In her fascinating debut, Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time, violinist Natalie Hodges presents an accessible memoir in essays that bridge the time-space continuum in musical terms. "If you want to change the past, all you have to do is try to record what happened in it," she writes.

Hodges weaves her themes through the full work, disparate as they may seem at first. Her discussion of time's relationship to the way humans experience it will be recognizable to all, the way those looming challenges (or measures) make the moments before them fly by, and time stops once they are reached--in Hodges's case, literally, bow to floor, fingers plucking the violin's strings to complete the piece and exit the stage.

She also argues that no time is ever lost, no experience wasted. Learning to dance the tango helps Hodges understand how improvisation can work and how to trust the idea of prescience, knowing what her partner on the dance floor or fellow musicians are about to do--step or play or pause. Her description of Johann Sebastian Bach's Chaconne invites readers to listen as a violinist would. She pays tribute to her Korean immigrant mother and posits an enlightening suggestion to think of cultural "assimilation" in terms of symmetry rather than equality. It's a book to savor. The ideas are dense; readers will want to pause and digest them. They offer a way to see the world anew, to reframe experience, the way Hodges has come to understand her own: from the inside out. --Jennifer M. Brown, senior editor, Shelf Awareness

In The Double Life of Katharine Clark: The Untold Story of the Fearless Journalist Who Risked Her Life for Truth and Justice, debut author Katharine Gregorio tells the thrilling story of her great-aunt, the first American woman to work as a wire reporter behind the Iron Curtain. Gregorio recounts Clark's heroic efforts to spread the truth about Communism to the world.

From an early age, Clark exhibited a fearless independent streak that led her into the male-dominated world of journalism. Clark and her husband, a prominent Time-Life correspondent, were based in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, by the 1950s, covering a wide beat that included Hungary, Poland, Germany and Bulgaria. Clark followed the high-profile 1955 trial of Milovan Djilas, a high-ranking Communist leader in President Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavian government. Djilas had dared to criticize the regime and, stripped of his posts and privileges, refused to be silenced. He reached out to Clark to publish his articles in the American press, and an abiding friendship developed, despite heavy surveillance by government agents. This resulted in Clark's most hair-raising episode: smuggling the second half of Djilas's manuscript, The New Class, out of Yugoslavia after he was imprisoned in 1956. Working carefully to shepherd both The New Class and Djilas's autobiography, Land Without Justice, to their eventual blockbuster publications, Clark led a "double life" as a journalist but also as an advocate and friend to a man who--in theory--should have been her enemy. Clark's story, finally told, reads like an espionage thriller in Gregorio's capable hands--with the added wallop of its being true. --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver

Adrian Shirk (And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy) delves into the enduring allure of utopian communities in Heaven Is a Place on Earth, her second entrancing study of religious history. Following scholars such as José Esteban Muñoz, Shirk defines a utopia as "any gesture that points to a better future." Utopian experiments, she writes, often arise in response to "times of economic and social precarity" to counter the brokenness of capitalism and the emptiness of individualism. Certain sites seem to attract layers of utopian projects, such as Western New York, home to the Shakers, the Oneida Community and the Fourierists.

Shirk visits intentional communities, such as the Bruderhofs in the Catskills, the Simple Way in Philadelphia and The Farm in Tennessee. Brief "utopianotes" throughout the book describe pilgrimages to sites of former communes and recount her experiences with communal living. She describes living as a college professor in an "Adjunct Flophouse" in Brooklyn and attending a progressive church that felt like home. Later, she and her husband establish a Catskills compound, the Mutual Aid Society, where artists and acquaintances undertake long-term residency for minimal rent (and where she lives with her family today).

Points of reference are wide-ranging: early Christians' communal living in the biblical book of Acts, Nathaniel Hawthorne's utopia-themed The Blithedale Romance, the 1987 Belinda Carlisle song that serves as the book's title. Amusing asides tell the stories of utopia founders, visitors and "groupies," such as Marguerite Young. Shirk shares her personal struggles with failure, idealism and privilege, noting that these projects generally are undertaken by white people and require financial security. She consistently grounds the historical and theoretical material in this flowing narrative. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck

Elizabeth Miki Brina claims her voice with resounding clarity in her memoir, Speak, Okinawa. As the daughter of a U.S. soldier with Jamestown ancestry and an Okinawan immigrant mother, Brina's identity was always a negotiation of race, class and privilege. By opening her stupendous book with her maternal grandmother and leading into the 1945 Battle of Okinawa ("Okinawa had never known such carnage"), Brina adroitly announces her literary intentions: "I had not learned this history, my mother's history, my history, until I was thirty-four years old. Which is to say I grew up not knowing my mother or myself." The knowledge she reveals here--about herself, her complex heritage, her history--proves breathtaking.

Brina grew up in a "ninety-nine percent white" Rochester, N.Y., suburb and recognized racial disparity early: "White was always what I strived to be." That longing estranged Brina from her not-white, not-American, not-English-fluent, not-assimilated mother, Kyoko. As a teenage nightclub waitress supporting her destitute family in U.S.-occupied Okinawa, Kyoko dreamed of escape by marrying an American; her wish fulfilled left her a lonely, isolated alcoholic shamefully dismissed by her only child. Brina's father was the heroic protector, until Brina came to realize, decades later, that Kyoko "is the one who is stronger now."

"By being aware, being honest.... By apologizing. By forgiving," Brina begins her own restorative transformation. Interwoven with her nuanced metamorphosis is the inseparable history of Okinawa, colonized by China and Japan and, since World War II, with an unpopular, large U.S. military presence, despite its status as a Japanese prefecture. Moving fluidly between intimate memories and documented history, Brina creates a multi-layered literary gift. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

Kaitlyn Greenidge wowed the literary world with We Love You, Charlie Freeman; her follow-up, Libertie, shows no hints of sophomore slump. Inspired by Susan Smith McKinney Steward, New York's first Black female doctor (and the third U.S. Black woman to earn her medical degree), Greenidge's novel alchemizes history into a gorgeously affecting story of a powerful mother, her headstrong daughter and the complex challenges they must deal with as Black women before and beyond the Civil War.

The titular Libertie is the freeborn daughter of Dr. Sampson, a woman so powerful that Libertie introduces her with a riveting opening sentence: "I saw my mother raise a man from the dead." Libertie recognizes her mother's "magic" when coffins are delivered to Brooklyn and enslaved escapees rise into freedom. At "eleven, nearly twelve," Libertie begs to help, to learn, to fulfill Mama's dream of having "a horse and carriage together, with 'Dr. Sampson and Daughter' written in gold on the side." But as Libertie matures, she recognizes that her dark skin and her mother's lighter one mean very different lives, that degrees of color are inextricably linked to both privilege and oppression. As Mama attends to more white women during Reconstruction--even as they dismiss Libertie's darker, assisting hands--Libertie's sense of betrayal solidifies into polarizing resentment.

Greenidge writes with an effortless flow, her prose enhanced with songs, chants and verses that remind readers how words have other functions beyond straightforward storytelling. As her characters grow into self-awareness, readers, too, are granted the illuminating gift of bearing witness. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon

Introverted Will struggles to connect with peers while processing family heartache in Jennifer Ziegler's authentic and compassionate middle-grade novel Worser.

Will Orser loves words. He respects their precision, believes them "the basis of a civilized society" and holds others to his exacting linguistic standards. "Despite his mastery of words, Worser [knows he is] unskilled at talking with people" and devotes his energy instead to his Masterwork, a lexicon years in the making. This makes Will's grammatically incorrect nickname, "Worser," especially insulting. As seventh grade begins, Will's mother recovers from a stroke and his "elaborate, excessive" Aunt Iris cares for them both. Meanwhile, Will hides at a bookstore where the owner, a man of few words, allows Will space to work and, later, to connect with surprisingly like-minded peers when the school's Literary Club is displaced. When the store is threatened, Will overreacts dangerously and jeopardizes his new friendships.

Ziegler (Revenge of the Flower Girls) offers a thoughtful take on a sympathetic, if occasionally unlikable, protagonist and brings readers along with Will's increasing self-awareness and sociability. Her sensitive portrayal of Will's avoidance of his recuperating mother is particularly poignant. Although his voice suits his age and emotional development, Will's prolific vocabulary and witty linguistic games--such as arranging state abbreviations into longer words or appreciating the perfect wetness (and etymological origin) of galoshes--should delight more advanced readers and inspire others to word play, too. A compelling and semantically delightful story for lovers of language and flawed protagonists. --Kit Ballenger, youth librarian, Help Your Shelf

Newbery Honor author Shannon Hale (Princess Academy) and Caldecott Honor illustrator LeUyen Pham (Outside, Inside) follow up their smart and sweet Itty-Bitty Kitty-Corn with another powerful story about friendship in a fluffy pink and purple package.

Sometimes, being thought of as perfect is no blessing. Majestic Unicorn "yearns to look the way everyone thinks he should." His friends gush over his shiny horn, his "magnificent haunches," his "purple as a dream" tail. But when his best Kitty-corn friend, Kitty, tries to paint a portrait of him, she can't get it quite right. Unicorn is frantic, trying to assume a more flattering stance: "Unicorn stands and twists, sways and spins, gallops in place, and poses thoughtfully--all at the same time." What happens next is a tragicomedy of errors, but true friendship, as always, wins the day.

The crackerjack team behind the Kitty-Corn books is pretty perfect at creating delightful stories about the messiness and sweetness of friendship (Best Friends; Real Friends; Friends Forever). Pham's digital illustrations on a white background feature expressive faces and droll, occasionally slapstick, humor. They are balanced nicely with Hale's witty and emotionally astute text (welcome back, goofy rhyming sidekicks Parakeet and Gecko!).

Readers of Pretty Perfect Kitty-Corn will witness the ways in which self-perception can be damaging, and good friends (those who are "precious, like the last cookie") should always share the magic message that we don't need to be flawless to be worthy of love. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor