What a Happy Family by Saumya Dave is a tender contemporary drama examining the impact of mental health challenges on a well-to-do Indian American family in Atlanta, Ga.

Twenty-something Natasha is the middle child and black sheep of the Joshi family. While everyone around her is powering forward in their lives, Natasha feels stuck and unhappy. Her brilliant sister is a psychiatrist, as is their father. Her brother occupies the family sweet spot: he's a male child attending a prestigious university. Joshi matriarch Bina harbors high hopes that flighty Natasha will settle down in her job and marry her childhood sweetheart, Karan, the son of Bina's closest friend. Instead, Natasha launches her dream career as a stand-up comic, shocking her parents and the local community of watchful aunties.

As with her debut novel, Well-Behaved Indian Women, Dave is fascinated by the generational dynamics in South Asian diaspora families, where the pressure to succeed can take a toll on members who dare to imagine for themselves a different vision of the future. In sharing the intriguing stories of Natasha's siblings and parents in all their complexity, Dave builds suspenseful subplots that simmer alongside Natasha's slow and devastating unraveling as her fledgling comedy efforts backfire and she feels increasingly isolated from those closest to her.

What a Happy Family is a masterful study of immigrant parents and their American children navigating conflicts within their cultural bubble and outside it. Faced with the ultimate test, the Joshis must confront uncomfortable realities if their fragile family unit is to endure and thrive. --Shahina Piyarali, reviewer

Sure, modern crime fiction has an abundance of idiosyncratic female detectives, but how many of them show up at the murder site in a minivan transporting four children, one of whom urinates all over the crime scene? So begins Fabian Nicieza's ceaselessly funny debut novel, Suburban Dicks, in which characters' wisecracks cushion a painful reckoning with the prejudices running amok in a New Jersey town.

Queens girl-turned-suburbanite Andrea Stern, who is ostentatiously pregnant with her fifth child, isn't looking for drama the morning she rushes into a West Windsor, N.J., gas station; she's looking for a bathroom for her youngest child. Unlike the incompetent cops on the scene, Andrea determines that the killer tried to make the murder of gas station attendant Satkunananthan Sasmal look like a random shooting. Andrea is no stranger to crime solving: she was planning to attend a graduate program with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit when she got pregnant with her first child. The fatal shooting of Sasmal, an immigrant from India, is West Windsor's first murder in more than 30 years, but the town's Asian community has been feeling victimized for ages. Andrea teams up with disgraced local journalist Kenneth Lee in the hunt for the killer.

Suburban Dicks is a well-oiled mystery, throughout which stereotypes fly from the mouths and pollute the minds of even well-meaning characters trying to get to the bottom of Sasmal's murder and the decades-old crime it points to. Nicieza, co-creator of Marvel's Deadpool, has set out to expose prejudice in all its hairy, shattering guises, and in so doing, he never fails to find a laugh where it hurts. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Marjorie Liu gathers six previously published short stories and an original novella in The Tangleroot Palace, a powerful collection of speculative fiction that showcases the talent that's won her several Eisner and Hugo awards. With a range of themes and settings, the stories in The Tangleroot Palace exhibit immersive worldbuilding and emotionally evocative prose, the same style that has made her so successful in her paranormal romance novels and in powerhouse comics like Monstress (with Sana Takeda).

The collection opens with "Sympathy for the Bones," a story best described as creepy, in which a woman just crossing into adulthood murderously breaks free from the woman who has been her savior and captor for most of her life. The book ends with the titular novella, which reads like a fairytale, complete with a dangerous enchanted forest, an unwanted betrothal and an alluring stranger. In between are five stories varying widely in subject, but united by themes and archetypes readers will recognize from Liu's other work. She focuses on people, mostly women, who are morally gray: monsters with good motivations; humans who do monstrous things; women doing whatever they must for freedom and revenge.

Introducing the collection, Liu remarks that her stories are connected by a few common threads, but one lingers long after reading. Writing in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, she notes that "hope in the possibility of something good--even the tiniest, most wee little good--is sometimes all we've got." While The Tangleroot Palace is certainly not lighthearted, that thread of hope guides everyone through even the darkest of times. --Suzanne Krohn, editor, Love in Panels

As in The Somerset Girls, animal rescue is central to The Summer of No Attachments, Lori Foster's tender-hearted romance set again in Sunset, a small community in rural Kentucky. This installment focuses on Ivey Anders, a veterinarian who recently called it quits with her beau. Ivey is assisted at the vet clinic by Hope Mage, a good friend and dedicated worker who has sworn off men because of a disturbing incident that occurred several years before.

Ivey and Hope tend to an abandoned dog with a broken leg and soon discover the dog is pregnant. After the birth of the pups, Hope looks into renting a new apartment in town, roping in Ivey to offer her opinion of the place. There, Ivey meets the landlord, Corbin Meyer, a single businessman. Corbin has just learned he's father to a troubled 10-year-old boy, Justin. The child was dumped into Corbin's life by Justin's drug- and alcohol-addicted mother.

When the boy meets Ivey, the two instantly hit it off, discovering they share a love of animals and horror movies. Their connection bonds them--and Ivey and Corbin. As father and son get to know and fall in love with romantically reluctant Ivey, Hope meets Corbin's brother, Lang, who is smitten with Hope, but finds he must walk on eggshells in order to woo her wounded heart.

Foster's feel-good, small-town romance weaves in well-plotted story threads and complications that expose how scars from the past, if healed, can unlock more hopeful, brighter futures. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

"Our mother was a terrible mother, wasn't she?" is a question that art historian and biographer Hayden Herrera (Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work) poses at the beginning of her frank and fearless memoir, Upper Bohemia.

Herrera and her sister, Blair, were born to Elizabeth and John Phillips, beautiful patricians with impeccable bloodlines and family wealth--although after the onset of the Great Depression there was never enough money. Still, there was the house in Cape Cod built on 800 inherited acres, with Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy as neighbors. There was the Manhattan apartment tended by a housemaid. But money was irrelevant. What mattered was art, freedom, love and the company of writers and artists whom Hayden's mother called "upper bohemians."

With their stunning good looks and good family backgrounds, Hayden's parents had "the gift of confidence." They saw themselves as artists, unconfined by convention or their children. After their parents divorced, Hayden and Blair became small nomads, bouncing between caregivers and their parents' impermanent households. The sisters learned to live in a state of unanticipated change, rocketing between the East Coast and Mexico.

"But our terrible mother gave Blair and me a wonderful life," Herrera insists. It's true that this life has led to a wonderful book. Herrera tells the story of her childhood through the voice of a child, never deviating from that point of view. She presents a social history of midcentury privilege and the history of two feckless parents who "believed in the importance of pleasure," in a narrative that is both detailed and riveting. --Janet Brown, author and former bookseller

In this shattering work of dystopian fiction, love and survival intertwine until neither is recognizable from the other. The New Wilderness, the Booker Prize-longlisted novel by author and former This American Life producer Diane Cook, takes a refreshingly raw spin on an age-old climate disaster story: the earth has all but been destroyed by industrialization.

Most of the population live in the polluted City, where the air is so poisonous to children that childbirth is discouraged. But a lucky few have been selected for an experimental foray into the Wilderness State, the last enormous parcel of protected land, where the flora and fauna are wild and real. Bea is an interior designer in the City, where her daughter, Agnes, is dying; she keeps coughing up blood. Desperate, Bea and her husband, Glen, are first in line to take Agnes into the Wilderness State with a group of other Community members, where they hope the clean air will save Agnes's life. In return, they'll survive--and check in regularly at Posts for data collection. But, of course, simply living in the Wilderness State is a brutal, beautiful journey, and it challenges everything Bea and Agnes know about their love for each other.

Cook's writing is both a melodic ode to nature and a devastating eulogy to what has been lost, both in the real world and her fictional one. As Agnes becomes wilder, so does her mother, and their diverging natures soon bring them to a crossroads. This is a gorgeous tale of motherhood and the will to live. --Lauren Puckett, freelance writer

Twelve-year old Ivy Mae Bloom wants a real home and, since her Mama can give wishes, she doesn't think it should be such a tough request. The Stars of Whistling Ridge is the inventive, magical tale of three sisters--and three more sisters--whose lives are run by the power of wishes.

Ivy's Mama is a "fallen star-woman," duty-bound to "tend to the magic that wove underneath the world." Mama and her sisters, Agatha and Ruth, keep the magic going in the U.S., while other star-women protect elsewhere. Ivy and Mama, together with Ivy's father and her two younger sisters, Elena and Sophie, travel the country in an old Winnebago (named Martha) while Mama barters wishes and heals places where magic is weak. When the family finds themselves stranded with Mama's star-sisters in Whistling Ridge, N.C. (the place they had "first fallen to earth"), Ivy hopes her wish for an actual home is coming true. But something is seeping the magic out of Whistling Ridge, endangering the town and all the world around it.

The Stars of Whistling Ridge, the third middle-grade novel by Cindy Baldwin (Where the Watermelons Grow), is a refreshing breath of familiar magic. Baldwin has created a fantastic mythology around fallen stars, fireflies and the stardust of which we are all made, all of it growing from the idea that wishing on stars may have been happening "for as long as anybody could remember." By weaving together magic and science, Baldwin dares to ask how certain we are that magic isn't real. Complex issues of family, impending puberty and what home really means are handled deftly in thought-provoking ways. The Stars of Whistling Ridge inspires readers to see the extraordinary in everyday life. --Kyla Paterno, freelance reviewer

In her deeply bittersweet third YA novel, Nicola Yoon (The Sun Is Also a Star) sweeps readers into a heady world of romance, magic and ballroom dance set against the chill, beachy backdrop of Los Angeles.

Black high school senior Yvette "Evie" Thomas lost her faith in love six months ago when her father left her mother for another woman. When she donates her once-cherished romance novel collection to a Little Free Library with a mysterious keeper, Evie gains a strange power: any time she sees a couple kiss, she has a vision of the beginning and end of their relationship. The keeper also gives her a book, Instructions for Dancing, that leads her to La Brea Dance, where she meets X, the gorgeous 18-year-old Black grandson of the studio owners. The teens enter a ballroom dance competition at the behest of their instructor, Fifi, an "exploding firecracker in human form." The two fall for each other but Evie, who knows "heartbreak = love + time," must decide whether the rewards of love outweigh the risk.

Fantasy and romance meet realism as Yoon combines whimsical elements with a thoughtful excavation of how relationships evolve and inevitably end, plus a nuanced, sensitive look at parental infidelity. Ballroom dance scenes, Evie's visions and X's blue-dipped dreads all create a vibrant, cinematic feel, with beach bonfires and L.A. landmarks grounding the setting. Simmering dance numbers, maturity and a high swoon factor make this showstopper anything but routine. --Jaclyn Fulwood, youth services manager at Main Branch, Dayton Metro Library