While playing in the woods, Ghouldilocks, a wide-eyed, wild-haired, yellow-skinned creature, discovers an abandoned mansion. Inside she finds three chairs of differing degrees of hardness, three bowls of—what else?—“ghoulash” of varying temperatures, and three beds of disparate sizes. The tale matches “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” beat for beat as our protagonist sits in every chair and breaks the littlest one, samples all the ghoulash and devours the smallest bowl’s contents, then falls asleep in the smallest bed. When the mansion’s ghostly residents return, they discover Ghouldilocks still slumbering. Mistaking her for a mummy, they’re terrified, and the hubbub awakens the interloper, who, in turn, becomes scared of them. Everyone scrambles for the door. Outdoors, the ghosts realize their error and explain that they’re friendly but that they believed Ghouldilocks wanted their sheets for her wrapping. Mistaken identities are now resolved—with a couple of funny visual and textual puns thrown in—and new relationships are forged. Ghouldilocks is invited to stay, learns to cook ghoulash, becomes besties with Baby Ghost, and promises never to enter anyone’s house uninvited. Children who enjoy the source material will giggle over this humorous take, which emphasizes friendship and goofy antics rather than scares; they’ll pore over the comedically energetic cartoon illustrations and appreciate the satisfying ending.

San Jose, California, known as “the Garden City,” is struggling during the Great Depression. The fruit and vegetable processing industry serves as the area’s main economic driver, but recent wage cuts have cannery workers poised to go on strike. Best friends Amelia and Victoria work on a cannery assembly line, thanks to Amelia’s well-connected bar-manager father, Angelo Gumina—the second-in-command to mob boss Gaetano Ferrone—who used his influence to secure them summer jobs. They soon find themselves fired up by activism, attending meetings and demonstrations to protest unfair wages and poor treatment at work. To evade police after a demonstration turns ugly, the girls seek refuge in the Rosen Department Store, owned by Alexander Rosen; Victoria meets Alexander’s son and heir, Michael, who’s known as “the scion of San Jose,” and their association leads to Michael being kidnapped and held for $40,000 ransom. The pressure to solve the case increases when Bureau of Investigation agent Louis Cooper gets involved, sue to rumors of mob involvement, and conflicting accounts of what really happened to Michael emerge. The apparent lack of progress in the case brings things to a fever pitch. Meanwhile, influential real estate magnate Thomas Ripley, who has the ears of both the mayor and governor, has his own agenda that involves obtaining more power, more land, and more money. Over the course of this intricate tale of politics, corruption, and shifting alliances, Doll delivers a fast-paced work of historical fiction that takes full advantage of its Prohibition-era California setting. The farming community is effectively shown to be beset by unrest, greed, and scandal, and the shifting plot will keep readers on their toes. Overall, the work has a cinematic quality, but it’s always firmly grounded in elements of real-life history; as such, it serves as a cautionary tale on how social disparities and anti-immigrant bias can be manipulated to fuel the evil plans of powerful people.

Like many girls in the 1960s, the author was spellbound by Warren Beatty and obsessed with meeting him in real life. Unlike many girls, Nash grew up in Tarzana, California, with eccentric parents whose social circle included radical left-wing politicians and minor Hollywood stars. For her, Warren Beatty would be—in some ways—attainable. By 1974, the author was working at the Sunset Strip’s Old World Restaurant (where she knew Beatty was a patron) and trying to get her acting career off the ground. It was there that she began a decades-long, on-and-off relationship with Beatty, which would endure for the rest of her career as an actor, comedian, and associate director working in television production. Nash uses Beatty as the throughline as she fleshes out wonderfully outlandish stories from her madcap childhood (which featured “typical family stuff” like Black Panther fundraisers and dressing up like a nun to be able to buy liquor underage) and her time as an adventurous young woman in 1970s Los Angeles. The author spent her days on movie sets or skydiving before attending parties at Jack Nicholson’s Mulholland mansion, all while slowly feeling the pull toward addictions to alcohol, quaaludes, and binge-eating. Nash takes readers through the ’80s, ’90s, and up to the current day, chronicling her experiences with recovery and the healing potential of comedy, which led her to finally call out the big star that had been stringing her along for years. The author’s skill as a comedian is on full display here—she peppers every page with perfectly timed punchlines that communicate her quirky personality. (When a producer’s call catches her off guard, she breezily responds that she’s painting, but explains, “I was eating—but I wanted to sound interesting and busy.”) Although she writes with deep emotion about her addiction issues, it may feel that Nash sometimes waves the darker aspects of Hollywood away with jokes; still, her consistent, irreverent voice makes the memoir delightful. Just as she describes one of her encounters with Warren, her wonderful stories feel like “remnant[s] of stardust mixed in with a cozy blanket of nostalgia.”

The Rebeccas—one a doctoral student, the other a cashier at an organic grocery store—have been separated for six months. Theirs was a volatile marriage, marred by student Rebecca’s alcoholism, but now she is sober, on her medication, and eager to become a foster parent. But in order to get approved, student Rebecca needs cashier Rebecca, who herself grew up in foster care, to pretend they are still happily married. Cashier Rebecca isn’t entirely opposed—she desperately wants her wife back if she is stable—but she has her own entanglements to manage. Despite her precarious personal financials, she has presented herself as a “provider” on an app that pairs sugar babies with sugar mamas and connected with the pregnant Charlotte. But little does she know that Charlotte isn’t expecting and isn’t in need of a romantic benefactor—Charlotte likes wearing a prosthetic pregnancy belly and is using her inheritance money to serve as student Rebecca’s (“her Rebecca”) sugar mama. The novel’s premise smacks of screwball, but the bleak interior lives of her cast keep comedy on the sidelines. Chapters alternate focus between Charlotte and cashier Rebecca, and in both, we hear how much they hate themselves and watch as myopia blinds them to the needs and experiences of others. Higgins’ prose has moments of evocative wit, such as, “Her voice sounds strained and controlled, like she is giving boarding announcements for a rocket designated to explode for the pleasure of the rich and perverse.” But she allows her characters so many flights of fancy that the line between imagination and reality is blurred, and in some scenes it’s difficult to tell what is actually happening.

Aye-Shan City has already been reduced to ashes, its few remaining survivors sent scattering in the opening pages of Hong Kong brothers Chi-Ho (the author) and Chi-Kit (the illustrator) Kwong’s sweeping and kinetic saga about the nature of war. Aye-Shan City may have been destroyed by the dastardly Zhehe people, but that just means that the stage is set for a City Builder—in this case the young Ocean Hacklin, heir to the great City Builder Yishan Hacklin—to rebuild Aye-Shan City all over again, using his superhuman Naoyang skills. Before that can happen, however, Ocean must team up with Shaman Ling Tiber; together, the duo, along with a comical company of other Aye-Shan City refugees, set out to locate the fabled Guardian Beast. Readers may see parallels between Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series and the story of the fallen city of Aye-Shan: Both set technology and the natural world at odds with each other. The Kwong brothers take the premise one step further in positing that war itself is just part of the natural cycle of things. There is a lyrical quality in both the writing (“The fighting song is loud and clear, the sound of nature changes the world”) and the illustrations. The latter seem to shift and morph into varying styles, some vibrant and colorful, others stark and black & white. At one point, speaking through imaginative speech balloons in prose that gives it an ethereal air of nobility, the mighty Guardian Beast laments how it was overcome after the Zhehe people “tempted Aye-Shan people to engage in lewd acts, which generated negative energy and weakened my power.” Will the Zhehe people and the inhabitants of Aye-Shan City ever break free of this cycle of destruction and creation? That depends on what the Kwong brothers next have in store for readers.