In a rich, atmospheric novel, brothers Hunter and Lawton Loggins paddle down Georgia's Altamaha River in kayaks, carrying their father's ashes to his final resting place. Taylor Brown (Fallen Land) also transports his audience to the 16th century to discover a French expedition on the same river that included Jacques le Moyne, the first European artist to travel to North America. As the mystery and mystique of the ancient waterway washes up on the shores of both time periods, the long-hidden secrets of a father and those of an early explorer weave together to create a beautifully layered story of love and regret, fidelity and honor, courage and cowardice. Brown tests the limits of humanity along the River of Kings, and the result is a gripping novel.

The Altamaha demands to be treated as a character. Brown willingly complies with exquisite imagery and a deference befitting royalty, writing: "Bald cypress rise round and gray from the banks on roots splayed like the feet of elephants, their gnarled toes marked by dark lines of old flood. Their limbs spread horizontally, edged high over the water like rotors, each draped with long beards of moss."

Readers are sure to experience the journey through all of their senses. The inclusion of maps and illustrations to coordinate with le Moyne's story enhances this effect, making The River of Kings a dynamic reading experience that fully engages its audience. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

In The Iguana Tree, Michel Stone told the harrowing story of a border crossing that resulted in the loss of a child, betrayal by loved ones and exploitation by law enforcement on both sides. Border Child addresses the aftermath of that journey and the emotional and economic consequences that have ensued.

Nearly three years after their deportation, Hector and Lilia Santos are back in their remote village of Puerto Isadore. Despite adding a son to their family, both harbor guilt over the disappearance of Alejandra, their infant daughter: Lilia for leaving her daughter in the hands of an unknown female coyote, and Hector for his naiveté and for abandoning his family in his pursuit of the dream in el Norte. When Hector spots Emmanuel--Lilia's former boyfriend and the man responsible for connecting her to the treacherous coyote--in a nearby town, he decides to follow him. Hector once again must leave a very pregnant Lilia and their son under tenuous circumstances to discover the fate of their daughter.

Stone poetically considers the marital pressures and emotional toll that comes with the trauma of losing a child: "Our marriage is like a shattered clay pot whose shards have been glued back in place. The thing is not what it once was, but it's been salvaged." She also puts an authentic face to the problem of immigration and the price paid for daring to live a dream: the loss of innocence, the tearing apart of families, and the devastation and desperation of dashed hopes. Gripping, visceral and beautifully written, Border Child carries the potential to stir awareness and trigger debate about an increasingly controversial issue. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

C.J. Box's Vicious Circle brings back the Saddlestring rodeo star Dallas Cates, who in an earlier Joe Pickett thriller dumped Joe's rodeo-loving daughter April in harm's way, forcing Joe to "go western" on the whole sleazy Cates family. Now Dallas is hell-bent on revenge. Joe, his wife, Marybeth, and their three daughters are in Dallas's crosshairs as he gathers two low-life ex-cons and an axe-wielding tweaker to torment the Picketts. Box's Wyoming is full of shoot-first individualists with little love for Washington (or the local game warden), but Joe is a lousy shot, a careful man and a champion of fair play. His loyal wingman, ex-special forces rifleman Nate, keeps Joe's contact number filed under Dudley Do-Right. But when it comes to kin, Joe holds nothing back.

What sets Box's Pickett series apart is the heavy load of family dynamics. The only guy in a houseful of women, Joe gets his macho posturing knocked down all the time. His attempts to balance nurturing his family while corralling the violent and the corrupt engender a compassionate heart in the not-quite-social Joe. The remote mountain landscape and natural bounty of Twelve Sleep County make for a stunning backdrop to Box's swiftly tangling plots and his sharp eye for little character tells--like the governor's heiress wife who'd "had enough face-tightening medical procedures to appear perpetually astonished." Vicious Circle brings us the comfort of old friends, old enemies and a tasty bunch of new oddballs and losers. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Sally Andrew (Recipes for Love and Murder) stirs up another engaging mystery in her second Tannie Maria novel, The Satanic Mechanic. Although South African journalist Maria van Harten  (affectionately called "Tannie" or "Auntie" by her younger colleagues) relishes her role in helping others with cooking and relationship advice, her own love life is more complicated. Still haunted by memories of her abusive husband (now deceased), Tannie Maria is hesitant to open herself up to her still-new boyfriend, Detective Henk Kannemeyer. When Tannie Maria sees a man poisoned at an arts festival and witnesses another murder days later, her relationship with Henk (who is investigating both cases) becomes much more fraught.

