After her four-year marriage ended, the author found herself nearing the end of her 30s and  confronting an uncertain future. Living in New York City and working as a ghostwriter—a job she had come to despise—she made the practical but emotionally fraught decision to freeze her eggs (“I can’t stop thinking that I’m behind schedule”). Soon after, she quit her job and moved to the small New England town of Hanover, New Hampshire, which she knew only because it was where she adopted Ronan, her Glen of Imaal terrier. Trading her mouse-infested environs for bohemian chic, Vereckey moved in with Susan and Jake, the couple who bred the terriers. Residing in the apartment on the bottom floor of the main house, Vereckey began the slow, uncertain work of rebuilding her life. Returning to her journalistic roots, the author took on freelance work for a local newspaper and settled into the rhythms of her new household, enjoying evening Jeopardy! sessions with Susan and Jake over cocktails, the companionship of their five dogs, and the quiet intimacy of shared space. While there’s plenty here to make readers laugh, the narrative doesn’t shy from difficult moments, including the heartbreak of a quality-of-life decision for one of the dogs and Susan’s mother’s death; Vereckey conveys this material with genuine emotion and restraint. The author structures her story in short, essay-like chapters that capture the texture of daily life rather than follow a strictly linear narrative. Some vignettes don’t connect directly with the larger arc, but Vereckey’s engaging voice and warm observations keep the pages turning. While readers hoping for a dramatic transformation or clear forward momentum may find the pacing leisurely, the narrative effectively reflects real life. The author isn’t offering a tidy reinvention story; she’s documenting the messy, slow process of finding one’s footing after loss. What results is less a saga of self-discovery than an honest portrait of someone trying to navigate through the unknown and figure out what home means when everything familiar has fallen away.

Bob Dylan has nothing on Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) when it comes to cryptic musical personas. He was a successful singer-songwriter but came to it late, almost casually, after establishing himself as a poet and novelist in his native Canada. He wrote songs steeped in religious imagery—“Hallelujah” most famously—but kept his own faith vague. Though he was embraced by the counterculture, he had a nihilistic streak and was, as one writer here notes, “a long-standing member of the National Rifle Association.” The essays Shumway collects don’t pretend to make a coherent portrait—except, perhaps, as a man who tried to wriggle out of every attempt to categorize him. A trio of essays discuss his uneasy relationship with ’60s folkies like Dylan, ’70s singer-songwriters, and ’80s rock acts. (Eric Weisbard delivers a particularly thoughtful piece on Cohen’s ’90s revival, stoked by his music’s appearances in films like Pump Up the Volume.) Cohen songs are less sung than incanted, which leads many to dismiss them as simple; Alan Light’s appreciation of Cohen’s gift for melody offers an elegant, well-researched counterpoint. Numerous pieces touch on his uneasy relationship with the spotlight; his touring in his later years was less about ego than a desperate need for cash after a manager embezzled his funds. Some of the pieces have a strong whiff of academia about them, including explorations of his documentary appearances, “Hallelujah” covers, and his songs’ relationship to Christian and Jewish musical traditions. But even at its wonkiest, the book feels celebratory toward Cohen, suggesting that his music and life offer rich material for cultural scholars. The closing essay, an overview of Cohen’s archives, offers a glimpse into the mass of notebooks, scraps of lyrics, and ephemera that still await the eager Cohen researcher.

Narrator Rika Horauchi’s new position at the local museum isn’t the kind “you [come] across every day.” For a few hours every Monday when the institution is closed to the public, Rika talks with a beautiful Roman statue of Venus. The job is as dreamy as it is deeply ironic: Latin is easier for Rika to speak than her own language. This unusual juxtaposition of characters is key to understanding Rika, whom Yagi depicts as having long been garbed in an invisible yellow raincoat that protects as it also stifles her: “The coat was always present, regardless of what other clothes I was or wasn’t wearing…like a second skin.” At first Rika searches for reasons to leave a job that puts her in proximity to a naked marble goddess that makes her self-conscious about the “many layers” covering her own body. Over time, the color of her raincoat fades from “blinding yellow” to “the hue of pre-griddle French toast” and Rika realizes that she’s in love with Venus, who tells her of the emptiness she feels at being a perennial—but misunderstood—center of attention. But only when Rika finds herself challenged for Venus’ love by another equally ardent “suitor” does she discover how much she and Venus have transformed each other. Yagi’s characters and the world they inhabit are as inimitably charming as they are whimsical. Through them, the author explores weightier themes like loneliness, love, sexuality, and the meaning of art with flair, zest, and a refreshing touch of the surreal.

Eight-year-old Dante awakens screaming from a terrifying nightmare of a shadowy figure pursuing him. His mother holds him and shows him photographs of two ancestors, his maternal great-great-grandmother, Taloa Homma, a Choctaw woman “stronger than” the Trail of Tears, and his paternal great-grandmother, Ora Lee Scott, a Black woman “stronger than” the Tulsa Race Massacre. When Dante asks about those events, his mother encourages him to seek the answers himself; at the public library the next day, he immerses himself in history. The violence, cruelty, and destruction that his people faced sadden him, but he discovers another feeling—pride in the people who were “stronger than a nightmare” and confidence that he must be, too. Grimes and Well’s (Choctaw) quiet text feels a bit didactic at times, but it’s wholly edifying, and Dante’s journey hits poignant emotional notes. Lewis’ (Lenni Lenape) signature watercolor art uses vibrant color for present-day scenes and sepia tones to distinguish the historical figures and moments; he welcomes young people into Dante’s world yet offers them a level of remove from the events he reads about so that readers can decide when and how to learn more.

Of course, there are a few changes. Yes, widowed anthropologist Harry Lancaster, homebound with a fractured hip, starts out by accepting a gift of high-priced binoculars from his daughter, Ceci, a State Department employee stationed in Delhi. And he depends on his home caregiver, Emma Stockton, for help above and beyond. But when his neighbor Sue Daniels is poisoned with death camas, a plant that looks like wild onion, suspicion is spread over all of Lakeview Estates, a development outside of Columbus. The neighborhood’s principal suspects—retired executive Gautam Patel and his wife, Sakshi; glamorous boutique owner Rachel Valucci; trucking company owner Milo Czesiak; retired chef Jimmy Chatimont; accountant Jack Buchanan, whose teenage son, Conner, Harry sees tossed from a moving car; and local government zoner and planner David Dubois—are hiding so many secrets that by the time Emma, who plays a much more active role than her counterpart in Alfred Hitchcock’s film, muses, “Maybe Sue was blackmailing the entire lane,” her supposition seems more likely than not. First-timer Cullen tosses in two more violent attacks, some late-blooming references to a series of other classic movies, a rushed engagement between Emma and surgeon Blake Derrickson, whom she’s known since childhood without ever really knowing, and a spirited neighborhood debate over installing security cameras that reveals how sharply the denizens of Lakeview Estates are divided against each other on the topic of communal security versus anti-surveillance paranoia. Wonder what those holdouts might be hiding?