Ariana thinks of Nowruz as her “secret holiday” because she’s the only one in her class who observes it. Usually Mama helps prepare, but this year she’s out of town. So Ariana and her father step into her shoes, with some help from Ariana’s grandmother (Nana). Ariana and Dad shop for food and boil and paint eggs; later, Ariana decorates baklava with Nana. As they work, Nana explains the holiday’s origins. Nowruz, which means “new day,” is “like a birthday party for Mother Nature. People welcome spring with clean homes, new clothes, and clear hearts.” Best of all, it’s “a chance to start over and be better people.” When Mama returns, she’s happily surprised to see a table brimming with vibrant eggs, carefully organized cookies, a live goldfish, and other significant objects, including the haft-seen, a spread of seven plant-based items. Later, Ariana asks Nana why the whole world doesn’t celebrate Mother Nature’s birthday. Nana’s suggestion that Ariana invite her friends to celebrate with her leads nicely into backmatter discussing Nowruz further. Readers unfamiliar with the holiday will emerge enlightened, while youngsters who observe it will feel kinship with Ariana. Warm, engaging illustrations rife with bright patterns include recognizable Persian holiday hallmarks such as tiny chickpea cookies, sabzeh (greens), and elegant gold-bottomed tea glasses.

Ms. Wilson’s lived in apartment 1A so long that she’s become an expert in the weekday comings and goings of her upstairs neighbors, the Lams. She knows every step, scuffle, and squeak. Best of all, the absence of sounds means the building is finally empty, and she can play her many instruments in peace. Enter Gus, the Lams’ new pup. When they leave for the day on Monday morning, he happily barks along as Ms. Wilson plays her piano downstairs. But the silence that Ms. Wilson has come to treasure is gone. Just when it seems like the Lams will have to give up Gus, however, they hit upon the perfect solution. Sookocheff gently establishes mounting tension on both sides, all resolved with a realistically satisfying ending where empathy and cooperation win the day. She captures the complexities of apartment life—the ways in which neighbors fall into familiar routines and negotiate a shared existence. Relying on a muted palette of browns, beiges, and grays, her illustrations are enlivened by action lines, swirls, and confettilike dots that visually convey sound and emotion; thoughtful details make the characters feel all the more vivid. Ms. Wilson is brown-skinned; the Lams present East Asian.

The unnamed and unmoored protagonist of Shannon’s debut novel has reluctantly moved back in with her parents: “I swapped the city I found for the city I came from.” Overeducated and underemployed, she deals with her lack of direction by becoming obsessed with cleaning. When she gets a job as a cleaner at a local art gallery and meets fellow artist Isabella, her life begins to change. The two women immediately hook up despite the fact that Isabella lives with her successful, rich, and bland boyfriend, Paul. As the narrator becomes more enmeshed in their lives, she thinks she may be able to have it all (“I wanted both of them at the same time. I wanted both of them in bed”). When Isabella leaves one day without a word, the narrator begins to slip into a life that doesn’t belong to her. Written in stream-of-consciousness style, the novel is told in one long gulp with no chapters, paragraph breaks, or quotation marks. The form situates you directly in the protagonist’s mind, which can feel claustrophobic because she’s an absolute disaster. Her thoughts ping-pong among sex, art, death, money, children, thrifting, cleaning, cooking, and everything in between. She is flaky, a liar, and makes decisions that seem detached from reality. Unfortunately, the novel is both too absurd and not absurd enough. The plot, when it surfaces between the narrator’s thoughts, is so outlandish at times that it’s distracting. Despite this, Shannon has imbued the novel with a sardonic humor that serves as a bright spot. When the artist sits down with her family to fill out the census, she tells them she’s not heterosexual to little reaction—and thinks, “I questioned whether pure, uncut indifference was in fact homophobic or progressive.” These moments of levity help the book become less mired in the narrator’s seemingly endless nonsensical loop.

Li’s astute sophomore novel opens with lifelong pals Diana Zhang, Justin Yu, Errol Chen, and Vivian Wang graduating into the Great Recession and moving back into their childhood homes in North Potomac, Maryland. Navigating a historically bad job market and their Chinese immigrant parents’ unrealistically high expectations, the friends must also contend with their own sense of failure: “The four of them formed a line of defense against the cautionary tales other people hoped to make of them.” Their friendships are tested when Grace Li—their sometimes-friend, and their parents’ idea of a model child—returns to town. Grace, who, dropped out of Harvard Law School to the others’ delight, is trying to become a documentary filmmaker, and asks the group if she can make a film about them. As the novel is set in the early days of internet fame, the friends agree without fully understanding what this will mean for them—until Grace’s documentary, Bad Asians, goes viral. The video, which propels Grace into YouTube stardom, reveals long-held secrets, unspoken animosity, and growing cracks among the four friends. Declaring a “delicate truce” to “hold them together through this larger crisis,” the friends try to rehab their image in the most ill-fated way possible. Years later, when it all comes back to haunt them, they must each figure out how to survive the consequences of their actions. The novel follows the friends in the eight years after graduation as they grapple with the ways the video—and their foolish attempt to course correct—has changed the trajectory of their lives. Li is a master at drawing characters that feel distinct, layered, and outrageously human, even if the pacing sometimes suffers. Imbued with humor and sharp social commentary, the novel beautifully explores Asian American identity; economic instability; relationships as both anchor and buoy; the malleability of success; and the ways that ambition manifests itself for better or worse.

Stine kicks off what he dubs in his introduction an “Everything Scary Story” (inspired by eating an everything bagel) for middle graders and their parents, “who read my books when they were kids!” He throws in a cheery evil laugh—“Mmmmwahahaha…!”—before launching into a four-part story that packs a creepy old house just off Cthulhu Street that serves as the main setting with all the stuff of nightmares from his considerable arsenal. In short chapters alternating between two equally surreal storylines that may each be a dream of the other, he chucks in an impressive array of disquieting tropes and elements—ranging from spooky creaks and howls to purple worms emerging from noses, a mom who sells crocheted body parts online, teachers in “weird animal masks,” and classics like evil toys and an ominous message scrawled in blood. Even though the point-of-view characters are in a constant state of round-eyed terror, this outing is plainly meant to be in fun, and aside from being splashed with hot green vomit or spending a little time as ventriloquist’s dummies, none of the young people here suffer actual harm from the cascade of supernatural threats, for reasons the author explains at the end. The cast presents white.