"I was maybe too hungry for love and ended up with murder on my plate," Tannie Maria admits as the novel opens. Determined to move past the dark memories of her marriage, she starts attending a local counseling group run by a gentle former Satanist named Ricus, the titular mechanic. But as Maria begins to confide in her fellow group members, Ricus's shadowy past comes back to haunt them.

Tannie Maria's first-person narration is studded with Afrikaans words, most of them related to food, and features a sheaf of recipes at the end. Andrew weaves together the two murders with issues of land rights and discrimination against indigenous peoples, while gently nudging her protagonist forward--not minimizing her past wounds but helping her deal with her pain in new ways.

In short, Tannie Maria's second adventure is like the meals that come from her kitchen: a bit eclectic, with many different influences, but ultimately a satisfying feast for readers. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

In the 22nd century, humanity has colonized the solar system, including the moon. The Society of Cousins is the most misunderstood lunar colony, a matriarchy where men are given enormous social and sexual liberties, but not the right to vote. The leaders of other colonies--particularly the patriarchal Persepolis--are suspicious of tyranny, and send a delegation to investigate the condition of men.

When the Society of Cousins' biggest male celebrity tries to gain custody of his son, he unwittingly fuels a rebellion led by his volatile lover. In Persepolis, an expat from the Society has married into a wealthy ice-mining family. When he's sent back on a dangerous mission, he must choose between conflicting loyalties.

If the literary zeitgeist has been dominated by dystopias, The Moon and the Other evokes Dickens and H.G. Wells. It's science fiction with heart, romance with idea density. It's utopian and it's savvy. Kessel's droll, sideways humor surfaces periodically, as in "uplifted" dogs and casual allusions to punitive "debtors freezers." He explores gender identity and politics, portraying the complexity of social customs and relationships with neither jaundice nor bullishness. Focused on the lives of his characters, Kessel keeps pace yet makes room for his meticulously thought-out future world.

It's a grownup vision: not because it's serious, but because it's wondrous. It extrapolates not just society and technology, but real-world emotions and human behavior as well. This moon is a place we've never seen before in fiction. --Zak Nelson, writer and bookseller

Fans probably know Ernie Johnson Jr. best as the Sports Emmy Award-winning host who sits alongside basketball greats Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Shaquille O'Neal on TNT's Inside the NBA. While Johnson always shows up meticulously prepared to talk sports on-camera, off-camera he's had an unscripted life that has thrown many obstacles his way. Johnson is a man whose Christian faith has been tested, and, in the process, his spirituality has been strengthened. Unscripted, a moving and multifaceted memoir, probes some of Johnson's personal detours while sharing the many joys that have defined who he is and how he has come to lead his life.

Johnson followed in the footsteps of his father, a great major league baseball pitcher who later became a legendary sportscaster. Father and son forged a strong bond that instilled a sense of integrity and character in Ernie Jr. as he built his own 40-year career in broadcasting. Unscripted offers stories from Johnson's childhood, as well as funny and unforgettable on-the-job anecdotes. Details about Johnson's personal life include his marriage to loving wife, Cheryl; their six children, four of whom were adopted; one son's battle with muscular dystrophy; and Johnson's own non-Hodgkins lymphoma, an ordeal that deepened his faith and wisdom. Throughout, he offers positive, inspirational lessons for readers and a hopeful message about learning to appreciate every moment of life. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Although Charlton Heston wrote several excellent autobiographies (including The Actor's Life: Journals 1956-1976 and In the Arena), Marc Eliot's hefty, compelling and intimate biography stands as the definitive portrait of the complicated and controversial Oscar-winning actor and political activist.

Prolific biographer Eliot (Cary Grant) creates a captivating portrait with the help of Heston's son and daughter (who had no editorial control) and new interviews with dozens of Heston's friends and foes. Eliot also uses the actor's files and unpublished journals. Surprisingly blunt about Heston's acting style, Eliot writes, "He played his characters literally, on their and his surface, at least in part because he was never asked to do more." And after Touch of Evil's box office failure in 1958, "he would henceforth seek out the conventional, the mainstream, and the commercial, and resist films that were personal artistic statements."

Charlton Heston offers plenty of juicy, behind-the-scenes tales of the making of some of his classic films, including Planet of the Apes, Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments (where Yul Brynner and director Cecil B. DeMille kept their exhausting pace thanks to amphetamine injections and pills). Even more fascinating is Heston's political evolution: from a liberal Kennedy supporter, marching with Martin Luther King in 1963, to a disillusioned independent who eventually--right around the time his film career sputtered out in the 1980s--became a Republican gun rights advocate and NRA spokesperson. Eliot's Charlton Heston: Hollywood's Last Icon is an absorbing, haunting and richly detailed portrait of the iconic actor. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

Gustave Flaubert's evolving connection with political ideals and disillusionment drives Peter Brooks's fascinating work of literary history, Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of a Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year.

Literary critic Brooks (Reading for the Plot) focuses his discerning mind on Flaubert's underappreciated novel, Sentimental Education. He convincingly connects the book Flaubert considered his masterpiece to the violent and tumultuous political history of 19th-century France. Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris explores Flaubert's own assertion that serious reading of Sentimental Education would have prevented the devastation wrought in Paris in 1871, following the Franco-Prussian War, when the French Third Republic bloodily suppressed the Paris Commune.

Sentimental Education, Brooks skillfully argues, was written about the ill-fated revolution in 1848 that led to the French Second Republic, a failed revolution in which Flaubert foresaw the irrationality and violent sectarianism that would later tear his country apart. To make his case, Brooks includes Flaubert's correspondence with friend George Sand as well as passages from the novel, all of which display Flaubert's singular talent for description, characterization and mood. Moreover, Brooks's careful, sophisticated and nuanced scholarship pieces together a larger impression of troubled modernity, and reveals Flaubert's self-consciousness as an author in the face of cataclysmic historical events. Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris is a profound look at the personality and beliefs of a literary giant, a work as entertaining as it is probing. --Scott Neuffer, freelance journalist, poet and fiction author

The Evangelicals is a comprehensive history of white evangelical movements in the United States, geared to provide a deeper understanding of present-day evangelicals and their influence. Journalist and historian Frances FitzGerald (Fire in the Lake) presents nearly 300 years of complex ideologies, schisms, social reforms and energetically creative theology in a well-organized, eye-opening narrative.

FitzGerald locates some of the deepest roots of U.S. culture in the two Protestant revivals of the 18th and early 19th centuries, known as the Great Awakenings. The revivalists of these movements transformed the rigid and hierarchical colonial society into the more democratic and free-thinking one of the 19th century. Their version of Christianity dominated the U.S. for a hundred years and "brought a populist anti-intellectual strain into American Protestantism" that still reverberates in American distrust of expertise and belief in individual freedom and conscience.

Early revivalists lobbied for the separation of church and state, and many fought against social hierarchies and religious organizations. But they eventually split over the abolition of slavery and the civil war. In the South, "the rejection of emancipation led to the rejection of all social reform," as well as a separation of religion from social and political life that mostly held until the Moral Majority and Roe v. Wade.

This book is not only for those with a particular interest in religious history; it is for anyone with a serious interest in American social movements, politics and culture. It is a history that strongly re-emphasizes the evolution of a nation, and those who hope to shape the future are wise to study the past. --Sara Catterall

The essays in The Songs of Trees by David Haskell are contemplative, lyrical and filled with insights on nature that come from years of dedicated observation. Haskell has a deep understanding of the complexities of nature and the interconnectedness of living things. These relationships can be seen through the interactions of a variety of trees around the globe with the birds, insects, animals, air, water and soil that surround them. His descriptions at times are like eulogies to dying trees that have fallen due to an encroaching sea, and at other times akin to the notes an oenologist might write for a fine wine: "The golden sap between dark plates of ponderosa bark has the vigorous odor of rosin and turpentine: oily, acidic, and bright."

Haskell studies the various microcosmic layers of plants, insects and water among the branches and leaves of a giant ceibo tree deep in the Amazon jungle. He listens to the rain as it falls on orchids, bromeliads, strangler figs and philodendron leaves, and hears hundreds of bats, the croak of frogs, the squawk of scarlet macaws and the call of howler monkeys from upper branches where the energy is vibratory and intense.

Throughout his observations, he deftly interweaves a deeper and broader scope: history, war, climate change, industrialization--the latter of which is threatening not just to these trees, but to all living things that share this planet. If anyone ever doubted that life is dependent on symbiotic relationships, then reading Haskell's The Songs of Trees will change that opinion forever. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Town Is by the Sea offers some of the most beautiful paintings of sunshine on water ever painted, and that is more than enough reason to track it down. But Toronto children's librarian Joanne Schwartz's (Our Corner Grocery Store; Pinny in Summer) extraordinary picture book, illustrated by Sydney Smith (Sidewalk Flowers), is also a moving visual portrayal of what it means to send humans deep into the earth, deep under the sea, to dig for coal.

In a 1950s mining town in Nova Scotia, a boy and his family live in a house overlooking the water. The chummy boy narrator describes it in conversational style: "It goes like this--house, road, grassy cliff, sea." When he wakes up, "it goes like this": "first I hear the seagulls, then I hear a dog barking, a car goes by on the shore road, someone slams a door and yells good morning." As cheerful days of baloney sandwiches and sunny shoreline ambling are vividly chronicled, Smith intermittently yanks the reader down into the blackness of the coal miner's subterranean realm, where the boy's father pushes his way forward through a claustrophobic tunnel.

Echoing a longstanding mining tradition, it seems likely that the boy will eventually follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather: "One day, it will be my turn," he says matter-of-factly. Coal is frequently in the headlines these days, and this book puts a human face on the centuries-old practice of coal mining. More abstractly, Town Is by the Sea is a powerful and profound work of art that tweaks our perspective and transcends its subject. --Karin Snelson, freelance writer and editor

In the cat-centric world of CatStronauts: Mission Moon, when a global energy crisis threatens lights-out for the planet, the president of the United States--a handsome dark-furred feline--calls the World's Best Scientist for advice. Not to worry, though; the bespectacled scientist has a plan. Four brilliant catstronauts--Major Meowser, Waffles, Pom Pom and Blanket--"will fly to the moon and build a solar power plant on the surface." The president is sold (fantasizing about newspaper headlines: "Moon Power Saves World: Coolest President in History!") and the mission is a go.

At Catsup Headquarters, the catstronauts train and pack for their voyage, while engineers race against time--literally, as huge clocks have been installed all over HQ to "keep us on task"--constructing a new spaceship from a massive carton labeled SATURN VI ROCKET KIT. Will they make it to the moon before the world goes dark? Only time (56 days, 16 hours, 37 minutes and 12 seconds) will tell.

Author and illustrator Drew Brockington rockets to a terrific start with his debut graphic novel series (book 2, Race to Mars, was released simultaneously with Mission Moon). Clever feline gags (Waffles is caught licking his paw during a meeting) mesh with realistic but accessible space lingo and technology. Full-color illustrations make each squarish catstronaut's personality pop: whether it's Major Meowser's raging, tiny-fanged expression when Blanket and Waffles have fallen asleep on the job or the commander-in-chief's bug-eyed face as he "spitooo"s his coffee while reading the paper (where he apparently gets all his intel). Cat fanciers, space enthusiasts, STEM educators and comic book fans alike will purr with delight at Brockington's exciting and funny series. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor