Serena, Hazel, and Emrys, along with a talking book named Van Stavern, are members of an ancient organization that’s responsible for safeguarding magical items to keep them from those who would use them for evil, protecting the public and foiling their dangerous counterpart, the Yellow Court. Serena’s own magical relic, the Aegis, allows her to view magical entities as they really are, rather than how they present themselves. This comes in handy when her “spooky sense” alerts her to something being off about Shadowglass, a streamer who exerts mysterious power over their followers, several of whom have wound up dead. Finding out what’s going on with Shadowglass takes on a greater urgency when Serena’s brother, Dom, becomes the focus of the streamer’s attention. The characters balance magical assistance with using their own common sense and intuition, and the villain is chilling but not too scary for a middle-grade audience. This latest installment will be a hit with series fans but can also be enjoyed by those who haven’t read the earlier books. A shocking reveal at the end promises additional adventures for the Order. Serena is Black, and she and Dom have two dads. Emrys and Hazel read white.

Simi and Rupi Naik are estranged sisters, Indian immigrants to the U.S. who find love and salvation through a dramatic sacrifice. Simi has built an enviable life in rural Kentucky, with a nursing career that suits her (even if she has to work three jobs to sustain it) and the love of Prem Gupta, a good man who can’t wait to make her part of his prosperous and loving clan—all of which she’s terrified of losing because of her past. Bearing the brunt of the troubles that forced them to flee Mumbai, older sister Rupi has it much harder. She hasn’t put down roots and wields words like daggers to keep people at bay. The distance between the sisters narrows when Rupi’s boss at an LA tattoo parlor, the man who secured her travel visa before stealing her wages, dies, and his widow steals Rupi’s passport. Robbed of her meager belongings on a cross-country bus, a desperate Rupi shows up at Simi’s workplace in the throes of a raging bacterial infection, needing help from the sister she hasn’t seen in years. When she faints and later wakes in a hospital bed, she’s at risk of being deported to a country in which she may face serious charges. Rupi’s solution is to pressure Simi to get her would-be fiancé, Prem, to marry her instead and get her a green card. Since Rupi doesn’t believe in love or the sweetness of a guy like Prem, she’s demanding something she can’t believe will come to fruition—but Prem agrees. If that sounds heavy, it is. Rupi compares her plight to “a true-to-life Hindi soap opera in the middle of small-town southern Kentucky.” Alternating between Simi and Rupi’s narratives, Dev blunts the darker aspects, focusing on the aftermath rather than directly depicting traumatic events, allowing that heaviness to coexist alongside Bollywood melodrama and romance.

A reader from a young age, the author “dreamed of a literary life” and would become a poet, writer, and educator as an adult. Now living in a Spokane, Washington, homeowners association community in a home of her own with two children, an HOA president husband, and a tenure-track job, Zeller seems to have a charmed life—no one would ever guess she came from an impoverished background. Born in 1979 at a gas station owned by her parents on the Oregon coast, the author recounts her transient childhood, describing living in a van, squatting in mattress stores overnight, and gathering fish and berries by hand for meals. After saving funds from odd jobs and scholarships, Zeller attended college in the late 1990s, discovering that the childhood she saw as ordinary was a world away from those of the middle- and upper-class students around her. Despite these differences, the author found herself “passing” as middle class. (“I knew how to move between formal and informal language registers, so no one picked up on my past.”) The author also dissects the ways in which the American education system as a whole favors those from middle- and upper-class cohorts, pointing out that the SATs “privilege specific socioeconomic groups, races, and genders.” In poetic prose, Zeller describes a lifelong feeling of never quite fitting in—she discusses feeling like a traitor to her class for changing her social status while being made to feel as though her background made her inferior, particularly by her middle-class husband. Reflecting on the challenges she faced both in lower-class and middle-class contexts, Zeller compellingly interrogates the privileges she holds and lays bare how fickle those privileges can be.

Accompanied by her mother, a girl visits her late grandmother’s garden—a memorial space where they honor Abuela. The young protagonist recalls spending nearly every day with Abuela as a baby and toddler. Since then, she and her mother have visited the garden, leaving flowers at a headstone. Often, the child brings a balloon and twirls with joy as the breeze blows; sometimes, she gazes over the fence, hoping to see Abuela. But as she grows older, she begins to understand why she can’t return to her grandmother’s blue house and hug Abuela again. As the permanence of her grandmother’s absence sinks in, the girl reflects on the many ways her Abuela still feels present: in the butterflies that land on her fingers, in the playful wind that blows, and in the beauty of the flowers. Recio and Lawrence’s gently understated, lyrical text reminds readers that loved ones live on in the hearts of those they’ve touched, while McCarthy’s richly saturated illustrations capture both the joy of a child exploring nature and the quiet sorrow of a family learning to live with loss. The creators approach a difficult topic with tenderness and understanding, offering comfort and connection. The girl and her mother appear Afro-Latine, with curly black hair, braids, and warm brown skin.

Seek-and-find aficionados who loved, or who missed sailing on, Nohana’s Penguin Cruise (2025) will want to explore the five stories (as in floors) and 25 stories (as in tales), one per apartment, featured in this Japanese import. Endpapers introduce the 50-plus inhabitants: rabbit kits and adults, plus two cats, two mice, a flock of small yellow birds, and a smiling green dinosaur. A job or hobby identifies most residents: There are several musicians and three ballet dancers, two magicians and a wizard, a detective, bakers, a painter, a gardener, a bodybuilder, a scholar, and a bookworm, as well as an unnamed rabbit-ghost pianist! The slight storyline centers on one rabbit family with quintuplets as they move in. Readers are invited to follow the varied daily activities of the lagomorphs—and the hilariously incongruous sauropod—as they decorate, cook, play, care for pets and plants, practice their professions, and nap. On the last six pages the residents orchestrate a joyous rooftop housewarming party, welcoming the newcomers with music, dancing, and food. A couple of the round-limbed, stuffielike rabbits are solid gray or tan, but most are white, a few with brown extremities; some wear accessories, but no one is fully clothed. The minutely detailed interiors, rendered in a gentle palette, invite patient solo scrutiny and narrative invention.