In Daughters of the Sun and Moon, Lisa See (Lady Tan's Circle of Women) tells her story, set in 1870s Los Angeles, through three women's perspectives, giving readers a multifaceted look into life in Lo Sang (as it's called by the Chinese community).

Petal, determined to return home to China, initially spends much of her time plotting to escape her life of indentured servitude at a local brothel. Although Moon has several advantages--literacy, a loving husband, satisfying work helping in his medical practice--she is always conscious of her doubly precarious position in the community as a Chinese woman. She feels protective of Dove, whose tightly restricted existence, bound "lily feet," and marriage to a much older man leave her vulnerable to the machinations of unscrupulous men. When simmering tensions, racial and otherwise, boil over on the night of October 24, 1871, the three women must band together to help one another survive.

See's narrative brims with historical detail, which includes the complicated racial dynamics present in a city that was home to Mexicans and Indigenous people as well as Chinese immigrants and white settlers. She writes unflinchingly of the racism faced by people of color and the harsh immigration policies that made life more difficult for Chinese people, especially women, to build a life. Set against this stark backdrop, the women's friendship--often kept hidden from the men trying to restrict them--blooms beautifully in a harsh environment, like the chrysanthemum tea Petal serves her customers.

Poignant and fascinating, Daughters of the Sun and Moon is a heart-pounding frontier narrative and a tender tribute to female friendship. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Meg Mitchell Moore's insightful 10th novel, Down with the Shipmans, brings three grown sisters and their widowed father to the family's beloved summer beach house in New Hampshire. Their father's revelation that he plans to sell the house provokes strong reactions from all three sisters. As they clean out the garage and try to enjoy some beach time (with assorted dogs and kids in tow), Jordan, Natalie, and Mae also each deal with personal drama. How they navigate the high emotions of the week--while causing plenty of emotional reactions in one another--makes for entertaining and deeply relatable reading.

The narrative sparkles with textural details: the creamy clam chowder at local haunt Petey's, the changing light of a seaside morning. Moore (Mansion Beach; Vacationland) also examines the challenges of 21st-century womanhood via the Shipman sisters: high-powered Manhattanite Jordan, whose job in crisis communications has turned into a major crisis of its own; homeschooling "tradwife" Natalie, who loves her Vermont farm life but has gotten swept up in her social media empire; and gig-working dog trainer Mae, whose multiple jobs never quite seem to add up to a career. Each must decide whether and how to let the others in on her difficulties, while all three of them struggle with letting go of the house. As they wipe up spilled juice and unearth old family photos and grudges, the Shipmans are forced to confront messy emotions, reconsider long-held assumptions, and admit that--beach house or no beach house--they'll always need one another. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

Set during the heyday of mobster crime in 1930s New York City, A Pair of Aces is the third Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray collaboration (The Personal Librarian; The First Ladies) featuring undernoted trailblazing women. This time, the two reveal the unlikely partnership between a lawyer from the district attorney's staff and the most famous madam among New York's brothels.

Lawyer Eunice Carter is the city's first Black woman prosecutor and has worked hard to earn her job with the Manhattan DA's team committed to bringing down organized crime. Russian immigrant Polly Adler, New York's "Jewish Jezebel," runs a brothel known for its discretion and class, caring for "[her] girls" who serve the famous and the infamous. As Eunice traces citizens' complaints about the houses of ill repute, she sees a pattern among the bondsmen who bail out arrested sex workers, linking them to the racketeers the city is targeting. Eunice needs witnesses to make her case that the mob is infiltrating prostitution, and Polly needs the underworld, whose methods include violence, out of her business. The two, "not friends but allies," have a common goal: to bring the notorious Lucky Luciano and his comrades to justice.

Eunice and Polly risk their lives to share tips and collect evidence, and their quiet efforts lead to a sensational 1936 trial and Luciano's conviction. With references to mid-1930s New York names, music, locales, and culture, A Pair of Aces is lush with the era's atmosphere, enriching the story of two bold women who changed history. --Cheryl McKeon, Book House, Albany, N.Y.

A lost cat brings together two women who will become further united through bloody secrets in Dead Weight, a dark thriller about the bonds of friendship by Hildur Knútsdóttir (The Night Guest), translated from the Icelandic by Mary Robinette Kowal.

Unnur lives a well-ordered, quiet life, even if loneliness often drives her to look for her lover on his influencer wife's Instagram account. But one day she comes home from work and finds a black-and-white cat on her couch. Unnur puts the cat outside, but she comes back, so Unnur checks online for missing pets in the neighborhood and locates her owner, Ásta Ólafardóttir. Ásta retrieves the cat, named Io, but when Io comes back yet again and gives birth, they agree that the cat and her kitten should stay with Unnur for a while. Io doesn't seem to like Ásta's live-in boyfriend, anyway. Ásta drops by Unnur's several times a week to visit the cat, and Unnur finds out disturbing information about Ásta's relationship. At a moment of danger, Unnur is there to help Ásta, and she does so with shocking thoroughness.

Dead Weight promises gruesome violence right from the prologue before settling into the daily affairs of Unnur's life in a way that conveys the tension in her sense of control. Taut prose builds a palpable sense of her potential for destruction, should circumstances demand it, and gives complete credibility to her masterminding of how to face its aftermath. Perhaps, by the end of this haunting journey, more than one person has been freed. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library

A death cleric falls into a web of conspiracy and rebellion when someone murders his apprentice in the propulsive, (mis)adventurous fantasy mystery Mortedant's Peril by RJ Barker (Heart of the Wyrdwood).

Irody Hasp works as a Mortedant, a reader of the dead, and is the most disliked practitioner in the city of Elbay. His finances are dire enough that he takes work his neophyte finds in a "downtier" (lower-class) neighborhood. When the deceased's widow tries to stab him, he launches a cabbage in defense, and tragedy ensues when Irody's neophyte is murdered shortly afterward. The authorities accuse Irody, since "no one cares about the truth when there is an easy option." Irody has only three days to find the real killer or face execution. Aiding him are his neophyte's headstrong younger sister, Mirial, and Whisper, a behemoth sea person assigned to guard Irody. Irody considers them both nuisances, but as the unlikely trio uncover a tangle of treachery encircling their city, they form a bond that could last a lifetime, if they don't die in the process.

Readers who adore Katherine Addison's Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy will find satisfying similarities here, but they're wedded to a more action-forward plot and an acerbic, likably unlikable hero. Barker's world of spirit-animated devices, sleeping gods, and political machinations provides plenty of canvas on which Irody and friends can run into trouble in future volumes of this planned series, and tantalizing questions remain in the conclusion. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

"Brooklyn is a mythic place. Gowanus is its Nile," begins Vincent Coppola (Uneasy Warriors) in this humorous yet often wrenching recollection of his youth. Gowanus Crossing is not just a memoir of Coppola's childhood but also a history of the Gowanus Canal and Brooklyn, and by extrapolation, of New York City.

With a gimlet-eyed view, the former Newsweek reporter, now in his 70s, traces the changes wrought by various immigrant communities--especially his own Italian American community--as well as by the Vietnam War and the AIDS crisis. Most notably, he captures the elastic days of childhood: "Waiting defined life in those days.... Vast deserts of time, never to be reclaimed." This was a luxury and a curse, as when he awaited the grade on a story he'd polished so many times: "I choke up when I read it." Sister Mary Malachy accused him of plagiarism and knocked him against the blackboard. Coppola was 13; he would not write another story until he was 28. Coppola describes his first kiss, getting arrested for murder (innocent Coppola was eventually released), and watching his brother Thomas die of AIDS.

Not only does Coppola describe the mythic quality of the Gowanus Canal of his boyhood, but he paints a mythos for all readers. The Canal, once a salt marsh, nurtured "succulent oysters," exported by the Dutch; Frank Sinatra bought his sfogliatella at Cioffi's on Union Street; George Washington sheltered in the Old Stone House on Third Street with the retreating Continental Army. Sister Mary may have underestimated Coppola's gifts, but readers will not. He has captured a bygone era in Brooklyn for posterity. --Jennifer M. Brown

With chapters named after birds and presenting short avian facts, Cara Benson's forthright memoir, An Armsfull of Birds: A Personal Field Guide to Love, Loss, and Commitment, establishes her belief that despite sorrow, struggle, and tragedy, nature provides solace, even in the face of its own destruction.

A published poet with a journalist's style, Benson documents her recovery from substance abuse only to face anxiety, "self-loathing," and "internal recrimination." ("Ravens became associated with the dead and with lost souls.") Her account is not chronological, illustrating the complexity of her journey. In the chapter "Burrowing owls," she relates how she and Jon, "two profoundly wounded people learning how to love," met at a recovery meeting and made a home, but he died by suicide 12 years later. Benson's prologue notes that, at 55, her focus is now on a "creaturely sense of connection with and respect for my environment."

Benson also nurtured a passion for hiking, mastering the 46 Adirondack peaks. She details her summiting of "the Daks" and even more challenging climbs. She appreciated Jon's love for the birds at their feeders, and he supported her environmental activism. Adjusting to losing him, she bought a home in upstate New York, "witnessing firsthand the stresses we humans were putting on the planet," breaking her "already broken heart." She concludes, settled in her forest, that love and grace grow from loss, inspiring hope for the natural world, too. --Cheryl McKeon, Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza, Albany, N.Y.

Whether because of its spectacular location, its cultural significance, or simply its romantic image, San Francisco has always occupied a distinctive place in the American mind. In assessing its contemporary relevance, reporter Jonathan Weber has had a front-row seat since 1990, when he was named the first Silicon Valley correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. The product of his close observation is City on the Edge, a well-informed, granular account of San Francisco's history since 1990, and a portrait of how it has served as a microcosm of some of the fundamental changes occurring in U.S. society during that time.

Much of the story of San Francisco's last 35 years inevitably centers on the tech industry, beginning with the 1990s dotcom boom and its spectacular bust in 2000. The book is peppered with the origin stories of now-iconic companies with local roots, including Twitter, Uber, and Airbnb. But even as the tech-fueled fortunes of the city followed a decidedly upward trajectory, it faced persistent issues of homelessness and drug addiction and crime, along with rapidly rising wealth inequality and gentrification.

As he narrates this story, Weber juggles a large cast of noteworthy characters, including Mayors Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom and businessman/philanthropist Warren Hellman. For non-San Franciscans, there will be moments when City on the Edge veers too deeply into the narrow byways of the city's often Byzantine politics, but Weber usually doesn't linger overlong there. With all its triumphs and travails, it is impossible to leave this account without a strong sense that what Weber calls the "boom-and-bust cycles" of San Francisco life are destined to repeat yet again. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

Israel Moya's meditative, cathartic YA debut, Monarchs in the Wind, is a thoughtful take on the get-out-of-town trope featuring a Mexican American teenager who is desperate to not be defined by others.

It's 1994, and 17-year-old Cal Garcia, who is about to graduate from high school, witnesses the valedictorian fall from a bridge to her death. Fear has "ruled" Cal, the child of Mexican immigrants, since childhood. When Cal was seven, he snuck onto the roof to evade his drunken father and fell. "Pa found me with a jagged plank buried in my face." Cal left the hospital with a facial scar, and his father left town out of guilt. Since then, Cal has had his own scrapes with authority, and the valedictorian's gruesome death rocks him. The teen has few options for a future in tiny La Sombra, Calif., so he buys a used 1968 Mustang to enact his escape. But at every turn, something or someone seems to be trying to trap Cal: cholos fresh from prison who take a shine to the Mustang; a mysterious bruja; even his boss at the local supermarket, who has his own plans for Cal. And is it truly possible to outrun his fear in a "rotting and falling apart" vintage car?

Moya's text, inspired by his own youth, is elaborate and sometimes plodding but packs an emotional wallop. His novel, featuring hints of magical realism, remains solidly grounded; patient readers will be treated to a satisfying transformation in which Cal decisively shifts out of neutral and into drive. Moya reaches for something beyond the typical coming-of-age narrative and mostly succeeds with style and immense heart. --Luis Rendon

Bribri American poet Ari Tison's sophomore YA novel, Together We See, delivers many of the same stunning attributes that made her debut, Saints of the Household, a Walter Dean Myers Award winner. Tison's radiant prose artfully describes various types of relationships, and she adroitly develops intricate, intertwining kinships that drive a complex plot.

Seventeen-year-old Ulá's "Bush-living" older brother, Kabék, always travels from Bribri territory in Costa Rica to their mother's home in Wisconsin for Christmas. Ulá's father, Andres, doesn't tell Ulá or her mother, Shannon, that he also plans to visit this year. Ulá has a complicated relationship with her Native land-activist father; after Andres and Shannon divorced a decade ago, Andres moved to Bribri territory. He's not present in his "half-Sikua" ("outsider") daughter's life but takes pride in her study of Bribri history and myth "in a look-at-me-I'm-so-great-because-of-my-daughter's-knowledge kind of way." Andres, who recently had a heart attack, is evasive about why he's visiting and equally cagey when he quickly leaves. Then he is dead. The Costa Rican police claim nothing is amiss but Ulá finds a note: "I think someone is coming for me."

Over the course of Ulá and Kabék's four days of traditional mourning in Bribri territory, Tison builds a dramatic murder mystery about corrupt systems, familial ties, and how to "re-matriate" Indigenous land. Ulá's first-person narration is crisp and direct, while a chorus of Bribri ancestors gracefully depict several side characters' experiences. Tison attempts a lot here and isn't entirely effective--there are simply too many ideas--but her short chapters are propulsive and her elegant prose and sophisticated relationships make this novel a worthy read. --Siân Gaetano, children's and YA editor, Shelf Awareness

In the enchanting, affecting Where You'll Find Us, Jen St. Jude's sophomore YA novel, a transgender teen stumbles upon a magical refuge for queer youth where gender-expansive people from different eras live forever, paused in time.

Eighteen-year-old Cal's post-high-school plans are in flux. They had hoped to attend a women's college with their girlfriend, Ramona, until Cal's mother used Cal's iPad to look something up and searches for "transgender, transmasc" popped up, after which Cal's parents disowned them. Ramona announces at prom that she secretly fundraised enough to cover Cal's first year; Cal, overwhelmed by the idea of continuing to live a lie, bolts into the stormy night. In the dark, cold and sopping wet, they find sanctuary in a "white, weatherworn house" called Amaranth.

Amaranth is a home of abundance and acceptance, a "gay paradise" where "time doesn't exist." Its housemates--five ethnically diverse queer folks from different U.S. historical periods--invite Cal to stay, heal, and experience "the thrill of self-recognition." When time unexpectedly restarts, the housemates must leave and reckon with the painful events that caused their initial flights.

St. Jude (If Tomorrow Doesn't Come) draws meaningful parallels between the intertwined lived experiences of LGBTQ+ youth and their elders and thoughtfully explores the many meanings of "family" and "home." They skillfully craft remarkable, complicated characters whose moving stories of life during the Harlem Renaissance and the HIV/AIDS epidemic are interspersed with Cal's passionate narration. Where You'll Find Us brims with emotion, warmth, and authenticity, and the acute, overlapping paths of Amaranth's inhabitants should entice readers until the bittersweet end. --Kieran Slattery, freelance reviewer, teacher, cocreator of Gender Inclusive Classrooms

Darrin Lunde, author and collections manager at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and illustrator Erica J. Chen (Who's Making All That NOISE?!) collaborate again in Who's Making That Big STINK?!, a delightful addition to the Whose Is THAT? series of picture books. Here, Lunde and Chen share a mixed bouquet of nature's odors depicted through playful and expressive digital illustrations.

Lunde's narrative--which focuses on the more odiferous inhabitants of the animal and plant world--is likely to illicit giggles and snickers, wrinkled noses and "ewww"s, as he compares smells to "rotten eggs and smelly feet" or "cow poop." Chen's exaggerated yet realistic animals join young readers in responding to the odors; a fox is thrown back by the smell of a skunk, and a tiger luxuriates in the aroma of buttered popcorn emanating from a binturong ("Not every animal with a strong odor smells bad!"). Lunde's text includes fascinating tidbits about why animals have these odors, such as the ring-tailed lemur, which uses scent to attract a mate, or the hippopotamus, which "twirls its tail to spread its smelly poop all over the riverbank, marking its territory." Odor plays a vital role in the natural world, and Lunde helps emerging readers appreciate its importance.

Chen's anthropomorphic animals add to the entertainment as their fuzzy faces twist in disgust, surprise, or interest. Funnier still are the faces of the animals producing the strong scents: the musk oxen are having a grand time, and the skunk is undoubtedly smirking. Lunde and Chen give budding naturalists a wonderful whiff of the great outdoors. --Jen Forbus, freelancer