Everyone knows a woman like Emma, a central character in Liza Palmer's More Like Her, a woman who seems to epitomize perfection--a beautiful and successful woman, with a handsome husband and stunning home, who inspires envy. But things are never what they seem, and a chill might run up your spine as you read this novel, which embraces a darker, edgier side of chick lit. Told from the point of view of unlucky-in-love Fran, More Like Her rips the blinders off all its characters with the revelation that the seemingly unflappable Emma has been the victim of years of domestic abuse. When Emma's husband commits the ultimate violent act, Fran is forced to examine her perceptions of those around her but, more importantly, reevaluate how she has been zombie-walking through her own existence.

Drawing strength in the aftermath of Emma's tragedy, Fran struggles to learn the lesson that life is far too short to hide her true self. She begins taking more chances--in her career, in a relationship with a sexy Southern businessman and in her attempts to honor the memory of Emma. Palmer creates a cast of authentic characters around Fran, people who could be your co-workers or members of your book club. More Like Her is a reminder that, despite appearances, you can't really understand a relationship unless you're in it.--Natalie Papailiou. author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend

David Vann's debut, Caribou Island, a beautifully dark novel, was both a fully realized tale and a portent of things to come. In Dirt, Vann is still exploring darkness and what it can do to families.

In 1985, Galen lives with his mother, Suzie-Q, in a secluded house in a suburb of Sacramento. His Aunt Helen and her daughter, Jennifer, visit many afternoons for tea and occasionally all four of them visit Grandma in a nearby nursing home. An idyll? Hardly. This is a family made so dysfunctional by lies, violence and abuse--physical and emotional--that even basic civility is lost to them.

Galen is 22 with no job, never went to college, bulimic, virginal and seeking transcendence in whatever New Age mantra or practice is available. Jennifer is 17, precocious, a sexual tease who tortures the besotted Galen. Once a year, everyone goes to the family cabin near Lake Tahoe and Suzie-Q tries to re-create her Norman Rockwell illusions about family fun--down to Grandma's chicken and dumplings.

This time, it all goes wrong because a revelation is made that changes everyone. Back home, Galen and his mother move toward an inevitable conclusion. Galen, crazed and out of control, tries to become one with the dirt, to become "a meditation on dirt." Naked, sweating and threatening, he digs and mounds dirt, wallows in it, making and remaking his world according to Siddhartha's meditation. He has finally internalized the fact that all that holds his family together is hatred and violence. The ending will leave you wide-eyed.  --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

Rosamund Lupton (Sister) offers up an intricately plotted combination of thriller, speculative fiction and mother-daughter celebration in Afterwards. One afternoon, Grace Covey waits to collect her eight-year-old son, Adam, and 17-year-old daughter, Jenny, from their exclusive school. When the building bursts into flames and Grace runs inside to save Jenny, the family's calm suburban life devolves into a nightmare.

Grace and Jenny wake up in the hospital--outside their badly burned, comatose bodies. They can hear and see everything, but can be seen and heard only by each other. Grace watches as doctors tell her distraught husband that she and Jenny may never wake up, and tries to provide emotional support to her daughter even though she has no idea how to explain their ghostly state. Meanwhile, the police receive evidence that Adam started the fire. Grace believes her son has been framed; so does her sister-in-law Sarah, a police investigator. Grace shadows Sarah's investigation, learning disturbing information about the school, as well as tragic secrets behind her best friend's carefree exterior. The key to the mystery may lie with Jenny, however, and Grace must help her daughter find the strength to remember the events surrounding the fire.

Lupton delivers a top-notch mystery with red herrings galore. At its heart, it deals with parents and children, the shared joy and pain. Grace also sees the strength and intensity of her husband's love for her, a force that sustains their lives and yet is sometimes forgotten in the minutiae.

Readers are encouraged to grab a box of Kleenex, put Mom on speed dial and discover what comes afterwards. --Jaclyn Fulwood

Jonah Man is the story of an old performer on the road, barely hanging on to his career by taking and selling drugs, forced to share the stage with a talented young star in the grip of an abusive, ambitious father. The drugs get out of hand, the father is murdered, the kid takes off for New York and the cops ride in to sort it all out. So what's new and fresh about this? Well, in Christopher Narozny's first novel, the story takes place in the itinerant vaudeville world of the early 20th century, told with the grit and stage vernacular of that hard life behind the velvet curtain.

The old performer is Swain, a one-handed juggler who knows that bouncing rubber balls off his traveling collection of prosthetic hooks is "a good act, but it's not a finale." To make ends meet and numb disappointment, he deals vials of unnamed potent elixirs along the circuit while skimming a taste from each for himself. Swain's self-aware voice opens the novel, setting the scene for subsequent chapters narrated by the remaining characters, as Narozny describes the fleeting thrill of live entertainment where "nobody knows why you do what you do, no more than they know why they watch... there is only the mesmeric whirl." When that thrill becomes drudgery, the actors move from accolades to anonymity. The richly imagined Jonah Man, a hard-luck story of a career on the skids, is part mystery and part tragedy--a story that might play out in any era. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Lisa Scottoline (Look Again) clearly knows how to write a thrilling mystery: she's published nearly 20 of them in her long and successful career. In Come Home, however, she draws on her personal experience as a stepmother to write an intriguing tale about the lengths a mother will go to for a child to whom she has no blood relation. It's complicated, to say the least.

Come Home introduces us to Jill, a single mother and pediatrician with a preteen daughter. Through flashbacks we learn that her cad of an ex-husband not only stole from Jill, but abruptly ripped two stepdaughters out of her life when she caught him embezzling from her medical practice. Suspending, for a moment, the puzzle of what Jill ever saw in him, Scottoline makes us feel for the fact that despite Jill's best efforts, she lost not just her husband, but two children in the divorce. When Jill's shady ex-husband is found murdered, bringing her back in contact with the two young ladies she once thought of as her own, all hell breaks loose in a dangerous game to find the killer before he strikes again.

Scottoline has crafted a mystery set in a modern, blended family. She examines the bond an ex-stepparent has to children she can no longer rightfully call her own. The heart-wrenching family drama makes for an interesting backdrop to what could otherwise have been a run-of-the-mill whodunit. --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend

Stephen King's The Wind Through the Keyhole takes place between two earlier books in King's Dark Tower sequence (Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla), which means it could be considered book 4.5 in the series. In the middle of their journey to the mysterious Dark Tower, Roland Deschain and his band of gunslingers encounter a Starkblast, a rare storm that freezes and destroys everything in its path. They have no choice but to hole up and wait out the storm. To pass the time, Roland tells a story about a younger version of himself sent to help a town afflicted by a murderous shapeshifter. And there's a tale told within this tale as well, spoken to a frightened boy the younger Roland has taken under his protection.

This complicated structure complements the tales; readers will be as interested in the tale of young Roland and partner Jamie DeCurry as they are in the final inner story of Tim Ross and the magical being who later comes to be known as the Man in Black. Fans of the Dark Tower novels will thrill to the many echoes of the earlier works, with new insights into familiar characters and settings. The Wind Through the Keyhole is a commentary on the human need for stories and a fitting reminder of Stephen King's own status as master storyteller, focusing Roland Deschain's world just a little more clearly to readers both familiar and new to the series. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) was many things: a successful playwright, screenwriter and memoirist; a suspected Communist (maligned as an unrepentant Stalinist) who stood up against political intimidation in the 1950s; a labor organizer and civil rights activist; partner to Dashiell Hammett for more than 30 years; a woman criticized for being manlike and grasping, but simultaneously overly feminine and stylish; a New Orleans-born resident of New York, Hollywood and Martha's Vineyard who persisted in calling herself a Southerner. She was respected for her literary contributions, hailed as a hero by a feminist movement that she largely rejected, praised and excoriated for her politics and, ultimately, vilified for what came to be seen as the outrageous mendacity of her memoirs. It would be difficult to locate a biographical subject more contradictory or complex. In A Difficult Woman, Alice Kessler-Harris makes an excellent case that Hellman represents the complexities and changing mores of the 20th century.

The contradictions in her personality and politics are brought into relief by her written work--including plays still popular in repertory theater today--which always included strong moral statements. The concepts of truth and deception, or betrayal and loyalty, play large roles in her work and this insightful biography, rich with context, shows how they were also themes that defined her life. Not an apologia, but an exploration of nuances, A Difficult Woman gives us an infinitely more complex Hellman than the popular image that has survived her. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pages of julia

In 1997, while in her native Dominican Republic, Julia Alvarez and her husband, Bill Eichner, became the owners of 60 acres of deforested land that ultimately became Alta Gracia, a 260-acre organic coffee farm/literary arts center. There they met Piti, a Haitian teenager working on a neighboring farm. "Somewhere in Haiti, a mother had sent her young son to the wealthier neighbor country to help the impoverished family. Every time I spotted [him], I felt the pressure of that mother's prayer in my own eyes." Soon Piti was working at Alta Gracia and had become part of Alvarez's extended family. One evening, in an attempt to assuage his homesickness, Alvarez assured Piti that when he married, she'd be at his wedding. In August 2009, Piti did indeed call on Alvarez to come to his wedding scheduled in a remote part of northern Haiti the following week.

They dropped everything and went, although the journey wasn't easy; almost a year later, a few months after Haiti's devastating earthquake, they traveled back to Haiti with Piti, his wife, Eseline, and daughter, Ludy. That trip makes up the second half of the book.

With these two deeply affecting journeys, Alvarez offers us a miniature yet beautifully illustrated portrait of her own marriage, whose bond mirrors that of her own parents, both of whom were suffering from advancing Alzheimer's yet never lost each other or the memory of their great love. Ultimately A Wedding in Haiti is a deeply personal story of family and connection that casts a light on larger issues of global community and the need for unity, compassion, and understanding. --Debra Ginsberg, author

If there's an upside to aging, it might be that we're sharing it with Anna Quindlen, with her "Ah-HA!" moments and attitude of gratitude. Boomers have always enjoyed being a majority, but Quindlen's essays have been mainstays of optimism, her realistic yet upbeat tone ever present in her New York Times and Newsweek columns--and in the memoir Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, which ends, characteristically, "...to be continued...."

A Quindlen fan once described a "Life in the 30's" column as "fridge worthy," posting it where women place significant memos. In that column (collected in Living Out Loud), Quindlen took seriously her role as spokeswoman. "Sometimes I would think I was the only person alive concerned about some crazy cul-de-sac of human behavior," she writes in Lots of Candles. "Then I would get letters from readers and realize that was not the case, that we were not alone, any of us."

From the perspective of middle age, Quindlen addresses sandwich-generation responsibilities, the joy of parenting, the angst of girls pining to be size zero and consumerism (admitting to a love of goods, from shoes to throw pillows). Throughout, she emphasizes not the moments that have "passed us by" but "the pitfalls we've skirted." 

Just as A Short Guide to a Happy Life is the perfect graduation gift, Lots of Candles will delight moms (as well as readers who want to treat themselves to Quindlen's wit and wisdom). --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, bookseller

In Midnight in Peking, Paul French (The Old Shanghai A-Z), takes readers to pre-Communist China, breaking the true crime mold in gripping detective noir style. As the sun rises after a bitterly cold Peking night in January 1937, a local man makes a chilling discovery. At the foot of a watchtower rumored to be the haunting ground of fox spirits, a young foreign woman lies murdered and mutilated, her organs cut out, her limbs and neck partially severed. Peking police predict difficulty identifying the victim due to the lacerations in her face until E.T.C. Werner, a former British diplomat, arrives on the scene and cries out the name of his only child: Pamela.

Detective Chief Inspector Richard Dennis, head of the British Municipal Police in Tientsin and a former Scotland Yard man, is called to Peking to investigate the crime, but faces a string of dead ends and finds his hands tied as his superiors discourage him from investigating any leads that involve the foreign community.

Interweaving DCI Dennis's investigation with details of life in 1930s Peking, French takes the reader on a vivid tour of a community of aristocrats and con men, bureaucrats and pimps, a microcosm of propriety and barely concealed vice hovering on the brink of destruction. His careful attention to atmosphere, historical accuracy and character development evokes in the reader the same sympathy and frustration at thwarted justice that led him to write Pamela's story. --Jaclyn Fulwood, graduate assistant, University of Oklahoma Libraries

With pranks figuring strongly into its premise, Lisa Graff's latest middle-grade novel (The Thing About Georgie) makes a fun read starring sympathetic characters.

When the Media Club at Auden Elementary tries to pick a news anchor to read the daily announcements, Francine Halata and Kansas Bloom tie with three votes each. They agree to determine the winner by double dog dares: whoever completes the most dares gets the job. They both start out strongly: Kansas licks a lizard at recess, and Francine balances a spork on her nose for 15 minutes at lunch. But Francine quickly falls behind when she can't hang upside down on the monkey bars for an entire recess, and Kansas manages to trick the yard monitor into letting him sniff the man's armpit. That's when the competition really ramps up.

But there is more to Double Dog Dare than pranks and competition. Francine finds out that her parents are getting a divorce and doesn't tell her best friend Natalie. Instead of hanging with Natalie after school, Francine helps her father move into his new apartment. And Kansas has just enrolled in Auden Elementary because his mom left his deadbeat dad for a new job in a new town. Chapters alternate between the viewpoints of Francine and Kansas, so readers find themselves rooting for both candidates to win. Ultimately only one of them does, but how this is achieved involves a hamster, a talent show and a really bad magic act. --Lynn Becker, host of Book Talk, the monthly online discussion of children's books for SCBWI

Ever since the Duckling first appeared in The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog!, Pigeon has felt gypped. Why does cute little Duckling get everything all the time? It's simply not fair.

Here Duckling proves to have a few tricks tucked under her feathers. Along comes Duckling (scooty scoot scoot!). She bats her big blue eye and asks politely, "Hello! May I have a cookie, please?" A cookie appears from out of the sky. "Thanks!" she says with a flappy flip flap! Her joyful flight-dance scatters a few of her yellow feathers. But then, bursting into the picture from stage left is... the Pigeon. "Hey! How did you get that cookie!?" The large, bold type suggests the power of Pigeon's delivery. In smaller, quieter type, the Duckling replies, "I asked for it.... Politely."

Mo Willems once again proves that a roll of the eyes, a half-drawn eyelid and body posture can convey a great deal of emotion. The pigeon's eyelid at half-mast as he says, "You asked for it..." telegraphs, "Come on!" With that, he kicks off a litany of things in cartoon panels that Pigeon fans will be able to recite by heart ("I ask to drive the bus! I ask for hot dog parties!... I've asked for a walrus!"). Then, "Right now, I'm asking,... Why? WHY? WHY?" As usual, Pigeon works himself into a tizzy, and we won't tell how Duckling deflates his hot air.

But we reveal that she gets the last laugh--who says nice guys finish last? This is Mo Willems at his best. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness