In the opening pages of Youngblood, Lieutenant Jack Porter reflects on his time in Iraq and the challenges of explaining his experiences to those who weren't there. "What was it like? Hell if I know. But next time someone asks.... I'll answer crooked, and I'll answer long. And when they get confused or angry, I'll smile. Finally, I'll think. Someone who understands." What unfolds in the following pages of Matt Gallagher's debut novel is an exquisite story that perfectly reflects that crooked, long, confusing, angering explanation: the story of a young officer trying to maintain a sense of sanity and control in the face of a situation that defies both.

With the United States military preparing to withdraw from Iraq, Porter and his men have shifted from thinking of home as a place they've left to a place they're looking forward to returning to. But before they are redeployed, Sergeant Daniel Chambers is assigned to their unit--bringing with him an aggressive style born of three past tours and a host of secrets. As Porter is drawn into the stories about Chambers's dark past, he begins to question everything he thought he knew and understood about the war, his place in it and himself.

Gallagher draws on his experience as a former U.S. Army captain--which he wrote about in his war memoir, Kaboom--to offer a fresh perspective on the war in Iraq. Youngblood explores the moral ambiguities of war as well as the specific trials of what it means to be a leader in a place and time that defies logic and law. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

In her first novel, Unspeakable Things, poet Kathleen Spivack (With Robert Lowell and His Circle) focuses on Herbert Hofrat, a former Austrian government official who has escaped the Nazis with the members of his immediate family, save one son, settling them in a tiny apartment in New York City. Hofrat has been "chosen to live the hardest life of all: that of the survivor, the savior," spending wearying days alternating between a dim corner of the New York Public Library and an automat on 42nd Street.

Anna, Herbert's second cousin, is a physically deformed White Russian countess nicknamed "the Rat." Herbert helps engineer Anna's flight to the U.S., but even after she's reached this safe haven, she's haunted by the memory of an erotic encounter with the monk Rasputin that leaves mysterious burn marks on her thighs, explicitly described in Spivack's lush, if occasionally overcooked, prose. Meanwhile, a sinister German pediatrician named Felix lives in New York researching the "study and propagation of genius," and he turns the Tolstoi Quartet, emigrant musicians from Vienna, into involuntary participants in scientific investigations that conjure up the terrifying activities of real-life Nazi physicians. The novel climaxes in a highly charged encounter between Felix and Anna that knits these strands together.

Weariness and heartbreak are the dominant moods of this novel. While Spivack maintains a close focus on the hardships of the Hofrat family, she doesn't lose sight of the fact that this drama is playing out on a wider stage. Despite its strongly contrasting literary styles, Unspeakable Things feels like a tightly coiled spring, one that Kathleen Spivack manages to keep firmly under control. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Reed Farrel Coleman, author of the Moe Prager PI series and Robert B. Parker's Jesse Stone series, introduces Gus Murphy, a retired Suffolk County, N.Y., police officer who now drives an airport shuttle for the Paragon Hotel in the town of Bohemia. Murphy, haunted by the unexpected death of his son from a hidden heart defect two years earlier, also lives in the dilapidated old hotel.

Tommy Delcamino, a low-level thief Murphy arrested while still on the force, pays him a visit to request help. Tommy's son, TJ, was tortured to death, and the police seem to be ignoring the murder, so Delcamino wants Murphy to look into it. Murphy explodes, thinking that the ex-con is trying to take advantage of Murphy's own personal tragedy. When Murphy later goes looking for Delcamino, intending to apologize for his behavior, he encounters two armed men, but they make their getaway and shoot Murphy in the leg before he finds the body of the elder Delcamino.

Still hesitant to investigate the murders, Murphy decides he needs to know why these men were killed. He had no answers, no one to blame for his son's death, and he thinks solving this case may help him heal. Instead, he opens a huge can of worms that just might kill him.

Sharp, clever dialogue, a dynamic cast of characters that represents a cross-section of Long Island cultures and an engaging plot keep Where It Hurts gripping and entertaining. Murphy's authenticity, his flaws and his complexity make him a character readers will eagerly anticipate in future books. An excellent beginning to a series with great potential. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

Mystery, murder and supernatural entities are at the crux of The Evening Spider, a gothic suspense story by Emily Arsenault. Based partly on an actual crime committed in the late 19th century, the story revolves around two women who live in different centuries but have resided in the same house. In 1885, Frances Barnett tells her story via journal entries written from inside the Northampton Lunatic Hospital in Massachusetts, where her well-meaning husband, Matthew, has locked her away. She slowly reveals why she's been institutionalized, starting with her distress at learning she was pregnant--she'd never contemplated that possible aspect of married life--and her subsequent difficulties adjusting to life as a new mother.

Meanwhile, in 2014, Abby Bernaki is having difficulties of her own as a new mother. Although she loves her daughter dearly, the sameness of her days presses in on her, forcing her to remember events from her past that she'd just as soon forget. When odd noises and weird coincidences take place in the old house she lives in with her husband, Abby begins an elaborate search into the checkered past of the house's previous owners.

The Evening Spider doesn't quite fall into the pure mystery genre that Arsenault (The Broken Teaglass) usually writes, as it contains ghostly and supernatural elements. However, with its basis in a real crime, including excerpts from news stories from that era, readers can take delight in Arsenault's highly inventive imagination as she deftly interweaves the stories of these two young mothers searching for answers. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

General Turyin Mulaghesh is supposedly retiring. She's been exiled to the city of Voortyashtan to wait until she can draw her pension--at least, that's the story she gives to cover her true purpose.

Voortyashtan, once the stronghold of a war goddess, is now a city of industry that has financial and political ties to Turyin's home country across the sea, Saypur. The Saypuri prime minister has sent the general on a secret mission to find the truth behind a discovery in the old city, one with the potential to change--and perhaps destroy--the new world.

Turyin is weary of war, sick of death and tired of watching her young soldiers die in battle. When she witnesses the presumed dead war deity rise from the ocean to destroy the local mines (a source of a mysterious energy), Turyin undertakes a supernatural journey to the goddess's afterlife, which is filled with violently angry dead soldiers awaiting their promised return to a glorious war to end all wars.

The aging general, foul-mouthed and jaded, must find a way to stop this world-ending conflict with the dead, since she's the most qualified to do so in this city of politicians and scientists. Along the way, though, she learns to trust an engineer who's hiding something amid the reconstruction efforts in the old city. Robert Jackson Bennett's sequel to 2014's City of Stairs is thrilling, deeply thoughtful about the nature of war, and just odd enough, while still offering analogues to our own world to remain familiar. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

Although Jasmin Singer says her journey toward health and self-actualization "started with juice," it is the wisdom of her grandmother that suffuses and illuminates each page of this memoir: "You are exactly where you should be." From the earliest scenes describing her parents' divorce and revolving step-parents--when food became the one constant Singer could control--to a painful moment in a San Francisco bathroom stall avoiding her own reflection in the mirror, she is unflinchingly forthright and refreshingly authentic.

For years Singer felt "simply too much... too needy, too clingy, too desperate.... It seemed I took up too much space wherever I went, not just physically." However, each stage of her journey has a significant and crucial role in her identity. When a friend introduces her to a vegan lifestyle, food becomes about more than just herself and she permanently transforms her relationship with what she eats, eventually finding her life's work in animal activism. When she and her partner attempt a juice fast, the detox is much more than physical. Singer realizes "that food is indeed the most personal political act there is," and this change in perspective is as life altering as the 100 pounds she sheds. Dedicating herself to a cause creates an impetus for self-care, while her new physique creates a profound understanding of how people are treated based on appearance. Singer's memoir is a testament to how the greatest transformations are often intangible. --Kristen Galles from Book Club Classics

When Kali Nicole Gross (Colored Amazons) came across the case of an unusual 1887 Philadelphia murder, she found a story with many layers. In Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America, she explores the intricacies of that case and its implications on criminal justice, a culture of violence and conceptions of race and gender.

Hannah Mary Tabbs was an unusual post-Reconstruction black woman--she unabashedly pursued sex outside of marriage and used violence and physical threats to make a reputation for herself in her black community in Philadelphia's Seventh Ward. In the white community, meanwhile, she upheld the idea of womanly virtue and subservience to her white employers. Gross argues that this manipulative, variable representation of herself allowed Tabbs to almost get away with a serious crime. Tabbs had a lover whose headless, limbless torso turned up on the edge of a pond outside of town. The man convicted for that murder was, Gross contends, a patsy. The skin tones of the various players in this love triangle appear to have played as large a role as their guilt or innocence.

In prose that demonstrates careful research and offers a realistic reconstruction of the crime, Gross comments on social standards for morality and relationships between races and genders. The case of the disembodied torso is not only a sensational piece of true crime, but an opportunity to reflect on these continuing complexities. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rod Nordland had an opportunity to interview Zakia and Ali, two Afghan teenagers whose families threatened their lives because they were in love, he saw an opportunity to learn about Afghanistan's tradition of honor killings. Yet what was meant to be a single interview became more. While the country is no longer under the complete control of the Taliban, its people are unable to escape the Taliban's malicious and harmful attitudes, particularly toward women. Thus Zakia's family considered her to be property, and when she pursued her relationship with Ali, a youth from a different ethnic group, her family went mad with rage, forcing Zakia to take refuge in a woman's shelter. This is where Nordland first interviewed her months later.

When Nordland published an article on the couple in the New York Times, it unleashed a torrent of concern around the world for Zakia and Ali. Many readers felt he was responsible for exposing the young lovers to greater harm and was obligated to help them escape it, though this might contravene his journalistic objectivity. Others wanted to help them escape. Nordland was faced with a decision: leave the article as a standalone piece and not risk the lives of Ali and Zakia any further, or follow their story to garner more international attention and help. Ultimately, Nordland reached out with a larger group of journalists to record their ongoing struggle, and while he hopes his articles will give Zakia and Ali a better chance at being together, he ends up playing a more direct role in their survival. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company

When discussing urban planning, it's easy to forget the intricacies that go into creating the systems and structures that affect billions of people on a daily basis. From how streets are built to zoning laws that keep ethnic minorities ghettoized, every piece of the modern city comes from decisions made by architects, public servants and entrepreneurs who wanted to make their mark on humanity. Wade Graham's Dream Cities follows those men and women, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Jane Jacobs and Daniel Burnham, as they dreamt new ways for us to live, and battled to turn those dreams into reality.

Dream Cities highlights seven major theories or styles of urban planning, like Wright's focus on single-family homes that ultimately lead to cookie-cutter suburbia, and Le Corbusier's brutalist slabs that provided the main inspiration for high-rise apartment complexes. Teasing out the history of thinkers and the ultimate impact of their work, Graham (American Eden) creates an interesting mix of biographies: that of his human subjects, and the cities and countries whose shape they altered. While the book doesn't have much of a thematic structure (there's no summation or look to the future, for instance), attentive readers can easily see how the buildings and streets around them relate to the various threads Graham establishes. It's no small feat for a book to change how someone conceptualizes her world, and Dream Cities does just that. --Noah Cruickshank, marketing manager, Open Books, Chicago, Ill.

On the fifth day of Ed Boland's first year teaching history in a New York City public school, he found himself yelling helplessly at a girl who stood on her desk and said things to him that can't be printed here.

The Battle for Room 314 is Boland's story of his frustrating and humiliating year of teaching, told with humor and painful honesty. Boland worked for a nonprofit that mentored promising disadvantaged students, but he thought he might accomplish more as a teacher. He quit his job and, after three years of training, he was hired at a school that looked auspicious on paper. He almost immediately found himself struggling to hang on day to day. Most of his students were from working poor families in public housing. Some had been homeless or sold drugs or sex. Many had severe behavioral problems. "I had taken classes in lesson planning, evaluation, psychology, and research. Next to nothing was said about what a first-year teacher most needs to know: how to control a classroom." This, along with the school's poor management and the poverty and violence of his students' lives, set him up to fail. He gradually realized that more importantly, they set his students up to fail.

Boland offers advice to new teachers and recommendations for systemic change. He hopes that in telling this story, he will move the debate on education to address the problems of long-term poverty, racial segregation, immigration reform and unequally funded schools that prevent too many students from building useful rewarding lives. --Sara Catterall

Something's up with that big brown bear, because before the story ever starts, he's hiding behind a tree. Then, a boy spots the bear in his apartment hallway, looking terribly suspicious. The boy closes the door behind him and says to his cake-baking mother: "Mom, there's a bear at the door!"

So begins this charming, ingeniously crafted German import, with a funny conversation between mother and son. Mom's lines are in red: "How did the bear get up here?" "He took the elevator." "The elevator?" "The elevator." "The bear pressed the button and took the elevator?" "Of course! The elevator doesn't work if no one presses the button." As the boy imagines how the bear might have found his way from the forest to their 11th-floor apartment, the illustrations show the bear doing exactly what the boy is describing to his mother, whether it's riding the bus to the city or cycling to the bus station, with a helmet, of course. ("And what does the bear want, here on our eleventh floor?" "To look at the sea.") In a wonderfully appealing double-page cityscape, bear and boy are shown eating mom-made Black Forest cake on a big red picnic blanket on top of a tall building, with a distant view of the sea.

Author Sabine Lipan skillfully captures the simultaneously reasonable and improbable imaginings of a young boy. Illustrator Manuela Olten's playful, deliciously creamy acrylic paint and colored pencil artwork will have readers longing for their own unexpected forest visitor. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness

French author Claire d'Harcourt (Art Up Close, Louvre Up Close) wants to make very sure no one looks at da Vinci's semi-smiling Mona Lisa--or any other painting--without really seeing it. For anyone perusing her gorgeous, generously oversized Masterpieces Up Close: Western Painting from the 14th to 20th Centuries, there's absolutely no chance of that happening.

Each of the 21 full-color reproductions of paintings--from Giotto's 14th-century Scrovegni Chapel to Warhol's Marilyn (1964)--sits side by side with a set of specific, circled details from the painting in question--an eye, a dog's head, a globe, a chandelier. In Vermeer's The Artist's Studio, for instance, readers will see the small round image of a shiny two-headed eagle that's part of a chandelier, then look over to the painting to try to find where it is located. (A quick flip to the back reveals 21 lift-the-flap "keys" for any elusive ones, plus notes on each artist.) A brief caption discusses some historical, psychological, artistic or technical aspect of the visual detail. For example, The Artist's Studio chandelier caption asks the question: "How did Vermeer capture the sunlight that bathes the room?"

Not only is the "find the detail" activity fun in itself, this level of interaction encourages close scrutiny of these complex, often mysterious masterpieces, and should spur lively discussions about art and art history. As in many of the best books, Masterpieces Up Close asks more questions than it answers. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness