Willy Vlautin (The Horse) applies his characteristic compassion and spare tone to an unlikely friendship in The Left and the Lucky, a novel of hard times and scant hope. A boy whose life has been ruled by abuse and neglect and a man whose hard work has been rewarded by betrayal and loss find each other in working-class Portland, Ore., and forge a hard-won bond to their mutual benefit.

Russell is eight years old and lives with his grandmother, who has dementia; his mother, who works nights; and his teenaged brother, who is angry and troubled. As the latter spins further afield, Russell dreams of building a boat or an airplane to take him away to an unpopulated island near Hawai'i. Eddie, who lives next door, runs a small house-painting business, working six or more days a week. Russell turns up on Eddie's rounds of the neighborhood: out too late, hiding from something. The man offers the boy food, a ride home. Russell begins waiting in Eddie's backyard each night, and Eddie gives him odd jobs and shelter from violence.

In his eighth novel, Vlautin continues to focus upon an American underclass marked by desperation and poverty, people often forgotten or abandoned. With a gruff tenderness, a quiet lyricism, and moments of humor, he highlights not only the built family that Russell and Eddie assemble, but also motley characters from their neighborhood. The Left and the Lucky is often grim, but Eddie's dogged decency uplifts even in this grayscale world of limited options. Vlautin's character sketches and the careful value he places on perseverance are not soon forgotten. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia

Devi S. Laskar's absorbing novel Midnight, at the War spotlights an international reporter facing personal, professional, and global conflicts.

In April 2001, Rita Das lands at her unnamed, predominantly Arabic-speaking destination, only ever referred to as "[--------]." Her recent marriage hasn't stopped her from taking far-flung assignments to devastated zones where she reports on "numbers stories" all the while sneaking in "more human interest stories" amid functional tallies. Time with her husband, Sebastian, hardly seems a priority; Rita still regularly seeks out her philandering former lover. She neglects even her most beloved bond, that with her mother: they have "an arrangement" that despite the return of her breast cancer, Mom "will not die until she becomes a grandmother." But when 9/11 happens just before she's scheduled to fly back to New York, Rita misses her opportunity to say goodbye to Mom at the hospital, and that loss further fractures an already tenuous relationship with her father.

Tragedies multiply within her intimate circle: her best friend's last appointment was at the World Trade Center, and a pair of journalist colleagues are kidnapped and tortured. She becomes pregnant, unsure who the father is, and claims an opportunity to escape to [--------], where distance, surrounded by danger and decimation, might finally offer Rita some semblance of clarity.

Throughout her multilayered narrative, former journalist Laskar (Atlas of Reds and Blues; Circa) deftly dovetails Rita's complicated backstory of race, culture, disconnects, and dysfunction, with the relentlessly unceasing headlines that have undoubtedly left the world numb. Through the tumult happening on the pages, Laskar distills an impressive novel filled with empathy, inspiration, and ultimately hope. --Terry Hong

Mai Nguyen's morbidly funny sophomore novel, Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead, explores the raw depths of grief as the title character flounders after her infant daughter's death. Devastated and on leave from her job, Cleo takes a position at the funeral home that hosted her daughter Daisy's service. As she drags herself through each day, she encounters not only death, but life--in all its mundanity, frustration, and joy.

Nguyen (Sunshine Nails) writes in Cleo's sharp, wry voice, taking readers deep into her overwhelmed state. Cleo bites her tongue at people's well-meaning condolences, but occasionally, a snarky rejoinder (or a scream) slips out. After a failed attempt to return to her office early, Cleo drifts through the days in a fog, alternating between guilt, rage, and debilitating sadness. Desperate for some form of distraction, she begins working as the funeral director's assistant. Cleo immerses herself in the details of death while she hopes to forget about her heartache, at least temporarily. Instead, she repeatedly faces the reality of death--not only Daisy's but many other people's--and the variety of ways people grieve. Compounding her difficulty is the presence of her best friend and neighbor, Paloma, whose healthy baby was born on the same day as Daisy.

Readers will follow Cleo's jagged journey with a mixture of tension, empathy, and amusement: Cleo is grieving, but she still has a quippy sense of humor, and her impressions of her funeral home colleagues and clients are peppered with sardonic observations. Touching and insightful, Nguyen's novel is a moving depiction of motherhood and an honest portrait of grief in its multilayered complexity. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

An explosion at London's British Museum sets off the exhilarating drama of Go Gentle by Maria Semple, narrated by a New Yorker who finds herself at the center of an international art heist connected to her employer. The story is set amid the whimsical grandeur of a prestigious Manhattan address with scenic detours to a French chateau, attractive backdrops for an adventure swirling with art world mystique, comedy, and middle-aged sexual exploits.

Adora Hazzard is a resident philosopher at the swanky Lockwood Library museum. Its fabulously wealthy owners, Layla and Lionel Lockwood, live in a massive glass structure with a statuary garden and guards who are ex-Mossad agents. The novel's Stoic-inspired heroine is convinced her dating days are behind her until, in tandem with the art heist, she unwittingly stumbles into a romance that upends her tidy life. It all starts with a suave, mysterious stranger she meets at the ballet. The erotically charged attraction between Adora and the "expensively moisturized" Digby shatters her peace of mind even as their clever back-and-forth makes for dazzling dialogue. Meanwhile, the latest addition to the Lockwoods' statuary, a valuable French statue of questionable provenance, arrives in New York to great fanfare.

Go Gentle's marvelously madcap storylines converge as the action shifts to Paris and Digby's true identity becomes devastatingly clear, setting into motion an unanticipated finale that will have Semple fans cheering heartily from the sidelines. Semple (Today Will Be Different; Where'd You Go, Bernadette?) is an acclaimed storyteller with a fondness for intellectually dazzling heroines of a certain age, and her fourth novel is her best yet. --Shahina Piyarali

Tolstoy may have made famous the claim that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but Tolani Akinola takes the old adage to new heights in Leave Your Mess at Home, an incredible and moving debut novel centered on one family's dysfunction that probes questions of familial belonging and duty, immigration and identity, harm and healing.

The Longes moved to Chicago from Nigeria in search of the American Dream and, from the outside, they've achieved it. But Ola, a successful businessman, is considering how to raise his first child in a world not built to be kind to men like him, neither Black enough for American culture nor Nigerian enough to belong fully to his parents' people. Anjola, a doctor, is burnt out in her career and secretly in love with her best friend, who is engaged to someone else. Karen is still in university, but is as unclear on how to tell her parents she does not want to be a doctor as she is on how to tell them she might be gay. And all of that is not to mention Sola, the eldest daughter, long estranged from her family.

When Sola returns to Chicago following the very public implosion of her influencer career, her homecoming proves the harbinger of a great reckoning for the Longes, as long-buried secrets are laid bare. Heartfelt and heartbreaking, Leave Your Mess at Home is a reminder that everyone is a product of where they come from, yet in belonging to a family, there is always choice in what shape that belonging may take across hurt and harm and, ultimately, healing. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer

Like a miniature autobiography in verse, Julia Alvarez's radiant poetry collection Visitations offers snapshots from her life: a childhood in the Dominican Republic, immigration to 1960s New York City, the vicissitudes of adulthood, and the bittersweetness of later-life love.

Alvarez's ability to inhabit earlier mindsets and re-create decades-old pivotal moments is astounding. In her afterword, Alvarez (The Cemetery of Untold Stories) recalls, "despite the silencing and censorship of the Trujillo dictatorship, poetry flourished" in oral form in 1950s Dominican Republic. Poetry "was political by its very existence," and she imagines that the poet's role then, as now, is to lighten the evening--and perhaps the burden of repression: "I am to make the difference, turn the tide/ on the darkness massing round as the night drops down."

After the family's move to the U.S. in 1960, her world expanded as her father's shrank--brilliantly captured using the metaphors of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which she reads in "Waiting for My Father to Pick Me Up at the Library." "I'd already gone through that door/ and couldn't go back" versus the "This was the trade-off for coming to America:/ you became as small as the country you came from" that she addresses to her late father, who struggled to learn English. Aging and troubling world events threaten her sangfroid, but unexpected romance ("this spring-surprise/ of love in our autumn years") and the comforts of home ("I Go Through the House, Turning Off Lights") keep her steady.

With its vivid scenes and alliterative phrasing, this gorgeous collection presents food and family, memory and companionship, as talismans to hold against the darkness. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck

Dispatch from Every Second Guess, Megan Gannon's fourth work, is a moving memoir in verse about midlife marriage and parenting in an "age of senseless storylines."

The book cycles through landmarks from the author's life, including transracial adoption, divorce, finding love again, and blending families. But "personal and political begin and end// the same way," Gannon (Cumberland) notes, and news of police and vigilante murders make her fear for her Black son's future. He's not even protected at a hotel pool, where an angry mother manhandles him for stumbling into her blonde daughter; when Gannon confronts the woman, she insists it was a misunderstanding.

All of the poems include the word "Dispatch" in the title. Most are in unrhymed couplets, sometimes ending with a single envoi-like line. A clever in-joke: in this free-verse work, the only end rhymes are to be found in "Dispatch from Advanced Poetry." More often, the poems are laced with alliteration or enhanced by repetition, such as "Because..." anaphora and "safe" closing each stanza of a ghazal. The collection also contains lines borrowed from Mary Oliver and one adapted from Robert Frost.

Gannon interrogates everyday metaphors (e.g., a trapped bird) and fairy tales--if her husband's daughter is the princess, is she the wicked stepmother? Given life's uncertainty and fragility, she seems to suggest, one must cling all the more to loved ones during turbulent times. A poem pondering marriage commemorates "the always-lost-but-somehow-still-lasting-now"--all experience, especially happiness, is fleeting, but Gannon's poetry is adept at capturing it. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck

Mousestache Moosestache by Ezra Jack Keats Award-winner Rowboat Watkins (Rude Cakes; Go-Go Guys) is a delightfully rhythmic, rib-tickling picture book about a mouse and a moose who together encounter an abundance of zany facial hair.

Readers meet Mousestache, a tiny gray mustachioed mouse, and Moosestache, a gargantuan brown moose with a thick black 'stache, as they bow down to each other in salutation ("How do you DO-stache?"). What follows is a cyclical series of spreads with comic-style vignettes, each repeating the opening text's portmanteau pattern. "Cowstache" is reading under a tree; "Coostache" is the bird reading beside the cow. The absurdity increases as mustaches adorn unexpected objects: "Shoestache" is the mouse's shoe-shaped abode with a mustache roof; "Grandfather clockstaches" have hair in place of hands; "Mountainous rockstaches" are crowned with clouds in a recognizable shape. Mousestache and Moosestache arrive in an equatorial forest where "tropical fruitstaches" (bananas and pineapples) "dancing in bootstaches... strum... lutestaches" and "toot flutestaches." Eventually the mouse and moose give readers a meta-farewell from outer space because they "ran out of roomstaches."

Watkins's eccentric yet charming illustrations, sprightly rendered with pencils, pens, and "whatever else happened to be right under the artist's nose," complement both the book's casual tone and quirky premise. The text's wild plays on the word "mustache" are likely to encourage humorous, tongue-tied read-alouds, while its simple rhyme and sentence structure should be accessible to emerging readers. Fans of Dr. Seuss, Philip Bunting's Wombat, and Scott Rothman's Parfait, Not Parfait! simply must(stache) pick up this book. --Cristina Iannarino, children's book buyer, Books on the Square, Providence, RI.

Girl Reflected in Knife is a psychologically harrowing YA novel that follows a vulnerable teen as she navigates a breakup and the grief-fueled disassociation that ensues.

Seventeen-year-old white Destiny Black has "never been lucky in anything"--her mother has a history of addiction, she's suffered abuse, and a childhood "game of make-believe" as a trauma response "crossed from survival mechanism into full-blown delusion," landing her in psychiatric treatment. Destiny expects more of the same when her recently sober mother moves them to yet another new town. Then she meets Ryan, the town's football star, and the two fall in love. Just as Destiny starts believing in "happily right now," Ryan breaks it off to "focus on the season." Destiny is shattered. An impromptu lie lends her some "stolen hope," but ultimately leads to her escaping back into her childhood fantasy world. Destiny slowly spirals into a distorted reality that will make her lose everything she believes she has gained.

Anica Mrose Rissi (Wishing Season) deftly examines mental health through the lens of internalized trauma and skewed self-perception. Destiny always has one foot in an alternate reality, either through art or directly in her life, blurring "the line between what feels real and what is real." Rissi handles these sensitive moments with compassion. As Destiny's story unfolds, Rissi builds empathy with heartbreaking examples, such as Destiny's mother selling her bike for drug money. Enlightening fairy tale-like story interstitials appear throughout, further demonstrating Destiny's attempts at self-protection. This emotional YA novel is both tragic and mesmerizing. --Lana Barnes, freelance reviewer and proofreader

British adult romance author Pippa Roscoe, writing as P.C. Roscoe, makes her U.S. YA debut with How the Other Half Kill, a dramatic whodunit set among the rich and powerful on a private Caribbean island.

Avery Finch, Hugo Vandenburg, twins Sydney and Archie Devereux, and Leo Walker have spent their summers on Mokani Island since they were children. Now, the five college-age teens are together again to spend 12 days "on an island so beautiful, so luxurious, only a few of the world's wealthiest people [have] ever set foot on it." However, Avery brought a guest--Nora, her not-wealthy freshman roommate--and is uncomfortable around Hugo, whom she recently broke up with. Hugo is angry and hiding a massive betrayal by one of his fathers, "the gazillionaire owners" of Mokani. Sydney, Avery's best friend, disappeared at the beginning of freshman year without explanation; Archie is being evasive; and Leo, the son of the resort's prestigious Afro-Caribbean private chef and the only non-white kid in the crew, is staff this year. Each teen is hiding something, every parent has a secret, and someone makes the deadly mistake of trying to bring wrongdoing to light. 

While this thriller takes its time getting to the thrills, once they arrive, Roscoe's nail-biter takes off. The story shifts among Avery's, Hugo's, and Leo's points of view, three unreliable narrators who share half-truths, confused alliances, and vague understandings of the island's interpersonal politics. The identity of the victim may be unsurprising, but the eventual reveal of the murderer and a sneaky epilogue will almost certainly send readers immediately back to page one. --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness

Māori creators Steph Matuku and Zak Ātea make their U.S. debuts with The Dream Factory, an inventive, imaginative, and inspirational picture book folktale.

The dream factory stands at the edge of a town. When the sun sinks behind the hills, the dream machine switches on. "Dream mist in all different colors" pours out of the factory windows, drifts over town, and gifts the townsfolk with dreams "of riding unicorns, and swimming with mermaids." When the dreamers awaken, they paint, bake, sing, and invent. Then a "curious kererū" (wood pigeon) accidentally drops a feather into the dream machine, breaking it. That night, "dream mist in swirling gray and black" pours out of the windows and drifts over town. The next morning, after an evening dreaming of "unicorns with too many horns, and slimy mermaids with long, sharp teeth," the people decide to shut down the factory. The dreams stop, and so too does art and invention. It is only the kererū who can bring life back to the dream machine.

The world visualized here features people from different cultures--most with brown skin, some with traditional Māori tattoos--a variety of legendary creatures, and riotously colored architecture and clothing. The kererū is treasured in Māori culture and sometimes considered a symbol of transformation; the bird is the only consistent spot of vibrant color as the palette goes from technicolor to drab shades that match a lackluster life without art, creativity, and scientific exploration. With the return of "wonderful dreams" comes a return to explosive color. The Dream Factory--with soothing text and bountifully creative illustrations--should prove an excellent bedtime read. --Melinda Greenblatt, freelance book reviewer

Young travelers-to-be can explore the inner workings of an international airport in the instructive and illuminating, Richard Scarry-style picture book Airports, from illustrator Maxim Usik (Where's Attenborough) and "consultant" Laurence Hardisty. In nine factual (and funny) chapters, the creators reveal the mysteries and intricacies of these large transportation hubs that "move millions of people around the world every year."

Sections--such as "What's Behind the Scenes," "Can a Body Scanner See Me Naked," and "What Side of the Road Do Planes Fly On"--include thoroughly labeled illustrations of the topic area, like the departure gate, airport security, or taxiways. The plethora of labels do sometimes make it challenging to determine what a specific label is referring to, but this may lead to engaging discussion about the content. Accompanying the busy imagery are answers to questions the target age range should find especially captivating: "Can I take snakes on a plane?" "Where does all the poop go?" "Can a plane fly itself?" Each chapter contains enlightening details ("take regular sips of cold water and focus your eyes on the horizon" if you feel queasy while flying) and fun trivia (most airports choose beagles as sniffer dogs "because they are very friendly") that can be edifying for anyone in an international airport or on a plane.

Airports is an entertaining and informative way to familiarize oneself with the inner workings and myriad employees of these transportation nerve centers. Back matter includes an index and glossary of bolded terms. Whether you're a frequent flyer or preparing for your first endeavor, fasten your seat belt, sit back, and enjoy the ride. --Jen Forbus, freelancer