In Where the Dead Sit Talking, Sequoyah is a Cherokee boy struggling in Oklahoma's foster care system. He survives by disengaging from those around him, roaming free at night and making his own way in the world. But there are rules to follow, the threat of being rejected by yet another foster family and the cold reality of his mother's incarceration keeping Sequoyah tethered to the day-to-day confines of his life.

These are hefty topics by any measure, a glimpse of childhood lived on the edge of mainstream society. Brandon Hobson (Deep Elum) undercuts the severity, though, by endowing Sequoyah with a sensitive, innocent voice, and fortifying him with the kindness of strangers as well as the spiritual legacy of his forefathers. Liz, his social worker, and the Trouts, his foster parents, do all they can to help Sequoyah settle into his new home. Most importantly, he meets Rosemary, another foster teen living with the Trouts. They form what Rosemary refers to as a spiritual connection, partly through their shared Native American heritage, but it's far more than that for Sequoyah. Rosemary, fighting her own demons, is the only person he lets enter his heart.

Sequoyah's description of the anxiety he feels when moving into a new foster home is especially poignant, given that most of us take our surroundings and the comforts of home for granted. Hobson's gift to the reader is the hopeful persistence he instills in Sequoyah, despite his challenges with identity and belonging. He is a young man who is clearly scarred but thankfully not defeated. --Shahina Piyarali, writer and reviewer

Grace Moran, married off by her Aunt Violet to the older, remote Judge Moran, is enthralled when she meets Dr. Vikram Fernandes, who is from India, at a Dublin hospital. But it's the 1950s, and prejudice runs deep. People are shocked by Grace and Vikrim's friendship, especially when that friendship turns to love and she becomes pregnant.

Aunt Violet, determined that society will not find out, sets to work, and after the birth, she convinces Moran to have Grace committed to an asylum, telling her that her baby died. Violet tells Vikram that Grace died in childbirth, and he returns to India, brokenhearted.

Thirty years later, Emma Moran returns home to Ireland after the death of her father, only to find shocking revelations left and right. Learning that her mother didn't die in childbirth, but was committed to an asylum, is completely horrifying, and that's only the beginning as Judge Moran's will reveals even more surprises.

Ann O'Loughlin (The Secrets of Roscarbury Hall) has created a complex and interesting world in The Judge's Wife. Flashing back and forth between Grace and Vikram's relationship in the 1950s, and Emma's and Vikram's lives in the 1980s, O'Loughlin shows how drastically the world changed in those three decades. She slowly reveals more information, keeping the reader guessing about Grace's ultimate fate. The perfect blend of romance and intrigue, The Judge's Wife is a satisfying historical novel, and a fine way to spend an afternoon. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson, Ariz.

In A Dangerous Crossing, the fourth Rachel Getty and Esa Khattak mystery, Ausma Zehanat Khan (Among the Ruins) once again embeds a compelling whodunit within the context of greater political and humanitarian strife. Audrey Clare, a Canadian aide worker in Greece, has gone missing following a double homicide in one of the Syrian refugee camps on the small Greek island of Lesvos. The prime minister himself asks Inspector Khattak and his partner Getty to investigate the murders and Audrey's disappearance--but quietly, so as not to disrupt the tense politics surrounding the resettlement of Syrian refugees in Canada.

The mystery at the heart of A Dangerous Crossing stands alone, though references to the characters' pasts throughout the early parts of the novel may be confusing for those new to the series. As the story moves more determinedly into the disappearance of Audrey Clare, however, Khan's skill at conveying the very human impact of a case becomes clear. This exploration is by no means limited to the case at hand, as Khan skillfully sheds light on the very human side of the war in Syria--and the rest of the world's failure to grasp that humanity. Though a single novel cannot shift this narrative, A Dangerous Crossing does an excellent job of portraying the situation in Syria in a way that will help readers recognize hard truths. Moreover, it does so while drawing them into the type of carefully woven, multi-layered mystery that has become characteristic of Khan's expert novels. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

In his follow-up to The Defense, Steve Cavanagh puts his con artist-turned-lawyer protagonist, Eddie Flynn, between a rock and a hard place. Those tend to be the situations Flynn's best suited to deal with, but this may finally be the one to beat him.

The Plea opens with an unwelcome cadre of strangers in Flynn's office. After incapacitating two, Flynn learns his uninvited guests are federal agents there to secure his help. All they need him to do is convince a millionaire arrested for murder to drop his current lawyer, sign Flynn and take a plea deal that involves testifying against the law firm he fired. The tech genius is guilty, the agents assure Flynn. But just in case he needs additional motivation, the agents are threatening his wife's freedom--if Flynn refuses to help, the FBI has evidence to send his wife to jail for a very long time. This persuades him, until he meets David Child, the accused murderer. Flynn becomes convinced Child is innocent, and despite his history, Flynn can't live with himself if he allows an innocent man to plead guilty. But he can't let his wife go to jail, either, so he has to figure out how to finagle everyone's freedom--and safety.

While Cavanagh has a tendency to overdo detail, especially with legal procedure, he still manages to maintain a high level of suspense and intrigue. The overwhelming strengths of The Plea, however, lie in the characters. They are idiosyncratic, empathetic and fun, and readers will greedily turn pages to learn their fate. The verdict: a winner. --Jen Forbus, freelancer

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is 200 years old, and countless film adaptations have whittled it into a story we feel we all know. So, too, with Pride and Prejudice, published only five years earlier. But in fallow corners of these novels, John Kessel has found old parts and made them into something electrifyingly new.

It's been 13 years since Elizabeth married Darcy. Pompous and uncouth middle Bennet sister Mary has met her dwindling marital prospects with resignation, and a late--and incomplete--self-awareness. Taken for granted at home, she goes with younger sister Kitty to Pemberley to visit the Darcys. There Mary is smitten by another houseguest, the brooding Swiss scientist Victor Frankenstein.

Frankenstein is aloof, which makes sense: he's fleeing a creature who threatens his destruction if he doesn't create a mate for him. And that creature has followed him to England. But Mary sees in Victor a kindred spirit, a man of learning who doesn't laugh at her intellect. It doesn't matter that he's obsessive, emotionally unavailable and of dubious ethics.

This mismatch alone makes for a gleefully brisk and witty plot. But Kessel, ever probing issues of gender norms and humanism, strikes an even deeper vein. When Mary confronts the creature in a tavern, he tells her of Victor's plans "to make me happy." But Mary, who has seen her share of mismatched partners, retorts, "You put too much on having a mate." Kessel's Pride and Prometheus blasts away the pretense and self-pity of the misunderstood monster. --Zak Nelson, events and marketing manager, Third Place Books, Seattle, Wash.

Garo magazine cartoonist Seiichi Hayashi transformed the world of comics 40 years ago with this groundbreaking, atmospheric manga, about two young animators consumed in a failing, and often tempestuous, relationship. Nominated in 2009 for the Harvey Award in the category of Best American Edition of Foreign Material, Red Colored Elegy was inspired by the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, and combined elements of high and popular art to create timeless story with widespread appeal for adult audiences. This reissued manga includes an insightful contribution from comics historian Ryan Holmberg.

Ichiro and Sachiko live together in an almost primal existence, sleeping, eating, listening to music, having sex and drawing (when the work exists) in a sparsely furnished room. They dabble in politics while hoping to make their mark in the comics and animation world. Their relationship falls apart when ambition and personal tragedy take their collective tolls on their daily lives.

There is a voyeuristic and cinematic element to the restrained pen and inked drawings. Scenes of wind, rain, swaying trees and roiling oceans mirror the flaws in their relationship: carefree days of sex and sleep are punctuated by scenes of Ichiro hunched over a drawing board while Sachiko curls her body inward in a protective hug. Quiet moments of celebration strain under the soul-crushing weight of their doomed relationship. Hayashi depicts this couple in decline through stark black-and-white landscapes, music lyrics and background scenes emphasizing the weight of unspoken emotions between the two.

Ultimately Red Colored Elegy transcends manga, depicting universal themes as vignettes recognizable to any who have suffered through love. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

Czech writer and translator Heda Margolius Kovály (1919-2010) was living in Prague in 1941, when she, her husband and parents were among the first 5,000 Jews taken by the Nazis to Łódź Ghetto in Poland. In 1944, Heda was separated from her family during the selection process at Auschwitz. Her parents were gassed, her husband sent to Dachau and she was sentenced to slave labor. As the war neared its end, Heda escaped from a death march to Bergen-Belsen and returned to Prague, where terrified former friends and acquaintances offered little help. Her husband, Rudolf Margolius, survived the war, and took a job with Czechoslovakia's new Communist government. In 1952, Rudolf was among 14 defendants (11 of whom were Jewish) convicted in the Slánský show trial. He was executed under treason charges fabricated by Stalinists. Heda struggled to raise their young son as an unemployable persona non grata. She finally fled to the United States in 1968, after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Heda did not return to her homeland until 1996.

Her memoir, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968, has been re-published in several languages since the 1980s. In 2001, Czech filmmaker Helena Třeštíková interviewed Heda for a documentary titled Hitler, Stalin and I. Her son, Ivan Margolius, has translated transcripts of these interviews into an oral history of an extraordinary life. Heda's torturous path through some of the 20th century's greatest calamities is rendered with deep wisdom and a poetic eye for detail. Her misfortunes, and her perseverance through them, make Hitler, Stalin and I both an important historical account and a testament to human endurance. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer

Raised by deeply religious and survivalist parents on an Idaho mountain, Tara Westover's life was vastly different from other children's. At age seven, she was laboring in her father's junkyard, salvaging scrap metal and operating dangerous machinery. Nobody in the Westover family visited a doctor, relying instead on prayer and herbal concoctions to remedy even the most horrific and life-threatening injuries. Instead of attending elementary school, Westover was "educated in the rhythms of the mountain," with lessons consisting of her father's doomsday lectures about the evils of the "Illuminati" and the impending "Days of Abomination."

By using old textbooks, Westover taught herself trigonometry and science, relating complicated theories to the equations of her life. "What I knew of physics I had learned in the junkyard, where the physical world often seemed unstable, capricious. But here was a principle through which the dimensions of life could be defined, captured. Perhaps reality was not wholly volatile. Perhaps it could be explained, predicted. Perhaps it could be made to make sense." Her determined quest would lead her to entering a classroom for the first time at age 17 and, eventually, to earning a doctorate from Cambridge University.

An astonishingly raw and explosive memoir, Educated is Westover's gritty account of how she exchanged an extreme world of faith, fear, abuse and obstacles for one defined by power, strength and resilience. "My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs." In Educated, Westover more than proves that theory. --Melissa Firman, writer, editor and blogger at melissafirman.com

British photographer, writer and explorer Levison Wood (Walking the Himalayas) has journeyed the length of the Nile and the Himalayas. In Walking the Americas, he hikes 1,800 miles through the countries of Central America.

On this trek, he has Alberto, a Mexican guide and friend, to accompany him, a man who has never hiked through the uncut jungle or been outside of Mexico. Together the two travel south, from Mérida in the Yucatán Peninsula, through Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama, to its border with Colombia. They end their trip with a swim in the Caribbean Sea.

As with his other books, Wood skillfully incorporates scenic details, the day-to-day aspects of hiking through unfamiliar territory, the history of the various regions and the people they encounter en route. This walk is filled with the dangers of the natural world--snakes, spiders, biting insects that carry a host of diseases, crocodiles, sharks and jaguars, to name a few. Moreover, the men must also worry about drug smugglers, gang members, kidnappers, corrupt police and a host of other unsavory characters who would think nothing of stealing their money, clothes, possessions and their lives.

Reading Walking the Americas places the reader alongside Wood in his feats, as he ponders his motivations and reasons for hiking long distances and as he exclaims over the sheer beauty of the world he sees from a mountain peak few have climbed. His is travel and adventure writing at its best. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Transparent actress Judith Light, who plays the show's 60-something matriarch, wasn't looking forward to being filmed naked in a bathtub while pretending to be in the throes of erotic rapture: "How many times in television have we been told, 'Nobody wants to see that?' " According to journalist Joy Press, Transparent creator and showrunner Jill Soloway got the performance she wanted by encouraging Light to think of the elder-sexual interlude not as "a nude scene but as part of a revolution."

In Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television, Press profiles a dozen or so female showrunners of hit series that challenged television viewers' assumptions, especially about gender. She starts with the "twin disruptions" of Diane English's Murphy Brown and Roseanne Barr's Roseanne, both of which began their headline-generating runs in 1988, and ends with Soloway's Transparent, the first mainstream series to center on a transgender character. Press interviewed most of her subjects, including Shonda Rhimes. While her equal-parts-male-and-female Grey's Anatomy characters were practicing medicine, Rhimes practiced something unheard of on television: color-blind casting. An equally momentous if less decorous small-screen achievement: Inside Amy Schumer and Broad City have proved that girls can hold their own against boys in the bathroom-humor department.

The word "revolution" is ripe for overuse, but Press has earned the right to poach it for her book's subtitle. Stealing the Show ably makes the case that we are in the midst of a tectonic cultural shift, when "contemporary television quakes with women's sound and fury." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Fifteen-year-old Xiomara Batista is "unhide-able," taller than her father, with what her mother calls "a little too much body for such a young girl." Her struggles are numerous and accessible. She struggles with her parents' religion: "[W]hat's the point of God giving me life/ if I can't live it as my own?" She struggles with street harassment: "It happens when I'm sitting on the stoop./ It happens when I'm turning the corner./ It happens when I forget to be on guard./ It happens all the time." She struggles with boys: "I've been having all these feelings./ Noticing boys more than I used to./ And I get all this attention from guys.../ partly flattered they think I'm attractive,/ partly scared they're only interested in my ass and boobs." Most of all, she struggles with her devout parents, unable to bridge the generational and cultural gap between them. When Xiomara is assigned a biology lab partner named Aman, the "feelings" she's been having surge forward and she tentatively allows herself to take up a little bit more space. This spells serious trouble for X, as Aman calls her, because, "[t]he thing is,/ my old-school/ Dominican parents/ Do. Not. Play." In other words, absolutely no boyfriends until after college.

In her debut novel-in-verse, poet Elizabeth Acevedo (Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths), herself the daughter of Dominican immigrants, takes on the universal push-pull of parents and teens with gritty elegance. Readers will relate to X's frustration over her parents' tight reins on her activities and her longing for the mental, emotional and physical space to discover who she is in her world. The Poet X is beautiful and true--a splendid debut. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor

In his first publication for young readers, Markus Motum's picture book biography of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity takes middle-grade readers to a new world. Giving the robotic spacecraft the role of narrator, Motum navigates the audience through the inception of space travel to Mars, to Curiosity's engineering and finally into its journey to the red planet.

Curiosity highlights facts such as early obstacles to exploring Mars, the competition to name the rover and reasons behind the launch timing. It also includes fascinating tidbits like the regulation that everyone had to wear white coveralls to keep the lab clean: "The team didn't want to think they had discovered tiny forms of life on Mars, only to realize that it was just Earth bacteria I'd brought with me."

Motum's retro illustrations incorporate a beautifully diverse population of humans, especially NASA scientists, and offer prime opportunities to understand explanations about Curiosity and to insert factoids ("I take photos from my navigation and hazard cameras and combine what I see in both pictures to find a safe route around Mars"). They also evoke a strong sense of place, often using pitch-black backdrops contrasted with the red hues of Mars. On Earth, a scene of Times Square incites the pride and excitement of Curiosity's successful landing.

With his striking and intriguing story about a rover named Curiosity, Motum is sure to ignite that inquisitive quality in his young readers. Whether they have budding interests in science or in science fiction, Curiosity has the potential to launch them all on an incredible journey. --Jen Forbus, freelancer