Eleven-year-old Lizabeth “Liza” Gordon is used to moving house; as her grandmother says, her dad “was bitten by the gobug when he was young.” This time, Liza’s dad aims to start a family gelato business in Greenblossom, South Carolina, that he’ll call Gordon’s Gelato. Liza and her older brothers, Pete and Brad, are going to help run the shop. Liza doesn’t want to leave her friends, but when they prove to not care about her, she says good riddance to the Richmond, Virginia, area and heads to her new home. It’s worse than she imagined: The new residence is a “rundown, bi-level style house,” her room is “puss yellow with prune-purple trim,” and she’s starting school with only six weeks left before summer vacation. Stepping into her new life, she has to figure out how to work in a gelato shop, determine whether her new friends actually like her, and plan for her 12th birthday. Liza’s dad becomes a contestant on a reality show, competing for a grand prize of $1 million, which makes things a lot more complicated for Liza, but if her dad wins, her whole life could change. The novel’s fun and engaging lead character makes the book a captivating read. The supporting characters, from Liza’s eccentric dad to the boy who helps out in the gelato shop, feel well rounded and unique. Liza is easy to root for, especially when everything keeps going wrong for her. Her creative and disgusting gelato flavors, nicknamed “Gordon’s Gaggers,” are a funny element that adds to the overall charm of the story.

It’s typically American, Johns Hopkins musicologist Celenza notes, that rebelling colonials adopted the derisive British song “Yankee Doodle” as a badge of pride. But a true anthem was wanted, and it came in the War of 1812 (which “we tend to forget…began as an act of US aggression”): the “Star-Spangled Banner,” written by a lawyer (and slaveholder in the “land of the free”) who borrowed the barely singable tune from a British men’s club. It might have been a handier ditty, such as “My Country ’Tis of Thee” (its tune borrowed from “God Save the King”) or “Hail, Columbia,” but alas, no. Not long after emancipation, the formerly enslaved and their descendants found an anthem of their own in “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” with its resonant cadences (“Lift every voice and sing / Till earth and heaven ring, / Ring with the harmonies of Liberty…”), a song that deserves wider circulation outside the African American church community. Other songs in Celenza’s roster speak to other aspirations of freedom: George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which “captured the mechanistic beat of modern life”; the collected works of Duke Ellington, blending jazz with the European classical tradition; Abel Meeropol’s antilynching ballad “Strange Fruit” as sung by the great Billie Holiday, who ended her set with it and left the stage immediately after, leaving her audiences stunned by the force of her delivery; Jerome Robbins’ musical West Side Story, originally meant to tell the story of immigrant Eastern European Jews in New York and seized upon by politicians to denounce juvenile delinquency; and of course that great delinquent Bob Dylan, whose folk anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Celenza wryly notes, offers “an answer that is equally evasive and profound,” like the author himself. Celenza’s selections, extending into the era of Hamilton, aren’t unexpected, but she has something fresh to say about all of them.

Following the untimely deaths of her beloved parents just a few years apart, focused, determined Liliana Chamberlain hides out from state authorities, scraping by in her family’s apartment, focusing on getting to her 18th birthday in May, and keeping her grades up for her full-ride college scholarship. But her estranged maternal grandparents’ lawyer—who was her mother’s close childhood friend—suddenly arrives with news: Liliana’s billionaire grandparents disowned her mom when she ran off with Liliana’s dad as a pregnant teen, but now they want to send Liliana to her mother’s alma mater, Westdale Academy. Readers will be swept along with this engaging, over-the-top account of a school that’s filled with a diverse group of glittering teens. Chemistry immediately sparks between Liliana and two love interests: bisexual Theo Dubois, whose mom is a famous actor, and brooding but kind Maddox Moreno, the son of a tech giant. She decides to run for Optima, an elite society that accepts one student per year. While readers will likely pick up that Liliana is in danger well before she does, they’ll still career along with the rollicking, trope-filled twists and turns that continue to the very end of this boarding school adventure. Liliana and Theo are cued white, and Maddox presents Latine.

Some still doubt that the son of a glovemaker who never left England could have created the imaginative universe we behold in the plays and poems. Amussen, a historian at the University of California, Merced, writes a social history of England in the late-16th century to affirm that a man of the theater, a highly literate poet, an acute observer of daily life, and, quite simply, a great literary genius, could and did live to create the great works that traveled under his name. Early modern London had everything: travelers from abroad, artisans, the rich, the poor, the powerful, the meek. Many schools offered far more than they do today. A boy in his teens would have been taught the classics of the ancient world, the history of England, and enough Latin (if not other languages) to navigate the libraries and booksellers of Queen Elizabeth’s age. Shakespeare was surrounded by scholars and artists and musicians and poets of skill and learning. His plays were performed by the greatest actors of the time. His poems were dedicated to some of the most powerful aristocrats of the age. He did not have to visit Verona to imagine Juliet’s balcony. He did not need to be born to furs and finery to give voice to kings. During his life, Shakespeare was known for his ambition and his range. After his death, the publication of the First Folio edition of his plays cemented his reputation. “There is no mystery about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays,” Amussen writes. “There is nothing in the plays, or in Shakespeare’s life, that is incompatible with what we know of the man from Stratford.” The case is closed, the author maintains, and we can love and live inside his work without doubt.

For six years Sasha has lived in Haven, the underground society built to withstand nuclear war. Since the war, since her family’s deaths, since discovering she doesn’t get sick like everyone else does, Sasha’s life has been full of death and overfull with grief. While working in the Ward, Haven’s limited hospital, she stays with patients as they die. When Tristian Hayes, a unit commander of the Force, ends up as her patient, hanging on for his life, she pleads for him to stay alive. He does—upending her bleak ritual as Death’s Angel. Hoping to forget everything she’s seen and to numb the pain, Sasha leaves the Ward in favor of a role with a pickax, expanding Haven’s tunnels. Tristian, fiercely determined and stunningly stubborn, recruits Sasha to the Force for a vital mission aboveground. The story picks up steam with Sasha’s intense training to become the medic for Tristian’s tightknit unit. Together, they bear the weight of their unit’s survival and all that’s left of humankind. While in training, Sasha struggles to discern friends and enemies, but nothing is as challenging as facing her own demons. In this prequel to her debut novel, Conform (2025), Sullivan tries to accomplish a lot with both the worldbuilding and plot machinations, resulting in a convoluted story and flattened characters. The plot doesn’t have a satisfying payoff, but the romantic tension between Sasha and Tristian will keep readers engaged.