Naomi Hirahara's third Japantown mystery, Crown City, delivers an incisive primer about integrating Japanese culture with American ways through the experiences of a teenager in 1903.

Following the death of his master craftsman father, 18-year-old Ryunosuke "Ryui" Wada leaves Yokohama, Japan, for the "Crown City" of Pasadena, Calif., where he has secured a carpentry apprenticeship with an art dealer. Ryui's initial response to the U.S. is lukewarm: most people cannot pronounce his name, so they call him Louie. He lives in a rundown boarding house, where he shares a room with surly Jack, a Japanese photographer who frequently disappears, seldom talks to Ryui when he's there, and has commandeered their bathroom as a darkroom. Ryui takes a side gig as a server at a prestigious cherry blossom dinner hosted by popular artist Toshio Aoki. During the event, though, one of Aoki's paintings disappears. Aoki approaches Ryui and Jack to find it, hoping their proximity to the art world, their heritage, and unassuming roles uniquely position them to investigate while avoiding negative publicity. But to do so, the amateur detectives must navigate a seedy area called "Dark California," an opium den, murders, and anti-Japanese bigotry.

Hirahara (Clark and Division) captures an era when Japanese art was popular in Pasadena, yet racism toward Japanese people persisted. At first Ryui is hesitant to sleuth, believing he has enough to do at his job and in assimilating, but he eventually views helping Aoki as another way to prove himself in his new home. Ryui finds much to appreciate in the U.S. as he settles into his adopted country in the satisfying Crown City. --Oline H. Cogdill, freelance reviewer

In debut novelist Caitlin Breeze's poetic, otherworldly dark-academia fantasy, The Fox Hunt, a young woman falls in with a glitzy but dangerous crowd and stumbles into a life-altering magical bargain.

"Flood gossip [is] the spice on every tongue" at the University, an institute known for producing the most brilliant scholars in the world. Introverted student Emma notices her school's wildlife reacting strangely after a mysterious flood and hopes to use her prestigious research fellowship to study the phenomenon. Instead, she is thrust into the glamorous orbit of the Turnbulls, an elite, all-male, generations-old secret society. A debauched game ends with Emma calling out for rescue from the boy she loves and receiving help from the Night City, a hidden magical metropolis that exists alongside mortal reality. The city binds Emma into servitude as a shape-shifting fox maiden in exchange for the intervention. Emma is determined to return to her mortal life, but first she'll need a way to take down the Turnbulls, who draw power from the city through dark rites. However, the connections she forms with her fellow fox maidens leave her wondering where she truly belongs.

Breeze's narrative voice is thick with dreamy imagery. The Night City is vibrantly imagined, with arcane eccentricities and fairy tale codes of order, at once perilous and alluring. The Fox Hunt thrums with undercurrents of female rage and anti-elitism, but its heart lies in the solace of community and the healing act of honoring one's true nature. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

B.K. Borison (Good Spirits; Business Casual) returns to the broadcast world of First-Time Caller in her delectable romance novel And Now, Back to You. Jackson Clark, a weather nerd and the legal guardian of his 15-year-old twin sisters, enjoys working at a Baltimore radio station. He does not, however, approve of chaotic Delilah Stewart, the meteorologist for the television station that shares the same parking lot. Aside from leaving Delilah grumpy Post-it notes when she parks crookedly, Jackson has rarely interacted with her, so he is appalled when their bosses send them to western Maryland to co-report on a massive snowstorm.

Jackson is nervous about leaving his sisters behind and spending so much time with the effervescent Delilah. Meanwhile, Delilah is frustrated by her "mean-spirited" boss and resentful about being paired with stick-in-the-mud Jackson, when she could easily cover the story alone. Then they arrive at their remote lodge in the woods and discover that it's been overbooked because of the storm, leaving them with one room... and one bed.

And Now, Back to You is a clever and poignant story about two people with painful pasts realizing their futures look brighter together. Full of witty banter, meteorology geekery, and plenty of chemistry, this novel can be read as a stand-alone but will surely send new readers scrambling to pick up First Time Caller. Borison pays homage to classic romance tropes and When Harry Met Sally while applying her own introspective twist. --Jessica Howard, former bookseller, freelance book reviewer

In Traversal, Maria Popova (Figuring) crosses eras and continents to create a sweeping history of science and art, love and traversal.

This fascinating volume is ideal for fans of Popova's blog, "The Marginalian," and readers who wish to go deep; once again she reinforces her belief that science, art, and love all result from the instinctive urge to create. The title's "traversal" applies not simply to a sun, river, or ocean crossing but also the crossing of societal bounds. Popova posits that one's loves shape the course of one's life, discoveries, creations, ideas. Beginning with Captain James Cook embarking on the HMS Endeavour to witness the predicted 1769 transit of Venus across the sun, Popova hints that Cook perhaps served as a model for Mary Shelley's captain in Frankenstein (calling him a "Frankensteinian creature of disjointed character traits"), and astutely connecting science and art in the human quest for meaning. Furthermore, Frankenstein would not exist without Shelley being cast out by her father or her devotion to Percy Bysshe Shelley.

"Prometheus changed the world not by taking possession of fire but by sharing it with humankind," Popova writes. Antoine Lavoisier's widow, Marie-Anne, "worked tirelessly to ensure that Lavoisier's discoveries reached other minds." Her translations of his work helped standardize the scientific method.

While some readers may find the work a bit discursive, those who enjoy digressions will lap up this hefty work. Popova writes, "Each love we love and unlove alters the way we walk through life, alters the trajectory of our traversal along the shoreline of the self." Popova's well-researched, epic history makes this case over and over again. --Jennifer M. Brown

Reflecting on a life lived triumphantly in the margins, Good Woman: A Reckoning by Savala Nolan (Don't Let It Get You Down) revels in the author's raw, unfiltered femininity and offers a compelling vision of womanhood unhindered by the "herd think" of cultural expectations. The author, now in her "thunderous middle years," spent her earlier decades flattening herself into the "good woman" mold, only to realize that it did not deliver on its advertised benefits. What to be, then, if not a good woman? Over the course of 12 electrifying essays that lean into history, popular culture, spirituality and domesticity, Nolan demonstrates what it means to trust wholly in one's body, to honor one's complexities and to thrive "in a world that hates women." It's about embracing the antiheroes of our stories and tasting "the thrill of noncompliance."

In "Refusal," Nolan takes her sexual and emotional temperature and unravels years of social conditioning. She turns toward something far better, a counter-cultural pivot toward "playing the villain." To be self-possessed and self-actualized in our patriarchal society is, she explains in a later piece, "downright villainous." The essay "Mothers Superior," stunning in scope, describes mothering as a "godlike function" and makes a persuasive case for motherhood as a far more accurate description of God.

Crafted with Nolan's intellectually curious, animated narration, Good Woman will resonate with readers who sense that things are not working out quite the way they should. For them, Nolan's essays offer a dynamic framework, a "working compass" for redesigning our roles without altering or diluting the magical essence of what makes us uniquely female. --Shahina Piyarali

In her third collection, Nighthawks, Canadian poet Lisa Martin draws on flora and fauna imagery to craft dignified meditations on the fleeting nature of life and key relationships.

Martin (Believing Is Not the Same as Being Saved) chooses the perfect metaphors for pondering change. Doors and walls represent thresholds or barriers. Friends face cancer or bereavement, and several poems reflect on divorce. "Two" is an elegy for failed partnerships--her own and those of her acquaintances. Flowers embody transience: "Icelandic poppies in July/ in my married friends' backyard, gone/ by morning. The marriage gone, too." Elsewhere, creeping bellflower, an invasive species, symbolizes the insurmountable. "Each spring... before/ I give up the task entirely," she attempts to eradicate it, until she is able to make "peace with impossible// things." Bird-watching was a hobby Martin shared with her ex-husband, and birds make frequent appearances here, too, including in the title piece, which does double duty as an ekphrastic piece referencing the Edward Hopper painting.

"Mid Life" pictures middle age as the apex of a roller coaster, promising fear--and excitement--yet to come: "we rose over the top of the world we knew, and our youth--// and, screaming--// began to descend." A sonnet series illuminates the Myers-Briggs personality types. Martin also engages in metafictional musings on the poet's art ("Ars Poetica") and describes unusual experiences of the senses ("Synaesthetic"). The collection is a sonic feast, rich in alliteration, slant rhymes ("alone" with "home"), and careful enjambment ("Mean-// while").

Melancholy but elegant, these poems of the ephemeral affirm the joys to be found in human connection and the natural world. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck

In Dream Facades: The Cruel Architecture of Reality TV, Jack Balderrama Morley presents a fascinating take on the houses that have been the backdrops of popular reality television shows, and how these have not only shaped programming for the genre but also reflect wider social, historical, and cultural trends in the United States.

Morley, managing editor of design magazine Dwell, examines the homes featured on several shows, including Selling Sunset, The Kardashians, and The Real World, and describes residences that are "more than stage sets for drama; they're real places swollen with the fantasies projected onto them." As our culture has become oversaturated by the projection of these fantasy spaces, Morley continues, "our homes have changed, too, with these dream facades sutured onto them."

Dream Facades discusses aspects of shows--like the conflicts that are driven by houses and home ownership in The Real Housewives of Atlanta--and then carefully describes the contexts that surround the construction of these houses, where they are located geographically, and the path that led to both their aesthetics and how they have entered the culture.

Houses are more than structures; they are a reflection of ideologies and aspirations. Dream Facades makes those connections explicit while also proffering ideas for future concepts rooted not in aesthetic choices, but in choices that foster communities and empower people to live supported and fulfilled lives. In other words: "If shellacked modernity can become boring enough, it can lead its audience to ask for something different. It can let us realize that we should demand more from our screens, ourselves." --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer

Perennial favorite Rebecca Solnit (The Mother of All Questions; No Straight Road Takes You There) understands the despair that can arise in a world that seems hell-bent on harm and hurtling toward a destructive end. Noting the many ways that real change can be rendered invisible, The Beginning Comes After the End encourages readers to reject the "short-term perspective" in which "the present seems to be perpetual, unchanging, unyielding" and "no old world is dying, no new world is being born." As is typical of her work, Solnit draws upon myriad writers, thinkers, and activists to illustrate her points that the world is thoroughly interconnected and that "the past shows us how change works, how what once seemed impossible becomes actuality."

Though unnecessarily repetitive at times, Solnit builds a compelling argument that the dissolution that seems to threaten the social progress gained in recent decades is instead merely a backlash that she likens to a supernova. She cites astrobiologist David Grinspoon's assessment that what seems "as if they were gaining strength and becoming something larger or more powerful" is just a star's collapse at the end of its life. And from this destruction, Solnit argues, will come something new, something to build together. Perfect for readers of Robin Wall Kimmerer and David Graeber, Solnit's work offers an invitation to see the world and its capacity for change as a home for hope, asking, "What futures can we build on these other versions of the past, these other voices with other stories to tell?" --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian

A rescue dog and an orphaned cheetah form a new family in Newbery Honor-winning author Jasmine Warga's The Unlikely Tale of Chase and Finnegan, a graceful, ultimately hopeful middle-grade novel inspired by true stories of cheetahs and dogs in zoos across the globe.

A dog flees the cabin that was once his home, gets injured, and is rescued by two strange new humans. Though the humans heal him and name him Finnegan, he is slow to trust. When they explain that Finnegan has a new and important job at the zoo, he fears this means he is about to be deserted. Instead, he becomes the "new cheetah ambassador dog," companion to Chase, a curious and anxious young cheetah whose mother died.

Warga (A Rover's Story) alternates between Chase and Finnegan's points-of-view highlighting their mutual worries, loneliness, and fears as well as their shared joys: a love of food; pride in doing and being "good." Warga excels at character building, depicting Finnegan's fear of abandonment, and showing how Chase's "grief is like another appendage." 

Spot illustrations from artist Vivienne To (The Whisperwicks series) begin each chapter while larger, grayscale images indicate the start of a new section and the developing friendship. From "Endings and Beginnings" to the final page ("She runs to him") the figures of Chase and Finnegan move physically closer. This book may be too much to bear for young readers overwhelmed by sad things happening to small animals. Those who love realistic stories about animals and anxiety, however, may find The Unlikely Tale of Chase and Finnegan wholesome and emotionally satisfying. --Nicole Brinkley, bookseller and writer

The Future Book, by current National Ambassador for Young People's Literature Mac Barnett and illustrated by Shawn Harris, Barnett's collaborator on The First Cat in Space series, is a nonsensical, surreal, and silly picture book where noses are called "mushrooms" and cows are "mooing life-forms."       

At first, the future seems relatively straightforward, albeit peculiar: "the sun is called the moon," "morning is called night," and vice versa. Bananas are called apples... but apples? A page turn reveals, "We don't have apples in the future."

Barnett builds momentum as, one by one, new names for common phrases and customs are revealed, each more absurd than the last: a supermarket is called a "Bolly bolly hoo hoo" and "the lowest number is one bazillion." Intrigue and excitement multiply when new facts, like lots of people being named "Charlie Cheese Face," have no logical explanation: "There's an interesting reason why, but we don't have time for that story." Eventually the seemingly disparate items and phrases merge into a sidesplitting short story ("Then we gently placed fish on each other's heads"). The book's simple sentences and fourth wall-breaking narration enhance the farce.

Harris's art builds on the text as conventional images gradually give way to recurring outlandish ones, like a punk with triangular sunglasses and a rainbow-hued pompadour, and various people amicably sporting green fish on their heads. His confident, sometimes overlapping brushstrokes and playful use of color imbue the future with joy and humor (one page simply debuts the color "blorange"). Fans of The Book that Almost Rhymed by Omar Abed should add The Future Book to story time rotation. --Kieran Slattery, freelance reviewer, teacher, co-creator of Gender Inclusive Classrooms

In the hilarious and zany Midnight Mayhem by Christina Uss (The Adventures of a Girl Called Bicycle), 11-year-old Kazimir (Kaz) Jakobsen learns he may never sleep again--and that could be a good thing.

Kaz's family moved to Philadelphia only two days ago, but they've at least found a local restaurant, Beigel's Bagels, where they can have their traditional Sunday brunch. When the owner offers Kaz a spoonful of "something fluorescent green" called "Hairy Chest Mustard" and gives Kaz some homemade root beer to wash it down, Kaz's mouth feels spicy, but he's unconcerned. "Until it was time for bed." Kaz can't sleep. But it's not just for one night--Kaz stops sleeping altogether. In a book his mother brought home from the library, Kaz learns about a group of Eastern Europeans (called "the Sleepless Ones") who "had eaten an extremely potent local green mustard shortly before drinking homemade root beer." His parents dismiss the story as pseudoscience and take Kaz to a sleep study. There, Kaz befriends Floyd, a boy with a similar inability to sleep. The boys build a friendship around sneaking away at night to explore the hospital and Philadelphia, and Kaz begins to wonder if being a Sleepless One isn't so bad after all.

Midnight Mayhem acts as a delightful prism for sleeplessness, showing the night as a time that can be stressful and upsetting as well as a time that grants opportunity for expansive experience. Uss cleverly uses Kaz's third-person perspective to highlight both the joy and fear one might experience if they suddenly had eight extra evening hours. Exploration, risk, and friendship reign supreme in this excellent middle-grade novel. --Kyla Paterno, freelance reviewer

Desahogarse is a Spanish word that means to vent and "pour out your feelings": literally to undrown yourself. In René Peña-Govea's searing and cathartic young adult debut, Estela, Undrowning, a senior in high school is fueled by beautiful poetry and explosive rage.

Estela Morales attends one of San Francisco's most exclusive public high schools. She is proud of the fact that she tested in and feels distinctly different from the other brown and Black students who got in via lottery. Meanwhile, she feels like a "defective Latina" and worries Spanish will tank her college prospects. Estela asks fellow student Rogelio to tutor her, and a relationship blooms. Meanwhile, Estela uses poetry to "purge" her feelings about an eviction notice that threatens her home and family. When one of Estela's teachers announces a poetry contest that is open to "all Latiné-identified students," Estela enters and comes in second; first place going to a classmate who doesn't identify as Latiné. A controversy erupts and Estela is frustrated with how she's perceived, anxious about what will happen to her family, and harboring gruff thoughts about other minority students. Ultimately, she must undrown herself, come to terms with her toxic feelings, and fight for herself and her community.

Peña-Govea renders a sweaty and combustible city full of passionate and complicated characters who defy tidy characterizations, tackling prickly conversations about identity with care and academic-level precision. Estela's world overflows with diverse ethnic backgrounds, gender expressions, and sexual preferences that, in less sensitive hands, could feel token or flat. But Peña-Govea writes with such confidence that her characters realistically, fiercely wrestle with nuanced conversations, allowing for a classic bildungsroman with modern vitality. --Luis G. Rendon