps his daughter hidden on his expansive property, building her a private secluded world. Her only companion is her gun, with which she is an expert shot. By the time Mr. H remarries, his first marriage and his daughter have long been forgotten by all. When the new wife discovers the young girl and attacks her for her dark skin, she mocks the daughter by giving her the name Snow White. After suffering years of abuse, Snow decides to run away, beginning her adventure.

Valente creates moments where readers recognize allusions to the original fairytale of Snow White, like a tavern having only seven barstools. Yet readers encounter these nods with a thrill of the unexpected. Six-Gun Snow White gives this old story new magic. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company

A universally recognized yet enigmatic figure, Queen Elizabeth II is now England's longest reigning monarch. Most Britons can hardly remember life without her on the throne, but she was in some ways an accidental ruler. In the biography Young Elizabeth, Kate Williams explores Elizabeth's childhood and the turbulent family politics that set the stage for her reign.

Williams (Ambition and Desire) begins with Abdication Day, when Elizabeth's Uncle David (King Edward VIII) made his historic decision to give up the throne and marry Wallis Simpson, a surprise move that made Elizabeth's father king and put her first in line to the throne. From there, Williams relates the love story of Elizabeth's parents, her cozy early years spent in the nursery with her little sister, Margaret, and the abrupt changes to their family life caused by the abdication and World War II.

Meticulously organized, with a strong sense of duty, Elizabeth was well suited for the throne in some ways, though she lacked a thorough education. Much is made of Elizabeth's experiences driving an ambulance during the war (though even there she was set apart from her compatriots). More relevant, and more interesting, is Williams's portrait of the complicated ties among the royal family, including the close but often fractious relationship between Elizabeth and Margaret. Williams does her best to demystify the woman behind the crown, but the queen's personality and private life--so carefully guarded for six decades--ultimately remain elusive.

Part juicy family drama, part coming-of-age story in a royal setting, Young Elizabeth gives readers a new (if limited) angle on Her Majesty the Queen. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Microbes have existed for billions of years, but though we felt their effects, scientists only began to learn about them in the last hundred years. Our knowledge of the microbial world has blossomed in the 21st century and is expanding every day. Rob DeSalle (The Brain) and Susan Perkins are curators at the American Museum of Natural History, and Welcome to the Microbiome is an excellent introduction to this exciting scientific field, clearly written for a general audience and illustrated with fine black-and-white drawings by Patricia J. Wynne.

Your body is home to about "ten thousand different species of microbes... approximately the same number as the species of birds that exist on the planet." Although many of us may have been taught to think of "germs" and "bacteria" as threats, most of the species we live with are harmless or even beneficial to us, and DeSalle and Perkins argue that "our definition of what a pathogen is clearly needs to change." They cover the origins and definitions of life; the relationships of the "three great domains of life--Archaea, Eukaryota and Bacteria"; our attempts to detect and identify them, including genetic sequencing; how immune systems work in higher and lower animals; and how microbes travel, interact and affect us, including studies of microbes and roller derby teams, subways, obesity and mental health. They emphasize that this is not just a subject for scientists: "Our very survival may well depend on understanding, and respecting, the ecology and evolutionary context of the microbiomes in and on us." --Sara Catterall

The United States Department of Defense has called climate change the biggest "threat multiplier" worldwide because of its potential to magnify and exacerbate the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty and conflict. What has been done climate-wise cannot be reversed; what humans can do, as Bill Nye "the Science Guy" (Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation) proposes, is consider lifestyles that reduce the carbon footprint and treat the planet as homeowners rather than as short-term renters.

In Unstoppable, Nye provides a hopeful and pragmatic blueprint of tempering climate change by applying his engineering skills and existing science to tackle the problem. At the heart of this conundrum lie inefficient sources of energy that produce significant waste, like farming methods that have proven to be the heaviest emitters of greenhouse gasses, and fossil fuels such as gasoline, of which two-thirds comes out a tailpipe as waste. Nye argues for the need to find cleaner, efficient carbon-free energy alternatives that "put energy in the bank," like nuclear power, solar and wind power. He discusses the pros and cons of natural gas over coal burning, and the viability of reverse osmosis to desalinate seawater, mimicking the actions of Florida mangroves.

Maintaining the status quo will lead to staggering economic costs, but Nye believes that sustainability doesn't have to mean sacrificing the modern comforts of living. "The longest journey starts with a simple step... lifestyle changes that add up to collectively change the world." It's time for each person to answer that call and do their fair share. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

Animal lovers and taxonomists of all ages will go ape for the charming British import Creaturepedia, a visual explosion of more than 600 creatures, illustrated with Adrienne Barman's whimsical, cartoonish artwork--delicate line drawings of richly colored animals, usually with funny and expressive googly eyes. The most distinctive aspect of this magnificent book--aside from the fantastic fauna--is the unusually creative way that the animals are categorized. Each lively spread is populated by a menagerie of animals, labeled by name, with the sparest of details to help explain how each fits into its designated category.

The section called "The prickly ones," for example, includes the bay shrimp, and its tiny caption says only "has a spiky horn above eyes." "The brainboxes" category is populated by intelligent creatures such as the Asian elephant, the chimpanzee ("good at problem-solving"), the parakeet, the Jungle crow, the common octopus, the rat, the dolphin ("self aware"), the honeybee and the red wood ant. The "canary-yellows" embrace everything yellow, it seems, but an actual canary: the blue-cheeked butterfly fish, the banana slug, pineapplefish, etc. The "faithful" include the agile gibbon, the lovebird ("mates for life"), the dik-dik and the Mongolian gerbil. The "regal?" The lion, golden eagle, white tiger, king cobra. Other intriguing categories among the 41 total are "The Lilliputians," "The fierce," "The endangered," "The show-offs," "The munch-it-uppers" and "The mythical."  Amusing interactions between various animals on the page add yet another dimension to this fabulous book that guarantees hours of contented browsing. A gem. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness

"Is it fun in the yard,/ Nellie Belle, Nellie Belle?/ Is it fun in the yard,/ Nellie Belle?" Australian author Mem Fox (Time for Bed; Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes) brings her preschooler-pitch-perfect rhythm and repetition to Nellie Belle, a cheerful picture book so melodic it could easily be sung.

Nellie Belle is a reddish-brown pooch with a pink collar who pants and prances her way through an eventful day in a seaside town. She digs a hole, moves through the town greeting everyone she meets (begging at the bakery, howling with street musicians, accepting a pat on the head), goes to the beach to chase seagulls (who chase her back), and even jumps in the sea. "Is it fun at the beach, Nellie Belle, Nellie Belle? / Is it fun at the beach, Nellie Belle?" She goes to the park... but what's this? Possums hiding out in the park's dark shrubbery? Nellie Belle looks scared--it is decidedly not fun in the park. She races back home, retracing her steps because "It's best on the bed, Nellie Belle."

Mike Austin's (Junkyard; Monsters Love Colors) colorful, friendly illustrations resemble textured tissue-paper collage, a bold, simple style that harmonizes splendidly with Fox's bold, simple story. Wonderful touches and comical details abound, such as the hole in the fence that reveals beach-bound surfers, the kinetic orbits around Nellie Belle's wagging tail, the beach ball that bounces into Lighthouse Park (into the paws of a possum), and the abandonment, then reclaiming of Nellie Belle's beloved teddy bear at the end. Home sweet home. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness