In Just So Happens, Fumio Obata has created a visually elegant, emotionally rich semi-autobiographical graphic novel that examines the conflict between parental expectations and the cultural and social differences faced by Asian immigrants living in the West.

Yumiko Ono, Obata's protagonist, is a successful designer living in London, engaged to a Brit named Mark and fully assimilated into the hustle and bustle of London culture. During a gallery showing, Yumiko receives a phone call from her brother, who informs her of her father's death in a mountaineering accident. As Yumiko boards the plane and flies back to Tokyo to attend her father's funeral, she replays images of her last visit home--the weight of parental expectations for marriage and settling down in Japan, and her father's apparent disapproval of her career ambitions abroad--in dreamy flashbacks haunted by a Noh theater character she had seen perform in Tokyo. Yumiko endures the traditional death rituals with detached stoicism, until the moment she confronts her father's dead body. A physical touch to his face unleashes a torrent of grief, fueled by guilt and regret, and she escapes to the peace and quiet of Kyoto in order to reconcile her emotional struggles with the life that she has carved abroad.

Obata's fluid watercolors capture Yumiko's inner turmoil wonderfully. Like Yumiko, Obata is an expatriate himself; he left Japan for England in 1991, to study art. And he, too, has grappled with integrating two vastly different cultures. Yet he is able to show the beauty and richness of both cultures in his first major work of fiction. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

The Beauty, Jane Hirshfield's (Come, Thief) eighth collection, reveals a poet at the height of her powers. With her signature use of deceptively simple images and language, she hints at the unspoken truths that lie just beyond our perspective while celebrating the everyday details and connections that make a life.

The opening poem, "Fado," is one of the collection's loveliest. A magician conjures a quarter from a girl's ear, while in that "same half-stopped moment," a woman in a wheelchair in Portugal sings a fado at dawn. The quiet, beautiful descriptions belie the writer's wonder that two people oceans apart both live small miracles. The focus in this collection moves outward, from the specific to the universal, and later poems describe an object or episode from a greater distance, without editorial. In "Anywhere You Look," Hirshfield writes "in the corner of a high rain gutter/ under the roof tiles/ new grasses' delicate seed heads/ what war, they say." The poems begin to acknowledge that the business of living profoundly connects us.

Hirshfield's work has always been steeped in Zen Buddhism, fusing observed, sensory experience with mindful acceptance. Still, these poems acknowledge the struggle and the inevitability of regret. While many of the poems are brief, they are masterpieces in miniature. Their images are simple but not obvious; they are offered without judgment. They also reward contemplation. Hirshfield asks her readers to wait for their own reactions, suggesting that those reactions matter because they open the door to the poem's meaning, and because they unite us all. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Readers who enjoy political intrigue and an insider's view of the workings of United States politics will find an excellent tour guide in Barney Frank, the outspoken gay Democrat who served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (representing Massachusetts) from 1981 to 2013.

Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage is a political biography--there's no time for childhood memories; by page six, Frank is 16 years old and working on Adlai Stevenson's second presidential campaign. He offers compelling and nuanced accounts of how key political legislation moved through the political mechanisms, and why they succeeded or failed.

Never averse to working with Republicans, Frank made cross-party compromises to help end racial and sexual inequality. Today, compromise is almost impossible. Frank writes: "America's political community has come to live in two parallel media universes. Each wing ingests information and opinion that reinforces its own policy preferences and its own conviction that those preferences reflect majority opinion."

As an astute eyewitness and participant to more than 50 years of political history, Frank offers keen observations about Bill Clinton's impeachment hearings; the creation of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"; becoming the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, where he tried to reform Wall Street; the Iraq War; and the rise of the Tea Party. Frank is more reticent about his private life, but opens up a bit when discussing his relationship and eventual marriage to Jim Ready. Frank is a talented, persuasive and witty raconteur whose passion for politics and justice translates to a compulsively readable overview of American political life. --Kevin Howell, reviewer and marketing consultant

James Wallman believes that "we need to discard our materialist values and replace them with experientialist ones," and he provides convincing evidence that the shift from status-seeking toward a pared-down, minimalist life is well underway. He compares materialism to the obesity epidemic: too much stuff is causing millions to feel overwhelmed and suffocated.

Stuffocation: Why We've Had Enough of Stuff and Need Experience More Than Ever opens with a wealthy businessman who decided to place his belongings into boxes and bags to see what he truly needed throughout the course of 21 days. He discovered that "stuff" had become a distraction from the goals that bring lasting happiness: health and satisfying relationships. He is not alone; nearly half of the people surveyed in more than 50 countries are becoming "post-materialists," due to "stable upbringing[s], the stress of stuff, [concern for the] environment, the aging population, the growing population, the rise of the middle class, the move to cities, a lack of belief in the system, knowing that experiences are more likely to make us happier, the rise in costs and the switch to digital."

Wallman recognizes that in this age of social media, experiences must be sought for intrinsic satisfaction, not extrinsic FOMO (fear of missing out) or to impress Facebook friends. He believes experiences "hold up" better over time and contribute to happiness because they can be positively reinterpreted, do not grow stale, are hard to compare, contribute to our identity and bring us closer to other people. --Kristen Galles from Book Club Classics

With the 10 insightful essays in Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World, poet Jane Hirshfield continues the investigation she began in Nine Gates, into the ways poetry carries meaning and emotional truth. As one of poetry's most respected practitioners, she mounts a passionate argument for its importance and transformational power.

Poetry offers "new ways of perceiving" in complex and interconnected ways, she argues. The poet sees or hears or feels something and, in an act of the imagination, uses the tools of craft--words, images and form--to turn it into something previously unsaid and unknown. Each reader in turn re-creates the poet's imaginative experience. A poem changes us because experience changes us, and so poetry provokes new reactions to the familiar objects and concerns of life, connecting writer and reader and showing both how to see or hear or feel.

By expressing something new, a good poem moves both poet and reader toward emotional enlargement and an increase in awareness. Hirshfield uses examples drawn from poetry and literature, including Horace, Basho and Raymond Carver, and from the natural world and evolutionary science. Additionally, photos and other reproductions of visual art--like that of contemporary Times Square and Maya Lin's original submission for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial competition--ground her argument and contribute to the wonder of this collection. But Hirshfield is a poet first, and she anchors Ten Windows with her deep appreciation for poetry's ability to inquire of us how to live and create in a world that will ultimately go on without us. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Each chapter of novelist and critic Alberto Manguel's Curiosity has a question for a title. In the hands of another writer, one might expect answers to the various queries (or at least suggestions for how the reader might go about answering them for herself), but Manguel's project is not to find answers. Instead, he explores questioning in and of itself, and what happens when a question is formulated. Curiosity, of course, isn't always satisfied, even if an answer does eventually appear.

Using Dante's Divine Comedy as his central text, Manguel (All Men Are Liars) explores nearly every aspect of human existence (from death to globalization to our relationships with our pets). He depicts Dante's journey from hell to heaven as an intellectual one, bound tightly to the moral and spiritual metamorphoses the Florentine poet undergoes. To Manguel, the formulation and expression (and, hopefully, the quenching) of our curiosity is the intellectually human endeavor. Dante's journey from sin (which ancient philosophers such as Aristotle believed could only come from ignorance) to virtue is paradigmatic of each person's groping in the darkness when faced with an unanswered question. But Dante isn't the only touchstone of Curiosity: Manguel brings his considerable knowledge and insight to bear on a handful of important thinkers, including David Hume, St. Augustine, Jorge Luis Borges and Rachel Carson. While the subject matter and prose may be a bit academic for casual readers, Curiosity is ultimately rewarding for those interested in an illuminating look at some of life's hardest questions. --Noah Cruickshank, marketing manager, Open Books, Chicago, Ill.

Readers will want to savor every word of Shadow Scale, Rachel Hartman's worthy follow-up to her Morris Award–winning debut, Seraphina. The sequel continues the exploration of the fantastic, quasi-medieval world where dragons, saints and humans collide.

At the start of Shadow Scale, an uneasy peace shared by dragons and humans for the last 40 years has just been broken. Dragons rebelling against a longstanding treaty have poisoned the Queen of Goredd and her daughter, and attempted to assassinate the great dragon general himself, Ardmagar Comonot. Narrator Seraphina, half-dragon and half-human, is appointed emissary of the Crown and sets off to find others of her kind. The hope is that they will be able to link minds, "[l]ike beads on a string," forming a barrier that will protect the city from the coming dragon attacks. But politics and intrigue abound, as does a pervasive prejudice against all ityasaari (half-dragons). Seraphina perseveres, though many of the other half-dragons prove more difficult than she had anticipated. And one of them, an ityasaari with great "mind-fire," is plotting against her, manipulating humans and half-humans, pitting dragon against dragon, and bringing all of the Southlands to the edge of ruin.

Shadow Scale's multi-layered, complex plot further exposes Hartman's highly original world. Seraphina's feelings of loneliness and alienation feel all too human, as does the love story. While the romance is compelling, it never dominates the narrative. It features prominently in the conclusion, however, and readers can only imagine what lies ahead. --Lynn Becker, host of Book Talk, the monthly online discussion of children's books for the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators

Fans of Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan know that the spotlight onstage is "Tiny's special place," and Levithan (writing solo) shines a fabulous one on him here.

Tiny Cooper, Will Grayson's larger-than-life best friend, stars in his own birth-to-adolescence biography, fashioned as a musical. One need not know Green and Levithan's novel to enjoy this show, from Tiny's opening number, "I Was Born This Way" ("big-boned and happily gay./ I was born this way,/ right here in the U.S. of A.") to his coming out to himself ("Who am I trying to be/ when I'm denying I'm me?/ Why is the truth/ so stuck inside?") and eventually, to the world. One of the book's most moving moments occurs when Tiny comes out to Phil Wrayson (aka Will Grayson), but Phil already knows. Levithan fills the book with delectable morsels of Broadway insider jokes and music trivia. Tiny sees the world through the prism of the predominantly straight culture he was born into, adapting those definitions in order to make sense of his feelings and impulses, as in "Second Base" ("What's second base for a gay man?/ If you can't tell me,/ I'm hoping somebody can").

As in all good musicals, full-cast numbers, such as the brilliant "Parade of Ex-Boyfriends" that kicks off Act II, give way to solo acts both funny ("Drunk on Love") and heart-wrenching ("Something Else": "If you're tired of twisting,/ exhausted by existing,/ I understand"). This lightning-fast read is for Will Grayson devotees, musical theater aficionados and comedy lovers. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

In this irresistible pen-and-ink exploration of imagination, the drawings are specific enough to ground readers in Christopher Myers's reality and ambiguous enough for them to bring their own experiences to the scenes.

Myers plays with the relationship between artist and instrument. An unbroken ink line cuts the white title page on a diagonal while simultaneously bringing to life the child narrator. The boy looks downcast at the thought of "rich people who own jewels and houses and pieces of the sky.... But then I remember I have my pen." He shows readers all the things his pen can do. "My pen makes giants of old men who have seen better days," acts as caption to a portrait of the author-artist's father, Walter Dean Myers. Sometimes, artist and pen are interchangeable: "My pen rides dinosaurs and hides an elephant in a teacup" pictures the artist on the back of a T. Rex, then observing an elephant whose trunk echoes the teacup's handle. Myers varies the pace with single pages (a standout renders an X-ray of the artist's rib cage as the wings of a Monarch butterfly) and full-spread scenes that juxtapose images of war with a light-filled spread of diverse children and a giant heart antidote.

A metadrawing of the pen creating a self-portrait, as the artist stares into a mirror, begs the question: Does the artist make the art, or does the art make the artist? He ends with an invitation to readers to dive in and find out. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness