Lexie, a gifted Canadian 10th grader, is caught in a whirlwind of competing demands: striving for a sports scholarship to prestigious Sunridge High’s Fine Arts and Music program, grieving a beloved mentor, juggling swim team obligations, and navigating her parents’ post-divorce tension. While her mother and friends are supportive, her father—who’s charming but controlling—undermines her plans. He launches a renovation business and demands help from Lexie and her brother; he gets Lexie a dog she never asked for as a birthday gift and then complains she doesn’t care for it when she’s at her mom’s house. Lexie, who’s volunteering at a retirement home, dating lifeguard boyfriend Rhys, and dealing with anxiety (with help from a therapist), feels the pressure building until something has to give. Told with clear-eyed emotional insight and a sharp ear for teen voices, Azzam’s posthumously published novel gently but powerfully explores the costs of people-pleasing, the subtleties of emotional manipulation, and the strength required to set boundaries. Lexie’s journey toward recognizing healthy love and support is as rewarding as it is resonant. The lyrical prose, tight pacing, and strong supporting cast shine, and amid the emotional tension, many scenes show warmth and nurturing from those around Lexie. Most characters are cued white.

It’s 2023, and Ashley Bellamy is a history major at the University of California, Los Angeles, who’s staying with her father, Clive, in London, doing research for her thesis. Clive is the Chief Yeoman Warder (otherwise known as a Beefeater) at the Tower of London, who gives tours of the site in official dress and takes great pride in his work. The job also allows Clive to live on the Tower grounds, giving him intimate knowledge of the structure’s every nook and cranny. Ashley, though, is more interested in diamonds, including their “history and legends.” She has a strained relationship with her father, but his position affords her access to the famous Kohinoor diamond—a piece at the Tower that has a long and supposedly cursed history. One afternoon, an unattended bag prompts an alert, resulting in the deployment of a bomb squad and the evacuation of the area. Clive senses that the situation isn’t what it seems and discovers that the so-called bomb squad has taken hostages. The Beefeater is hardly going to take this lying down—and Ashley is there to help. The story artfully places its events in a setting that’s not only steeped in English history but is also in the heart of a major metropolitan area. The offbeat locale allows Clive to point out intriguing facts, such as how, for the execution of Anne Boleyn, “It was considered more dignified for nobility to have their heads removed without spectators.” Some of the dialogue, especially between Ashley and Clive, can be a bit bland, but the pair’s circumstances make for a unique thriller. It’s rare to see a setup that involves heroes with crossbows, “lances, a mace, some more longbows, a blunderbuss and several muskets” facing off against enemies with more standard machine guns. The pacing is also well-handled, and the stakes remain high throughout the narrative.

Told through the eyes of a sensitive child, Tower’s offbeat personal narrative immerses readers in the visceral confusion of a fractured family, rendered with vivid sensory details—the smell of apple juice and holding tight to a Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed animal. The child’s imagination serves as a coping mechanism, with recurring Star Wars and Hundred Acre Wood metaphors underscoring the epic scale of his emotional battle. The prose delivers a tone that ebbs and flows between innocence and despair, punctuated by moments of heartbreaking vulnerability: “I had to be a Jedi. I had to use the Force and get Mom and Dad to stop fighting. Maybe I could learn the Jedi mind trick like Obi-Wan Kenobi.” Yet at times, the narrative’s metaphoric language veers into adult reflection (“The loud clicks thudded in my soul like the stiff boots of millions of stormtroopers marching to war, and I was the only one on earth who could hear them”), which can overpower the childlike immediacy. The eclectic personal narrative is complemented by evocative pencil illustrations by Sanda that trace the memoir’s emotional arc. Early images are tight, boxed-in, and heavily shaded, visually echoing the claustrophobia of custody battles and emotional entrapment. As the narrative moves toward forgiveness and release, the art opens up with softer lines and light-filled compositions—e.g., a human-shaped door ajar with light spilling through the opening, and a glowing bird soaring upward through clouds—symbolizing transition and transcendence. While the memoir occasionally benefits from tighter pacing and fewer metaphors, Love Wars remains a hauntingly authentic and visually resonant account of childhood resilience and the slow path toward healing.

Scuttlebutt abounds as the mysterious box arrives at the local post office. One by one, anthropomorphized animal denizens curiously enter to see if they’re the recipient. Postal worker Fox replies to each with a poem stating that they are not the intended owner. The animals band together to follow the mail carrier to the home of Little Shrew, where they find that the contents of the package are really gifts for them. Feeling embarrassed about their over-the-top reactions, they band together to give Little Shrew a gift and show their appreciation in their own way. Bathed in light amid a palette of warm earth tones, Álvarez’s exquisite textured art creates an idyllic world that showcases the quaint, folkloric nature of this community. Unfortunately, the story falls flat. Translated from Spanish, the text is stilted in spots and repetitive, giving the narrative a sluggish pace. While the community members try to convey selflessness as a result of their self-reflection with their gift to Little Shrew at the end (a handheld mirror), the result is murky, advocating both selflessness and thinking about yourself, leaving readers with a muddled resolution.

Loebl opens her book with a jolt: Over the course of their rule, the Nazis looted some 650,000 pieces of art. In her ranging and mostly engrossing investigation, she focuses on the principal figures, events, and works that were at play in this knotted and tragic story of art in the Third Reich. The author of 14 books, including America’s Medicis: The Rockefellers and Their Astonishing Cultural Legacy, Loebl herself escaped Nazi Germany with her art-collecting family. As she rightly conveys, art was something that senior Nazis both hungered for and despised, depending on the subject, genre, and artist’s nationality. In swift and unencumbered prose, the author tells of how they attempted—and often succeeded—in cleansing it, first in Germany and then in the territories they occupied, looting museums and private collections at will. One target was the German Expressionists whose work Hitler regarded as “degenerate.” In short profiles of the artists and their patrons or dealers, Loebl gives a thoughtful account of this crucial interwar movement and the attacks it endured as the Nazis rose to power. The author, who spent much of the war in hiding in Belgium, weaves in her personal story to great effect, including descriptions of her own forbears’ collections of Bauhaus furniture and important prints and paintings. Her writing sags at times when she attempts to demonstrate the vastness of Nazi plunder by favoring breadth over depth in stories of dozens of dealers and collectors. This choice makes some of the characters seem unidimensional. This blemish aside, she succeeds in presenting the immensity of artistic loss caused by the Germans, both the spoliated works and sometimes the artists themselves, some of whom perished in concentration camps. Powerfully, she gives readers a blunt reminder of how much art with dubious provenance remains in the galleries of our great museums.