Lisa Roe's wry, warmhearted second novel, Big & Lily, takes readers deep into the heart of the Alaskan wilderness--and the equally challenging terrain of sisterhood.

Bridget "Big" Ackerman-Petty has spent her life caring for everyone around her, especially her bright, charismatic younger sister, Lily. Big's two kids are grown and her husband has retired, but she still spends her time managing everyone's lives, not to mention chauffeuring her imperious mother to water aerobics and appointments. When Lily's marriage implodes, she books a last-minute slot on an Alaskan wilderness trek and begs Big to come with her. Big reluctantly agrees, only to discover that Lily has signed them up for a no-frills adventure. Without cell service, a comfortable bed, or her luggage, Big finds herself entirely out of her depth, attempting to support Lily while struggling to keep up with their fellow hikers. As the sisters navigate physical tests, Alaskan wildlife, and each other's constant presence, they are forced to confront the emotional baggage they've lugged across the country.

Roe (Welcome to the Neighborhood) explores the sisters' close but complicated dynamic. The sisters' tensions also flare up along the trail itself, leading to at least one too-close encounter with a moose, among other dramatic incidents. Roe slips in a few breathtaking descriptions of the Alaskan scenery and one heart-to-heart conversation that begins to shift the way Bridget sees her sister and herself.

With a gorgeous setting and plenty of humor, Roe's insightful novel will appeal to readers who love adventure tales, complex families, and stories of second chances. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Paris is more than a moveable feast. It's an unlimited buffet that invites diners to select as much Paris as they want, and only the parts they desire. Those choices reflect upon the person making the selections, a concept Amit Chaudhuri (The Immortals; Sojourn) plays with in his movingly elliptical novel Château Rouge. In the years before the Covid-19 pandemic, an unnamed author of Indian descent arrives in the Château Rouge section of Paris to begin a fellowship. Any romance he felt about Paris dissolves when he enters his sublet, a grungy one-bedroom apartment that has, among other lowlights, a toilet bowl with "a history of staining." He's repulsed until his wife points out that this was the sort of place writers lived in during Ernest Hemingway's time. The romance returns, and he decides, however queasily, to give it a go.

As the novel progresses, the first-person narrator explores the richness and variety of the city. He notes his "sense of territories that flowed into each other," from the West African and working-class French neighborhoods to sections that are "bastions of wealth and privilege." That perspective is reinforced and complicated five years later, when he returns on a "research stop" for the book he's writing about Château Rouge, to see if the city is different, and how his impressions may indicate how he, too, has changed. "You see what you want to," the narrator says. Chaudhuri explores that truism with impeccable, lucid charm in this beautiful work. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer

Welsh author Liam Higginson has cited Shirley Jackson and Stephen King as two of his main literary influences. While it's too early to place him in the same rank as these masters of horror, Higginson's debut novel, The Hill in the Dark Grove, is a thoroughly atmospheric and quietly unsettling story that's both original and faithful to the spirit of their works.

Set in the rugged mountains and valleys of Higginson's native North Wales, the novel tells the story of Carwyn and Rhian Gwynnant. The childless couple in their 60s operate a failing sheep farm that's been in Carwyn's family for generations. Now mired in debt, they fear an auction sale that will transfer their property to "some rich landowner from England." They're determined to forestall that event through their tireless labor and some clever evasive tactics.

But the mountains are "the abode of witches and giants and gods," and the supernatural has long played a prominent role in the lives of their inhabitants. When Carwyn stumbles upon a carved stone face in one of his fields, he embarks on a project to excavate a site. But his dedication to this solitary archeological dig gradually crosses the line into obsession. Rhian's dread that he has summoned something dark and terrible from the earth overtakes her life.

Higginson's lush descriptions gracefully evoke the beguiling but often treacherous beauty of the Welsh countryside. He traces the changing seasons, subtly underscoring how tightly his characters' lives are tied to forces--natural and supernatural--beyond their control. All of this enhances a sense of terror that's slow building, but no less powerful for that fact. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Five years after his last novel, Chang-rae Lee (On Such a Full Sea) delivers A Tender Age, a luminous bildungsroman about the ache to belong. Jeon-Gi finds himself "suddenly thinking about the circumstances of how our girls got our dog." Years ago, they were visiting family friends and left with a three-month-old puppy that was being abused by the family's young son. In imagining the dog's revenge on his tormentor, Jeon-Gi insists, "To dispirit a certain kind you must be malign, become as bent as your nemesis. You must shock even yourself."

From there, the narrative explores "some rough times... [that] spanned the near-year that led up to my eleventh birthday during camp in the summer of 1976." Jeon-Gi and his family live 35 minutes north of New York City. Their apartment complex is home to "legions of us new immigrants," and the children regularly congregate outside to play. But Jeon-Gi is bullied by an 11-year-old girl who weaponizes his devotion to his mother; he is provoked by a racist playmate, then relentlessly terrorized by a fellow student. Despite good friendships and supportive counselors, amid developing his first romantic feelings, that summer Jeon-Gi's increasingly uncontainable frustration pushes toward inevitable results that reverberate through lifetimes.

Lee again explores identity and acceptance, family and relationships, racism and privilege with raw intensity and biting insight, managing to write breathtaking prose through predictable mundanity but also wrenching inhumanity. He gorgeously, empathically captures Jeon-Gi's visceral struggles desperately navigating between childhood innocence and "confronting adult realities." In his masterful almost-ending, Lee shrouds what exactly happened on that life-altering precipice, brilliantly inviting room for interrogation and interpretation. --Terry Hong

Homecomings, especially long-delayed ones, can be hard. Unresolved emotions and buried secrets sometimes bubble to the surface when the wanderer finally returns. That subject alone would be fitting for the sort of story that's distinguished Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Russo's long career. But with Under the Falls, he's connected that theme to an engrossing mystery.

Popular singer-songwriter Tyler Sinclair reluctantly is heading back to his hometown 18 years after he left to perform a benefit concert for his childhood friend Doc, paralyzed as a teenager in an accident while diving into the Falls with Tyler's help and now stripped of his Medicaid benefits. But the concert descends into chaos when the audience learns that Doc has died suddenly that evening. Afterward, the limo carrying Tyler is forced off a country road into a ravine by another vehicle. That crash sets the mystery plot into motion.

As the singer slowly recovers from his extensive injuries, his continued presence increases the pressure on Curt--the town's chief of police and another childhood friend of Tyler's who witnessed Doc's diving accident--to unravel the suspicious circumstances of the crash. These events also revive Curt's memories of Tyler's youthful attraction to his wife, Freddi, drawing the net that surrounds these characters ever tighter and forcing a moral reckoning for the man left behind when his best friend fled and achieved celebrity.

Despite the occasional implausibility, Russo (Life and Art) successfully manages the novel's plot twists to maintain the balance between a character-driven story and the tropes of traditional crime novels. Under the Falls will please his longtime readers and undoubtedly attract some new ones. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Susan Campbell's Alaska-set debut poetry collection, This Far North, is steeped in science and nature, and it spins lessons of resilience from human and animal survival in extreme circumstances.

Fairbanks, Alaska, makes an ideal base for hiking and camping excursions--but the poet knows hers are tame compared to what she recounts in "The 1910 Sourdough Expedition: An Improbable Ascent of Denali." And that's nothing to the wonder of birds' long-distance migration: "We imagine the gods chuckling, the/ gauntlet they've slung tumbling across/ empty sand as bar-tailed godwits beat/ their way south to New Zealand, seven/ thousand miles without food, without rest." Campbell marvels at wolves, rivers, fungi, and the aurora borealis; she tracks the turning of the seasons as "The world weathers us--/ wind, water, sun, and rain." For the natural world, too, spring offers a reprieve from harsh winter. "Birches know about longing./ From October to May they wait./ Wait./ Wait for winter to relinquish its grip." The verse is rich in alliteration, assonance, and anaphora--in two pieces, every line or stanza begins with "When."

That keen awareness of the passing of time underpins poems about climate change, animal and human deaths, and the history of science (Isaac Newton's apple, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek's microscopy). Campbell also draws on her decades as an elementary school teacher, having learned as much from her students--Riley, raised in a trailer park; Burt, neglected by his parents--as they did from her. Acknowledging beauty alongside challenges, this inviting, down-to-earth work deserves a wide readership. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck

In this fierce and wrenching memoir, YA and children's author Joy McCullough (Everything Is Poison) recounts being sexually abused as a teenager by the youth pastor at her Presbyterian church in the San Diego suburbs where her father was a pastor. Written in spare, intimate verse, Suffer a Witch recounts how the charismatic pastor McCullough calls "Brett" groomed her during Bible study when she was 14, making her feel valued by listening to her concerns about her body image and self-esteem. During her sophomore year, Brett started using those confidences against her, abusing her emotionally and sexually for three years. McCullough developed an eating disorder and later began cutting herself. It wasn't until she left for college that McCullough was able to reckon with what had happened to her, but her path to recovery was complicated and uneven.

Throughout this disturbing account, McCullough punctuates her evocative, unsparing poetry with prose letters addressed to women and girls accused of witchcraft across history. She draws parallels between her own persecution and that of Abigail Williams, Joan of Arc, and others. This becomes especially poignant when McCullough describes being shut down by her church, community, and father after pressing charges against Brett. Worse, McCullough learned that her older sister had also been abused by Brett and that her father did nothing about it. Through her writing, a nurturing marriage, and several strong relationships, including with the editor of this memoir, McCullough has been able to endure and thrive. This difficult but beautifully written testament to her strength is a gift for readers. --Debra Ginsberg, author and freelance editor

Interrogating the mind's immense power over the body, British neuroscientist Helen Pilcher demonstrates how bleak expectations of medical outcomes or aging can seriously impact well-being in This Book May Cause Side Effects: The Curious and Dangerous Power of the Nocebo Effect, Placebo's Evil Twin.

Pilcher cites peer-reviewed studies to show how exposure to negative medical information--whether through the "intangible internal forces" that shape health or external forces such as social media--can actually make individuals unwell even when there is no physical disease or sickness present. This, she explains, is the "nocebo effect," sharing the example of a patient who, in the 1970s, was diagnosed with advanced cancer and died shortly thereafter. However, the diagnosis was found to be incorrect, so it wasn't cancer that killed him. Rather, he died from "believing he had cancer."

More recently, in an experiment by Ellen Langer, type 2 diabetes patients consumed low-sugar drinks misleadingly labeled as high sugar. These patients saw an increase in their blood glucose levels because the label "messed with their minds." This and other studies indicate that people have far less control over the "internal whirring" of their brains than they realize. Intriguingly, cultural beliefs about aging can actually influence the physical aging process. One important way to contain the nocebo effect, Pilcher writes, is "simply to acknowledge its existence." Understanding that ailments may have a "psychological rather than physical origin" can alleviate symptoms.

An entertaining narrator, Pilcher presents a fascinating introduction to an insidious phenomenon that poses serious implications to health. --Shahina Piyarali

A fearful boy from Puerto Rico inexplicably enters another boy's dream world in the mystical middle-grade novel No Place on Earth, which explores anxiety and depression while compassionately challenging gender stereotypes.

When Gustavo's parents decide on a "trial separation," he moves from Puerto Rico to Yellowstone National Park, where his mom has taken a job. Gustavo's dad says he can come back to Puerto Rico if he's able to tough it out in the wild first ("I didn't raise un miedoso"). But the 11-year-old struggles with anxiety and panic attacks, visualizing disaster in excruciating detail. The difficult situation becomes surreal when the unknown boy who has been appearing in Gustavo's dreams turns out to be classmate Kordell ("the only Black kid on the whole bus")--and Kordell has been dreaming about Gustavo. In the boys' strange, shared dream life, Gustavo's anxiety comes terrifyingly to life, while Kordell finds a "happy escape" from crushing depression exacerbated by his parents' divorce. The boys resist befriending each other until they realize they both have the power to control the dreams.

Newbery Honor winner Andrea Beatriz Arango (Iveliz Explains It All) thoughtfully and astutely portrays the challenges of addressing anxiety and depression in a culture that favors toughness over sensitivity. The boys' dreams appear in verse, contrasting with the immediacy of waking life's prose. Gustavo does grow tougher in Yellowstone, but not in the way his dad imagined; he learns to accept himself, reject his father's cruel "jokes," and "feel the fear/ and then let it go." --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor

In the emotionally raw yet hopeful middle-grade graphic novel Exposures: A Story About Life with OCD and the Power of Facing Your Fears, Lily Williams (Go with the Flow) draws on her personal experience with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) to portray its agonizing effects and the results that can come from exposure and response prevention therapy.

Blonde, pale-skinned, 12-year-old Peyton hides her scary, intrusive thoughts from her "perfect twin" sister, Taylor, and their doting parents because she's convinced she's "crazy." Flashbacks reveal the rituals (compulsions) Peyton developed over the years to self-soothe, including counting, skin picking, and avoiding red (the "color of blood"). When Peyton has a severe panic attack, her mother contacts Anna, a therapist who diagnoses Peyton with OCD. Anna helps Peyton train her brain to accept uncertainty and to curtail compulsions by exposing her to her fears through repeated exercises. After treatment, Peyton no longer sees herself as the "bad twin" with a "broken" brain, nor does she feel defined by her OCD: "I want to be me."

Williams's refreshing representation of OCD depicts the complex layers of various OCD subtypes. Peyton's mental health journey is inspiring for its realism, including reminders from Anna that "progress isn't linear" and that there will be painful setbacks. Williams's expressive illustrations convey the emotional intensity of living with OCD: Peyton's intrusive thoughts break the panels' borders and balloon to overtake the page. Exposures is a tough but validating graphic novel that will likely resonate with readers of Buzzing by Samuel Sattin and Rye Hickman or Guts by Raina Telgemeier. --Cristina Iannarino, children's book buyer, Books on the Square, Providence, R.I.

The Bear and the Seed, written and illustrated by Poonam Mistry (You're Safe with Me), is a gentle picture book about renewal that follows a woodland creature whose love for the forest inspires an act of care and hope.

In a wood described as "ever growing," Bear spends his days admiring the trees and flowers around him. When the landscape suddenly disappears, he is overcome with sadness. Then he discovers a seed and decides to look after it. At first, nothing happens. As Bear waits, other animals offer suggestions. Worm advises him to plant the seed in the ground. Frog recommends giving it water. Bird encourages him to sing to it, while Fox suggests calling on the stars to shine their light through the darkness. Bear patiently follows their advice as the seasons change. By the time Bear emerges from winter hibernation, the seed has become a thriving sapling.

Mistry's hand-drawn and digital illustrations feature geometric patterns and details inspired by Indian fabrics that echo the textures of the natural world. An earthy palette of brown, green, purple, and copper creates a calm woodland atmosphere that complements the story's gentle pacing. Ornate borders surround many of the illustrations, which lend the artwork an elegant, storybook quality. The Bear and the Seed offers a simple but meaningful message about caring for the environment and believing in the possibility of renewal. The story's focus on patience, cooperation, and optimism makes it a thoughtful choice for discussions about nature, stewardship, and resilience. --Julie Danielson

In The Magic Library of Waterfall Way, a daring and wondrously cozy middle-grade fantasy by Julie Abe (Eva Evergreen series), an orphaned girl takes on her first real quest when a village is cut off from its magic.

Eleven-year-old Lyra Hunt needs desperately to find a home. She has been raised in the Alterran Empire, where guilds act as family units. Every guild has a specific focus, and every individual has a "remarkable" status--Extraordinary, Quite, Slightly, and Un--that allows them to cast different levels of magic. Lyra, "the only Unremarkable in an empire full of Remarkables," can cast no magic whatsoever. However, if Lyra isn't accepted into a guild and able to fulfill their required quest before she turns 12, she'll be banished to the Mists, where creatures eat "misbehaving children." The village of Waterfall Way is Lyra's last chance at safety but, due to a mysterious fire in the town's enchanted library, the key to the village's magic has been closed off. Lyra decides to unlock the library's enchantments and restore the town's missing magic as a quest in the hope that she will be accepted by the town's Guild of Scholars.

This first novel in a promising new series brims with wholesome adventure and surprising depth. Abe pivots from the more common heroic formula to invite readers into the perspective of a desperate outcast with a firm resilience and strong sense of self who only becomes a "chosen one" through her own consistent, forceful efforts. The Magic Library of Waterfall Way features accessible world-building, profound emotional shifts, and a protagonist who lets her hope guide her. It's an excellent read for budding fantasy fans. --Kyla Paterno, freelance reviewer