James Joyce: Portrait of a Dubliner by Spanish graphic novelist Alfonso Zapico (Café Budapest), is a charming addition to the growing body of graphic biographies that explore the lives of cultural icons such as Charles Darwin, the Carter Family and Steve Jobs. Joyce's peripatetic life is particularly well suited to the episodic nature of the form.

Zapico makes no attempt to provide a Classic Comics interpretation of Joyce's famously impenetrable writing. Instead he gives a clear-eyed depiction of the life that created the work. James Joyce is surprisingly comic given its subject's struggles with poverty, censorship, literary rejection, major health problems, near blindness and his beloved daughter's mental illness. Zapico treats Joyce with both humor and respect, but does not sugarcoat the writer's drunkenness, infidelities, financial irresponsibility and cheerful willingness to bite any helping hand that came his way. Some of the most powerful portions of the work deal with Joyce's relationships with those closest to him, including his literary frenemy Ezra Pound, his brother Stanislaus, and his lifelong love and muse, Nora Barnacle, who is the most fully developed character in the work after Joyce.

The visual language of the work is sophisticated. The grey-wash backgrounds are drawn with meticulously realized historical detail while Joyce and his contemporaries are rendered with a jaunty, comic book-style line. Taken together, the contrasting styles allow Zapico to move smoothly between the comic and the tragic, ending with a bittersweet homage to Joyce's influence on Dublin in the years since his death. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins

Garrard Conley's haunting and introspective memoir, Boy Erased, recounts his 2004 freshman year in college--the year his deeply religious Arkansan parents discovered he was gay and sent him to be evaluated at Love in Action (LIA), a fundamentalist Christian ministry that adapted Alcoholics Anonymous's 12-step program for gay conversion therapy.

The only son of evangelical Missionary Baptist parents, Conley was often required to help his father (who ran a car dealership before becoming an ordained pastor of his own church) in his ministering duties. While college opens his mind to new and challenging ideas, Conley's entire life had been shaped by Bible verses and End Times philosophy. So, when he's outed, he readily agrees to undergo the therapy.

Boy Erased offers an unusual firsthand perspective of gay conversion therapy: Conley is so steeped in his religious upbringing that he doesn't initially rebel against LIA's program. During his evaluation period (where he has to keep a Moral Inventory of sinful transgressions), he eventually realizes, "In the process of purification, you risked erasing every minor detail you'd ever cared about."

Conley is a vivid, compassionate and compelling writer who uses arresting imagery (his high school girlfriend's "predilection for French kissing ran a cold blade through the bottom of my stomach"). The portraits of his parents show them as sheltered and scared, but also loving and supportive. Boy Erased is a vulnerable coming-of-age tale that will educate and move readers. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant

In The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, Kao Kalia Yang related her family's immigrant experience. With The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father, she focuses on the life and art of Bee Yang: "my father raps, jazzes, and sings the blues when he dwells in the landscape of tradition Hmong song poetry." The storytelling and emotional communication of that art form was a defining element of Bee's contribution to his family and his culture, from their home in Laos to a refugee camp in Thailand and, finally, in the United States. When his mother died, Bee stopped singing, and Yang considers the significance of that silence as well.

As its title suggests, The Song Poet is lyrical and beautifully composed, with themes of loss and love, realistic and raw, but enriched by gentle metaphor. It is divided into "Side A" and "Side B," the first told in Bee's first-person perspective and the second in Yang's. These points of view offer immersion in a Hmong culture that values family, and shares a complex system of spiritual celebrations and a way of life centered on the day-to-day necessity of growing and harvesting food. War and violence drive the family to Minnesota, where Bee and his wife do hard, dangerous labor, and are poorly equipped culturally to battle racism and exploitation. But they retain their reverence of family and tradition. The Song Poet is a message of love and thanks to a father who sacrificed for his children's future, and a memorial to his art. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

When writer Bruce Holbert (Lonesome Animals; The Hour of Lead) questioned, after 30 years, his worth as a teacher in Washington State, his wife, Holly, decided they needed to write a book that celebrated teachers. The Holberts have compiled a trove of stories written by successful people who recall teachers of lasting impact who appreciated and nurtured their individual strengths and talents and exposed their students to worlds of possibility.

More than 80 essays are included from notable figures in literature, sports, politics, science, business, law--and beyond--who write affectionately about teachers from elementary school through college. George Saunders credits the intervention of two young teachers--who were dating--for putting him on a path to writing. A 30-year friendship with a former college professor continues to impart wisdom to filmmaker Ken Burns. Songwriter Rosanne Cash acknowledges that a no-nonsense college writing instructor taught her "liberation in the same breath that he taught structure." A public-speaking teacher who favored respect over scholastic performance affected actor Beau Bridges. Terrible student Alan Dershowitz is indebted to an eighth-grade teacher who reminded the future lawyer of his own self-worth. And swimmer Janet Evans credits a beloved elementary school teacher for believing her boast that one day she'd win the Olympics.

In an essay by Stewart Lewis about a hippie teacher who inspired the writer-singer, he says, "The power of teachers is overlooked and underestimated in so many ways." This vast collection successfully affirms the influence of unsung educators and gives them their due. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

Seven years ago, North Carolina essayist and journalist Bronwen Dickey rescued a pit bull mix for a family dog. Friends and neighbors rolled their eyes and advised caution, believing the hype that pit bulls have "a long legacy of human bloodlust and betrayal, hard-line genetic determinism, and unprovoked animal rage." Dickey, however, was won over by Nola's eyes--"It was a look with layers." Curious, she set out to study the history, genetics and mythology of this much-maligned bulldog derivative. Judiciously filled with data, anecdotes, illustrations and a self-deprecating, canny sense of humor, Pit Bull is a constantly surprising compendium of dog lore, human foible and social prejudice.

Today pit bulls are banned in 850 U.S. communities and the entire United Kingdom. As Dickey paraphrases them, stereotypes abound: "pit bulls are not for people like 'us'--the respectable and morally upstanding members of society; pit bulls belong to them." Exploring the history and politics behind the pit bull's current bad rep, Dickey interviews trainers (like breed-loyal Diane Jessup who scowls: "I refuse to face an uncertain future with a f*cking Labradoodle") and taps "news stories" about drug dealers, violent dog attacks on children, unscrupulous puppy mills, the infamous pro football star Michael Vick's fighting dog abuse arrest, and even the symbolism of some Ferguson protestors leading pit bulls in the Michael Brown demonstrations. Of the 77 million domestic dogs in the United States, pit bulls are a fraction. As Dickey clearly and absorbingly illustrates, pit bulls are not evil incarnate--they "are not dangerous or safe... aren't saints or sinners.... Pit bulls are just... dogs." --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Music underlies many of the poems in Brenda Shaughnessy's So Much Synth. "Synth" refers to both the '80s music of groups like Duran Duran, Eurythmics and Simple Minds, which figure into several poems, and the neurological condition synesthesia, in which the stimulation of one sense triggers a reaction in another. Though many poets play with the senses of sight and sound, Shaughnessy (Human Dark with Sugar; Our Andromeda) particularly relishes made-up words, internal and near rhymes, or visually broken lines to reveal her thoughts. In "Last Sleep, Best Sleep," for example, she describes "The great fruits of my failure:/ silk milk pills with little bitter pits" and then tosses in the knowing aside: "Who talks like that?" 

Inherent to So Much Synth is Shaughnessy's passionate, funny, hipster, feminist take on growing up. The young narrator living in a "lesbian loft" in "But I'm the Only One" strings together the tenants' comings and goings. The protagonist of the skillful poem about female adolescence "Is There Something I Should Know?" runs through every girl's angst about sex, menstruation, pop music, popularity ("The middle was always for losers. The middle seat,/ the middle-aged, the middle child, the middle finger,/ middle school, middling."). She describes the anxious anticipation of adulthood: "what it was really like to become a woman/ made me rather expect a kind of slow, gorgeous/ liquefaction after which I'd emerge a cross/ between Jessica Rabbit and Denise Huxtable." In So Much Synth, Shaughnessy writes with a mature sense of herself--both as she was and as she is. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

In his terrific middle-grade debut, Jason Reynolds (When I Was the Greatest; Boy in the Black Suit; All American Boys with Brendan Kiely) tells the engaging story of two African American brothers who spend a month with their grandparents while their parents work on their struggling marriage. This worries 11-year-old Genie Harris. Most things do.

It doesn't take long for Genie to see how different "the little house all alone on the top of a hill" is from Brooklyn: "No brownstones with the cement stoops where you could watch the buses, ice cream trucks, and taxis ride by. Nope. North Hill, Virginia, was country. Like country country." There's new food, too, like grits, or, as Genie thinks, "movie prison food." And when Genie tells Grandpop wearing sunglasses inside "makes you look crazy," he learns that his grandfather is blind. This discovery worries him, too, especially when he sees a gun in his Grandpop's back pocket. Genie has hundreds of questions, all of which he writes down in a numbered list for future Google searches.

Unfolding family secrets and upsetting mishaps, major and minor, keep the pages flying, and how obsessive Genie and his "cool, confident," muscled and girl-crazy older brother, Ernie, settle in with their grandparents makes for a poignant, profound, often very funny story, told in an easy style as smooth as Grandma's banana pudding. New revelations abound: their uncle's death in Desert Storm, masked fears, pea-picking, loud thunder, people who eat squirrels, the ins and outs of Grandpop's mysterious six-shooter, sweet tea and more. As Brave As You spills over with humor and heart. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness

It's a sad day for Isabel (who almost always has a parrot on her head) when her best friend Simon moves away: "For a while Isabel hated everything." To the visible agitation of the parrot, she angrily knocks over a vase, draws a T. rex on the wall and dumps out boxes.

In time she adapts, "and decided to like being on her own." Who needs friends when you can read or stomp in puddles or climb trees solo? Isabel also takes comfort in her "system," in which she sorts her belongings into cardboard boxes labeled Castles, Hats, Monster (the only box with a lid and an escaping claw), Broken Umbrellas, "Ducks, Hula-Hoop" and... Wolves. "Sometimes, at night, the parrot felt worried about the boxes, especially the box of wolves." "Don't be such a scaredy-parrot," she chides her bird friend, but secretly she worries, too, particularly about the biggest wolf. As she scoots down the city street, they spot a huge box "perfect for the wolf." But a friendly boy named Chester is inside. He explains that wolves are supposed to live in faraway forests, not in boxes. Chester, who "had a way with umbrellas and tape," is obviously a keeper, and when the two new friends tell the boxed wolf about the faraway forests, "The wolf left at once" on a red motorcycle.

British debut author-illustrator Daisy Hirst's simple, extra-charming artwork almost looks Sharpie-drawn (perfect for box labeling!), and her screenprinting technique adds rich color and texture to her bold compositions. A splendidly odd tribute to wild imaginations and friendships lost and found. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness