As in her previous eight novels (including Snowflower & the Secret Fan and Shanghai Girls), Lisa See's strong women give readers a distinct perspective on a moment in history. This time, the setting is late-1930s San Francisco, with the Golden Gate International Exposition (a World's Fair) and the golden age of Chinese nightclubs.

Grace, Ruby and Helen meet by chance in California and, despite their diverse backgrounds, become fast friends. Grace, the only Chinese girl in her Ohio farm town, has fled an abusive father; Helen endures a regimented existence in Chinatown with her wealthy family; Ruby left Hawaii to seek her own independence. They share a hunger for adventure and pledge solidarity, although competiveness and jealousy sometimes buffet their loyalty.

The chapters alternate perspective, with each girl taking turns narrating. While their talents vary, all three gain spots in the glamorous Forbidden City Nightclub, and their stars are on the rise when news of the attack on Pearl Harbor hits. See's skill in weaving historic details into a fresh story shines: secrets are exposed, and the effects of the war, including the racism endemic to the West Coast, force the three to struggle to maintain their careers as showgirls.

For a novel as rich in history and characters as China Dolls, one hopes the story extends beyond the war. See satisfies our curiosity with a lengthy denouement that takes the trio into retirement yet doesn't feel contrived, assuring Grace, Ruby and Helen are heroines we'll remember. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, manager, Book Passage, San Francisco

The One and Only, by contemporary-fiction superstar Emily Giffin (Where We Belong), isn't short on surprises. Though it revolves around football, it touches on domestic violence and features a rather duplicitous woman who is secretly in love with her best friend Lucy's much-older dad. Giffin isn't a stranger to imperfect heroines, but the nature of the unfolding May-December romance is a solid departure for one of the reigning queens of chick lit.

Protagonist Shea, a young woman in her early 30s, is crazy about two things: football and her best friend's father, a dead ringer for George Clooney. He's married to Shea's mother's best friend; the family connections run deep. Shea fondly remembers playing on the floor of Coach Carr's office as a child and then, in another passage, dreams of making out with him. Her obsession with Coach Carr remains unrequited until his wife passes away, at which time all bets are off.

Giffin raises some uncomfortable questions about propriety, adulthood and what any of us would be willing to accept or forgive in the name of love. Unfortunately, she doesn't thoroughly explore her intriguing secondary plotline that involves an abusive boyfriend. Altogether this is serious stuff, clearly illustrating Giffin's evolution from "Will she get the guy?" scenarios to more thought-provoking themes. Regardless of the shift, The One & Only should resonate with longtime fans and newcomers alike, as Giffin's sharp writing is as wonderfully descriptive and refreshingly modern as ever. --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend

Andrew Lewis Conn (P) sculpts a seriocomic view of American racism and anti-Semitism against the background of the nascent late-1920s film industry. Brooklyn-born twins Micah and Izzy Grand (originally Grombotz) share a life passion: filmmaking. Otherwise, they couldn't be more different. Big-mouthed Micah goes through life zestfully, indulging in all the gambling, drinking and women his heart desires while introverted Izzy, a gay man who refuses to indulge his urges, is more comfortable in the editing room than with other people.

Their studio president's new moneymaking scheme--making stock footage of foreign locations--sends Micah and Izzy to Africa. While neither initially wants to go, Micah's enormous gambling debts to a black gangster happen to come due at the same time. Packing up their crew, the brothers head off intending to return with stock footage, a new silent film for the studio--and a secret. In place of repayment, the gangsters have ordered Micah to make a picture about the history of the slave trade. What the crew ultimately discovers and endures will forever change the way they see film, humanity and themselves.

Alternating between insight and slapstick, Conn delivers a serious historical commentary disguised as a cinematic romp. In 1928, political correctness did not exist, and he pulls no punches when accurately depicting the casual acceptance of prejudice, including racial slurs and hate crimes. As Izzy Grand says, "Point a camera at something, you change it." Readers who watch through the lens of Conn's brazen yet thoughtful sophomore novel won't look at film the same way again. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

When Jung Yoon's ex-boyfriend contacts her for the first time in eight years, she assumes it's to deliver bad news. Jung, currently mourning her mother's recent death, is unprepared to learn that their former professor, with whom they both once shared a strong bond, is now dying. The news causes a host of memories to resurface--of college life, of young love and of the fragile world they once shared. This wave of introspection is the driving force behind I'll Be Right There, by South Korean author Kyung-sook Shin.

Though the story unfolds within the tumultuous political climate of 1980s South Korea, Jung's recollections of college life often seem indistinguishable from a contemporary American student's. Recalling her art school, she laments, "The male students were more interested in protesting and drinking than in going to class, and the female students were busy preening or being dramatically depressed." The narrative feels so familiar to Western readers that it is easy to forget the protests she refers to hold tremendous political significance, and were met with violent backlash from police.

Still, Jung's deepest struggles are not bound to time or place. Shin's skill lies in her ability to transmute the specific into the universal: loneliness, loss and the sweet anxiety of first love are experiences made broadly familiar through Jung's keen self-awareness. It is no doubt due to Shin's poignant yet accessible style that her bestselling Please Look After Mom has been translated into more than 30 languages worldwide. --Annie Atherton

At the start of Michael Koryta's Those Who Wish Me Dead, 13-year-old Jace Wilson tries to conquer his fear of heights by jumping into an abandoned quarry lake. Just as he thinks the drop wasn't so bad, he encounters a dead body in the water. Then two men dressed like cops approach the edge above, escorting a third man under a hood, and, as Jace hides beneath a rock, he witnesses the murder of the hooded man.

Ethan Serbin runs a program in Montana that teaches people how to survive the wilderness. One night, a former student and current U.S. marshal asks Ethan to take a young murder witness into his next group of students to help hide the boy in the mountains in case the killers come looking for him. His parents don't trust law enforcement, and Jace needs to be kept safe until he can testify in court. Ethan is reluctant but can't say no to protecting a child. His decision brings hell to his front door and forces him to use every skill he's ever taught to stay alive and protect those he loves.

The throat-clutching suspense in the novel's opening is maintained throughout. The protagonists are well defined and sympathetic, regular folk who discover their own incredible strength in extraordinary circumstances. And readers may well wish the strikingly creepy villains dead. Much of the novel takes place over rough terrain, but Koryta (Edgar Award finalist for Tonight I Said Goodbye) is a sure-footed guide who takes readers on a harrowing adventure they won't soon forget. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd

Andrea Maria Schenkel (Bunker; Ice Cold) has taken the real history of a brutal, remote murder and twisted it into something even more unnerving for this, her first novel (originally titled Tannod and now being published for the first time in the U.S.).

Based on an unsolved Bavarian crime committed in 1922, The Murder Farm is set in the wake of World War II, told by an unnamed narrator. It includes excerpts from interviews with friends and colleagues of the murder victims, and diatribes from various villagers who felt that the family had it coming. At first, it's unclear precisely what has transpired, or if anyone actually is dead--the interviewees make grave, vague reference to "the day before it happened" and so on, leaving the reader in suspense. But as the interviews continue and it's revealed that the entire Danner family was killed, everyone from the eight-year-old friend of the little dead girl to the elderly village gossip agrees that there was something wrong with the peculiar Danners. As the narrator delves into the family's history and how their remote "murder farm" got its nickname, he--or she--reveals the villagers' isolation, ignorance and superstitions.

The novel's short length belies its cleverness. The Murder Farm is not precisely a mystery; it's more an introspective look at a small town and the dark secrets that it hides. Comparisons to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood are obvious, and this compelling novel will likely appeal to fans of literary fiction and true crime as well as lovers of more typical mysteries. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

British author Helen Walsh's The Lemon Grove is a steamy novel about age-inappropriate vacation lust that inverts the usual genders. Instead of a dapper roué chasing a filly in a bikini, Walsh presents Jenn Harding, a stacked, 40ish nursing-home manager, driven to infraction by a 17-year-old man-boy in blue swim trunks. Although current cultural mores tend to be more lenient toward Mrs. Robinson-type lechery, The Lemon Grove must still (ahem) surmount Jenn's flimsy scruples about adultery and finesse a far more verboten impediment: Nathan-of-the-blue-trunks is the first love of Jenn's stepdaughter, Emma.

The entire novel is set in picturesque Mallorca, where the Hardings have been renting a villa in the titular lemon grove for years. Jenn, who had previously seen her daughter's beau only fully clothed and slumped in the backseat of a car, arranged for Nathan's accompaniment without any lascivious forethought. Walsh establishes the status quo between Jenn and her devoted but preoccupied husband, Greg, before unleashing Nathan's discombobulating swim-trunked presence, serving up an expat's view of Deià's local color. Sticking close to Jenn's present-tense point of view, The Lemon Grove luxuriates in atmosphere, which, if occasionally overwritten, effectively conveys Jenn's appetite for stimulation. The novel's reliably frequent sex scenes--explicit, adventurous and a tad breathless--achieve their aim without provoking an excess of squirms.

The suspense of The Lemon Grove is derived from the spectacle of watching Walsh insinuate enough misunderstandings, yearnings, resentments and physical collisions into the narrative to sell the reader on the inevitability of a holiday attraction between a woman and her teenage stepdaughter's first major crush. --Holloway McCandless, blogger at Litagogo: A Guide to Free Literary Podcasts

Near the beginning of Animal Wisdom a quotation from Gandhi appears: "The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated." Linda Bender, a veterinarian whose work has included rescue, rehabilitation and protection of wildlife in Europe, Asia and Africa, wants to help all nations "learn from the spiritual lives of animals." She begins by exploring how humans' relationship with the natural world became disconnected and explaining that the relationship is actually reciprocal: by saving an animal, we save ourselves; when we eat an animal that has been pumped full of hormones and subjected to stress, those toxins become a part of our body; when we destroy an animal's habitat, we destroy our own habitat.

But Animal Wisdom is neither merely a fervent plea nor a strident diatribe. Bender presents a variety of lessons on how we can learn from animals, devoting a chapter to each. Examples include how to accept and recognize unconditional love, how to trust ourselves and the world and how to accept suffering and mortality. After the convincing and compassionate lessons, Bender provides a list of concrete, manageable steps we can take toward reestablishing our connection with the natural world--from refusing to use plastic bags and packaging to using fewer pesticides and herbicides. Bender believes the destiny of humankind is inextricably linked with all species and depends on our ability to "renegotiate our relationship with Mother Nature." Animal Wisdom is a fine tool for this renegotiation. --Kristen Galles from Book Club Classics

Readers will become addicted to these 36 short stories the way horrible Henry Higginbotham (in "The Cake Made Out of Teeth") is addicted to the confection made in his likeness, the way twins Edie and Tom are addicted to Luck ("The Tin Man's Price"), the way the whales are addicted to the man brought aboard the Misselkree ("Johnny Knockers").

With eight drawers--the themes tucked within the Cabinet of Curiosities--and four curators (authors), this collection of 36 goosepimply tales flows smoothly, one into the next, and will offer plenty for boys and girls to keep them up at night, around the campfire or in a tent by flashlight. Graveyards and whaling ships, parks and houses provide the settings. Like Stephen King, these four curators know that the most haunting themes hit closest to home. Alexander Jansson's half-tone drawings give just a hint of the quiet chill lurking within the tale. Larger themes emerge across the collection: pairs, mirror images, bullies and victims, negligent parents, suffocating parents.

The book is thick, but the tales fly by. It makes a great read-aloud in bits and snatches for a family road trip, or straight through on a rainy afternoon. Give this to fans of Adam Gidwitz's Tales Dark and Grimm and Candace Fleming's On the Day I Died. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness