January Hoolihan, immediately after completing seventh grade, goes to live with the grandfather she’s never known. Her punk rocker father died mere months ago from an overdose, and his live-in girlfriend, Sammie, is leaving Manhattan for LA without her. January moves in with Bill Hoolihan on Long Island’s Shelter Island. When Bill warmly welcomes her into his home, she realizes he’s not the “scary” old man others have led her to believe he is. January’s 8-year-old friend Crisscross is on the island as well, having trailed Sammie when she dropped January off. Amazingly resourceful, Crisscross lives on her own until a local food-market owner shows her some compassion. Crisscross is hiding from her alleged uncle, Felix, a biker. He’s been looking for Crisscross, who’d rather stay right where she is. Wisoff’s absorbing tale is stylized as January’s eighth-grade assignment—in the conceit of the novel, she’s writing about what she did over her summer vacation. Intriguingly, the story doesn’t only follow her first-person narrative, since her post-summer “composition fact-gathering” provides her with others’ perspectives. For example, January’s foulmouthed former schoolmate Pigface (his hip-hop handle) witnesses several interactions between Sammie and Felix in Manhattan. January’s and Crisscross’s stories are equally compelling; they each find new families in entirely different ways. The often-grim narrative pulls no punches when dealing with such issues as child abuse and habitual drug use, but it hits upbeat notes, too, from various characters’ warmhearted actions to touches of humor; Crisscross pretends to be a Girl Scout selling cookies while her uniform is “in the wash. A bear pooped on it at the zoo.” Readers will surely look forward to more from these girls in the planned sequel.

Conservatism, wrote the political philosopher Russell Kirk, held that “there exists an enduring moral order.” The prevailing Trumpism, conversely, has no concern for morality, writes LBJ School of Public Affairs scholar Kettl; it is “focused squarely on acquiring, keeping, and using political power” and has no use for the niceties of checks and balances. Moreover, its enemy is not just the “woke left,” but also includes traditional Republicans and their moral sensibilities. The “idea factory” of Kettl’s title weds tech-bro libertarianism with right-wing activism and grassroots zealotry, all with a transactional approach “to build power, without necessarily creating sustained relationships among any of the players” and discarding fellow travelers once they cease being useful. (Witness Marjorie Taylor Greene.) Kettl traces much of the current dynamic, with outrage replacing principle, to the Covid-19 pandemic and populist resistance to government public health mandates; onetime outlier issues became central as this resistance extended to demands for parental control of curricula, book bans (with Florida, Iowa, and Texas leading the way), revoking guarantees of anti-LGTBQ+ rights, rejection of experts and academics, old-fashioned racism, and a profound mistrust of government. As all this was going on, the right-wing political elite was arrogating power unto itself, especially by pushing the notion of a “unitary executive” who controlled every aspect of government. “The concentration of power was one of the things that the country’s founders worried most about,” Kettl notes, but that has proved no deterrent as the Trumpist movement takes a slash-and-burn approach to upending the existing order. If successful, Kettl warns, “this would seriously, perhaps even fatally, wound America’s grand experiment in democracy.”

Twenty-something Alice Jones meets 18-year-old Leonard Kip Rhinelander in 1921. She’s one of three daughters of a couple who emigrated from England. Her father, George Jones, was the son of a West Indian sailor and a white English tavern owner; her white mother, Elizabeth, was a kitchen maid in a grand British estate. In 1891, the couple moved to New York. Now, 30 years later, Alice is walking down Pelham Road in New Rochelle when Leonard drives by in his new Oldsmobile convertible. Momentarily distracted by her, Leonard can’t stop his car quickly enough and bumps into a police car parked by the curb. Impulsively, Alice tells Sgt. Kelly that she saw what happened, and that the tall, gangly driver wasn’t speeding. Leonard, the young scion of New York’s top-tier Rhinelander family, gratefully offers her a ride. By the time he drops her home, four hours later, they’re smitten with each other. Within a few months, Leonard’s father, Philip, learns of their relationship, and he aims to torpedo their romance, sending Leonard to places far and wide for the next two years—but he can’t prevent them from writing voluminous letters to each other. An uncomfortably generous portion of the novel is devoted to the steamy contents of Alice’s letters to her beau: “you always knew that I love to be in your loving arms and hold your warm lips to mine. I knew many times, Len, dear, how I have made you feel very happy.” The letters are made public in a 1925 trial in which Philip forces his son to sue Alice for annulment of their secret 1924 marriage. The trial plays out in disturbingly lurid detail, vividly illustrating the implicit and explicit misogyny and racism of the period. Alice’s older sister, Emily Jones Brooks, serves as a knowledgeable narrator for Kinsolving’s fictionalized version of the real-life drama.

A century in the shadowlands of the Duskhold is a grueling sentence. A woman there has forgotten her birth name and also can’t recall what transgression begat this punishment—just that she, a human, had fallen in love with a Fae. She’s finally so distraught that she walks into the Whispering Sea, convinced that a fatal drowning is her only chance at reprieve. Instead of dying, she’s somehow “remade,” and, amazingly, she travels to another realm altogether. There, a couple shows her kindness and gives her the name Lyra. But she wastes little time before heading east to the Fae realm, where she’s certain her lost love resides, and she auditions to be a performer at the Amber Palace. Lyra can manipulate shadows and can even turn them into forceful energy, courtesy of “lingering traces of Fae enchantment” in the Whispering Sea. She passes herself off as a mere illusionist, however, and quickly befriends Lysara, the court historian. But it’s the prince who truly captures Lyra’s attention—and she captures his as well. Is he the Fae whom she loved so long ago? She’ll have to be cautious if she wants answers, or a chance at rekindling the romance, because Prince Torian is currently betrothed. And, as Lyra soon discovers, something is hunting her—a daunting presence that may have the inclination and the power to pull her right back into the shadowlands.

Gregorsdóttir’s tale, which kicks off a prospective series, boasts a consistently compelling protagonist. She begins as a tortured soul with a curiously murky past before she bravely travels to an unknown (or possibly forgotten) destination despite the danger involved. As the story continues, readers learn much more about Lyra, including details about her family. The supporting cast also shines, including Lysara and the seemingly conflicted Torian, as well as Tomas and Elidra, who “monitor crossings between realms.” There’s a pleasing variety among the characters, including smaller winged faeries, an antlered forest spirit, and nods to the godly Four Pillars. (Lyra apparently resembles most Fae, although references to her distinguishing human feature of “curved ears” are abundant.) Lyra’s journey in this first installment effectively fuses genre elements of romance and suspense. She longs for what she once had, and she does, on occasion, find herself in intimate situations—including a few moments that outright sizzle. At the same time, she perpetually fears that someone from the court might recognize her Fae magic, or that the aforementioned ominous presence will make itself known to her. Gregorsdóttir’s prose is pleasingly poetic, whether describing scenes of love or magic-wielding: “I opened my hand again, skin still stinging. Red crescents bit into my flesh, encircling tiny scorches, perfect black pinpricks edged in feverish pink. The stars had left their mark before dying, branding me with their last betrayed sigh.” A twist of fate near the end will most certainly leave some readers shaken—and hoping for a sequel.

When Meron’s native Poland was invaded in 1939, he writes in this impressive memoir, “Nazi Germany brought an apocalyptic change in my life: from sweet, uneventful, pampered childhood to the horrors of fleeing from monsters.” Seven years later, having fled those monsters, he arrived in Israel in 1946. “I was nearly 16 years old, with no Hebrew, no English, no algebra, no geometry; a total ignoramus.” Meron quickly made up for lost time. After serving in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, he entered law school in Jerusalem, successfully applied to Harvard University, earning a doctorate in international law, and joined the Israeli government as a legal adviser. Meron moved to the U.S.—teaching law at New York University, Harvard, and the University of California, Berkeley—and served as a judge and president of international criminal tribunals. He retired in 2019 at age 89. As Meron notes, international law deals with war, genocide, atrocities, and torture—he presided over cases involving crimes committed in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Since no agency enforces international law, however, great powers, including the U.S., routinely ignore it. Meron writes well, but a lifetime in government has produced a text dotted with excerpts from documents, letters, and speeches that might not fully engage readers. What resonates the most are his personal reflections, as when he writes about the death of his wife, Monique. “I had a rough childhood, losing my mother, brother and most of my family to the Holocaust. Perhaps it was the chaos of wartime, perhaps my emotional reserves had been drained or the survival instinct was too dominating, but the pain of losing my family was nothing compared with the shock, grief, despair and total loneliness I felt when Monique left me….Perhaps this is the price one must pay for true love.”