Pioneer Girl was Laura Ingalls Wilder's original autobiographical manuscript that her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, edited and later tried to spin off as a juvenile novel. It also became the basis for the beloved Little House series and the inspiration behind Lane's own fictional successes in Let the Hurricane Roar and Free Land. Wilder biographer Pamela Smith Hill has added commentary, research and analysis, bringing together pieces of Ingalls family history and shedding light on the collaborative role that Lane played in the development of her mother's literary craft and career as a children's author.

At the beginning of Pioneer Girl, Wilder's style seems influenced by her stint as columnist for the Missouri Ruralist; a seven-paragraph narrative conveys immediacy and dramatic tension. Through Lane's mentoring, Wilder gained confidence in her craft and began to imbue her characters with rich and deeply developed storylines--hallmarks that would characterize her fictional works. As a result, Pioneer Girl resounds with the nostalgic longing of an older adult confronting her own mortality, wistfully remembering a simpler time.

Hill stays true to Wilder's narrative, providing historical context where appropriate and adding footnotes to reconcile plot differences between the original manuscript and the subsequent series. This lightly edited version presents a portrait of an emerging artist, one whose storytelling gifts allowed her figuratively to wrap readers in Pa Ingalls's arms and take them on an adventure across the Midwestern plains. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

John Safran--a young, white, Jewish Australian who makes comedy films--seems an unlikely candidate to write a true-crime book, but that's what he's done with God'll Cut You Down: The Tangled Tale of a White Supremacist, a Black Hustler, a Murder, and How I Lost a Year in Mississippi. It explores the murder of Richard Barrett, a white supremacist, by Vince McGee, his black neighbor. Safran heads to Mississippi expecting a case tinged with the embedded racism of the South. What he finds instead is a complicated crime with no clear motive--race or otherwise.

The account of the author's yearlong investigation can be hard to follow: short sections with strange titles track Safran's moves through time, from one interview to the next, which presents the story in the order Safran uncovered it rather than the order in which the events happened. His journalistic approach can be brusque and perhaps misguided at times, as when he can't pay the convicted murderer for an interview outright, but gets around that law by giving McGee prepaid charge cards from Walmart. But his candid, informal style is endearing, revealing that God'll Cut You Down is as much the story of how Safran learned to write about crime as it is the story of why Barrett was murdered. Despite Safran's best noodling and puzzling and nagging of the police, lawyers, witnesses, family and friends of both the convicted murderer and the victim, the story of that murder is never made entirely; the delight comes from reading about Safran's experiences as an outsider snooping around an insular community. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

When writing about their travel adventures, great authors invariably include details and descriptions that might be overlooked by the average person. Some short, some long, these personal essays by 35 authors--including Pico Iyer, Torre DeRoche and Cheryl Strayed--deliver exceptional value in a small package. More than just travelogues, the essays in An Innocent Abroad cover a multitude of emotions: the exhilaration of finally visiting a famous literary location; the abject terror of being chased by drug sellers in a truck on a road in Morocco; the frustration of attempting to fight sickness and injury with Western medicine and the relief when local healing methods actually work; and the inexplicable desire to have an "adventure" (like diving into rock-strewn, shark-infested waters off the coast of Australia) that is almost certainly a bad idea.

Vivid images bring these international experiences to life--boating on the canals in Venice, hiking through the mountains in Thailand, jumping from ice floes off the coast of Greenland, strolling the seaside boardwalk in Havana. Many of these journeys took place before 9/11, a time when traveling anywhere in the world was so much easier, which is reflected in the oftentimes simple and trusting nature with which the authors approach their fellow travelers, the foreigners they meet and their surroundings. Although each author's experience is distinctly different, readers will gain the sense of transformation that comes with travel just by reading these stirring accounts. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

The Victorian era, 1837–1901, saw extreme filth and considerable change in the British capital. Lee Jackson (Walking Dickens' London; A Dictionary of Victorian London) turns his gaze toward this grime with Dirty Old London and divides his study by category of filth, not chronology. Chapters cover the ashes and cinders of domestic coal fires; "mud" in the streets (horse dung); "night soil" (domestic human excrement); sewers and drains; human remains buried close to one another; unwashed bodies and filthy homes; public toilets; and air pollution, largely from industrial and domestic coal smoke. He touches on major figures in sanitation and reform, such as Edwin Chadwick, who championed the idea that disease is traceable to environmental elements, and Joseph Bazalgette, credited with establishing London's sewer system. Themes include the challenges of regulation, the tension between centralization and local control and the limits of contemporary science--germ theory hadn't yet been widely accepted, and the notions of miasma and humors persisted.

While the subject of Dirty Old London is often, unavoidably, off-putting, it is also endlessly intriguing. Jackson is frank and matter-of-fact and occasionally entertaining, although his overall tone is more academic than playful. His research is reliable, with plentiful endnotes. He affirms that "this book is not about casting blame on the Victorians for their failure to manage the dirt of their great capital." Rather, Jackson hopes that the Victorians' filth can offer a lesson to the modern world that still struggles with how to handle its own waste. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

In Cities of Empire: The British Colonies and the Creation of the Urban World, historian Tristram Hunt (Marx's General) explores Britain's imperial history through the lens of the formerly colonial cities that he argues are her greatest legacy to the modern world.

Hunt organizes his work around 10 cities and their role in the development of the British Empire. Most, such as Boston and New Delhi, were founded as colonies. Others, such as Dublin and Liverpool, were transformed by the Empire's expansion. Hunt considers each city's creation or annexation not simply as an imperial act but as a series of negotiations and exchanges between two cultures, though admittedly often on unequal terms. He looks at architecture, civic institutions and street names as imperial artifacts. He discusses the role of each city as both an entrepôt within the imperial network and a hub of the economy that developed around it. Working more or less chronologically, Hunt traces the history of the Empire from Boston's transformation from a colonial to a revolutionary city through Liverpool's post-imperial decline. The book ends with Hunt's assertion that Britain is now on the receiving end of the Empire it created, shaped by exchanges and negotiations with its former colonies.

Hunt's approach is informed by postcolonial theory, urban history and his own Labour Party politics, but he uses them with a light hand, creating a work of colonial history that is both lively and authoritative. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Bearded and etched with lines like a dry riverbed, the face of poet and essayist Donald Hall (The Best Day the Worst Day) gazes out from the cover of his collection Essays After Eighty. The unretouched honesty of that visage telegraphs the frankness, pathos and humor of these 14 essays about the "ceremony of losses" that is old age.

Hall lives alone in the New Hampshire farmhouse first occupied by his great-grandfather in 1865. It's the setting for "Out the Window," the first and most beautiful essay in the collection. In it, Hall observes the passing seasons from his blue armchair, interweaving lyrical descriptions of hummingbirds and snowdrops that "crack the wintry earth" with musings on his interior life in the middle of his ninth decade. "After a life of loving the old," he writes, "I turned old myself."

The dominant emotional tone of these pieces falls somewhere between gratitude and bemusement at Hall's own longevity. There's the inevitable irritability at the constraints and indignities age imposes, like the voluntary surrender of his driver's license at age 80 after two accidents or the challenges of making it to the bathroom. "It's almost relaxing to know I'll die fairly soon, as it's a comfort not to obsess about my next orgasm," he confesses with customary candor.

The book's title essay is one of its most rewarding. In barely four pages, Hall, whose prose style is notable for its directness and economy, delivers some valuable writing tips, including this priceless one that provides a fitting ending for this review: "Let the words flash a conclusion, then get out of the way." --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer

Julie Kagawa imagines a world in which dragons living in Talon can take human form and infiltrate modern society in this suspenseful and romantic adventure, the launch to a new series.

Twins Ember and Dante, age 16, leave Talon for the first time, to assimilate as humans in a California beach community--only to have their training cut short by reports of rogue dragons. Instead, they are sent off each day separately for individual training. Two dragon slayers from the elite order of St. George (think Navy SEALs) also show up, searching for a female sleeper dragon. Riley, one of the rogue dragons, introduces himself to Ember and implies that there's more to Talon than she knows. Garret, a soldier of St. George hoping to hone in on the sleeper dragon, endears himself to a group of female teens--one of whom is Ember.

Kagawa builds tensions within the Ember-Riley-Garret triangle and adds a level of urgency with Dante's efforts to keep the twins together. As romance blooms between Garret and Ember, each realizes the dangers such an alliance introduces into their respective missions. Meanwhile, Riley's "nest" cells of rogue dragons begin to die out, and he wonders if Talon or St. George is responsible. Kagawa's description of Ember's fight not to shift into dragon form aptly describes her conflicting feelings of carrying out her deception: "my human body suddenly had felt very tight and confined." The larger theme of decoding male-female (St. George-dragon) miscues will hit universal notes of recognition for readers. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

The baby sister introduced in Maple gets a bit older and the sisters' relationship grows a bit more complicated in Lori Nichols's charming and insightful companion picture book.

"Maple and her little sister, Willow, were always together," opens Nichols's narrative. Maple takes Willow by the hand, and their namesake trees provide the backdrop. Nichols pictures them on a bed of leaves and making snow angels through the seasons, plus sharing their daily routine (most nights, Willow winds up in Maple's bed) as well as a special language (Pig Latin). But inevitably they want to do things differently, and Nichols paints Willow as the more easygoing of the pair--except when Maple wants only to collect dandelions, not blow on them: "That's when Willow decided to show Maple a thing or two." Maple yells, and Willow strikes back ("Admay!" says she, stomping on Maple's toy). A forced separation helps the sisters see how much they miss each other. In a visual representation of their emotional shift, Nichols depicts each child's closed bedroom door, their slowly thawing moods, and the doors opening. 

The author-artist captures a universal experience between siblings while continuing to emphasize a love of nature and the way it gives flight to the children's imagination (Willow fashions a cat mask from a maple leaf, for instance). Once the sisters make up, "They couldn't wait to run back outside." Fun details, such as a snorkel in the bathtub, attest to the girls' boundless sense of make-believe. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

In a fascinating picture-book biography, Emily Arnold McCully (Dare the Wind) introduces Etzel von Oeringen, born in World War I Germany to "champion police dogs."

Etzel's story will captivate readers. The couple that adopts him are American silent movie director Larry Trimble, who seeks a canine star for his next film, and his wife, Jane Murfin, a screenwriter. When they burst into the New York kennel grounds (where Etzel's been sent, postwar), eager to see if Etzel lives up to his reputation, the dog crashes through a window. But Larry, who's also an animal trainer, recognizes Etzel's potential. Jane still has doubts ("Before he can act in movies, he will have to learn to relax and have fun"), but Larry remains confident that Etzel can be taught. McCully's series of vignettes shows how Larry teaches his dog to play, through repetition and a new playmate (a kitten). He gains a stage name, Strongheart, and his film debut, The Silent Call, plays to sellout crowds and becomes front-page news nationwide. Etzel even sniffs out a thief posing as a journalist.

Children will most enjoy a double-page spread of Stongheart and his mate, Lady Jule, and their litter of adorable puppies--the first in a line of champion movie-star dogs. In McCully's endnote, she credits Strongheart with ushering in the popularity of German Shepherds in the U.S., and mentions his only film still available, The Return of Boston Blackie. Animal lovers drawn to the subject will also gain a snapshot of history and insight into the movie industry. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness