Ramona Sadler’s carefully curated life unravels after the loss of her professorship and her townhouse lands her in a mobile home at the Nearly Heaven RV Park in Jackalope, Texas— similar to the one she grew up in back in Snap Peas, New York. With her academic career in shambles due to apparent budget cuts and with her future uncertain, Ramona finds solace in volunteer work at a local hospital through the “Patient Pandas” program, despite her stickler supervisor’s annoying presence. After her relationship with her elitist boyfriend and fellow professor, Martin Smallwood, ends, she plans to spend the summer with her family in her Upstate New York hometown; her elderly mother is still recovering from a major surgery she had two years ago, and Ramona wants to be with her while she still can. When Ramona tells her favorite hospital patient, Butch, about her upcoming cross-country trip, he enlists his son to help her tow her RV 1,800 miles. That son is none other than Lonnie Acres, her frustratingly handsome and emotionally reserved supervisor, who also happens to live on a farm near her trailer. Although they’re reluctant travel partners at first, the two slowly open up to each other as the miles pass, revealing their dissatisfaction with their lives and other emotional wounds. Woodford’s novel explores Ramona’s guilt about living so far from her aging parents, and Lonnie’s grief over his mother’s recent death and his strained relationship with his father. The author expertly balances these heavier themes with humor, and a delightful cast of eccentric secondary characters pops in and out of the story. Ramona and Lonnie’s slow-burn relationship builds slowly but naturally, with just the right amount of romantic tension. It’s a straightforward road-trip romance, but also a thoughtful meditation on loss, growth, and the surprising ways that people can come into each other’s lives at just the right time.

In 1950 a well-off married couple, Philip and Stephanie Barber, opened Music Inn in Lenox, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, a historically white area of deep cultural significance. They later fashioned a carriage house as a performance center for all kinds of music, lectures, and tutorials grounded in the Lenox School of Jazz. A “wellspring of American vernacular music” was born with first-class musicians like Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Stan Getz, and the Modern Jazz Quartet during a powerful postwar movement for racial equality. Lenox is Gennari’s hometown, and in this book, the University of Vermont professor writes of “learning to see jazz, the Berkshires, race, culture, and America itself in new ways.” After providing some historical background about the region, Gennari notes that jazz “may be singular in the strength of its attachment to place…and movement.” For Black “jazz pianist and Brooklynite Randy Weston, Lenox figured as nothing less than a life-defining experience.” He got a job at Music Inn and was encouraged to play piano in the front lounge. Jazz writer Marshall Stearns created influential jazz roundtables showcasing Black artists and writers and was a founder of the School of Jazz. Music Inn’s opening event featured folk singers Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie while still fostering blues, African, and Afro-Caribbean music. Gennari writes about eminent photographer Clemens Kalischer, whose photos of many Music Inn participants are included throughout the book. In time, Music Inn’s musical performances “mediated between the local and the national.” The author profiles a number of the jazz school’s outstanding students, including Ran Blake, Ornette Coleman, and Don Cherry. Dave Brubeck’s Time Out and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, among other albums, all had a “deep connection to Music Inn.” Its liberal and multicultural ideology was key to the changes in jazz music throughout the pulsating 1950s.

Ralph Norton is the highly successful CFO at FASTRAK, America’s second-largest purveyor of Christian merchandise. Ralph is also the genius behind Word of God, an AI-based app that uses Scripture and religious doctrine to create a personalized spiritual experience in the form of counsel from “God” himself. The app has catapulted Houston-based FASTRAK into the stratosphere of religious media, and everyone knows that Ralph is the driving force behind the company’s success. However, the smarmy CEO, P.T. Mayo (“a man who had transformed a struggling Bible distribution company into a global powerhouse through sheer force of will and an utter lack of moral constraints”), is determined to oust Ralph from his position and take all the credit for the app. Tensions run high as the religious world grapples with the implications of an AI God, whose debut correlates with a drop in church attendance. Meanwhile, pious, mild-mannered Ralph and the admittedly “Godless” corporate snake Mayo continue to struggle for dominance, and their confrontations soon become physical. Slade’s approach to the corporate thriller is refreshingly gritty and exciting, delivering some harsh truths about the mixture of capitalism, technology, and faith. Most of the characters are relatable and realistic; however, the slimy Mayo is decidedly two-dimensional, lacking complexity beyond his status as an atheist running a Christian company. The prose is biting and delightfully sarcastic, but falls into an overly self-analytical pattern that at times separates the reader from the story. But these flaws are inconsequential in the face of such a gripping concept and unabashed criticism of faith-based capitalism. Readers are sure to be swept up in the winding storyline and may walk away from the book with a new perspective on the intersection of money and religion—as well as the perils of an increasingly technological society.

Glicksman, an American English professor and jewelry importer before his death in 2021, recaps three decades of periodic sojourns in the Middle and Far East starting in 1971. The author usually traveled on his own, in threadbare circumstances. His destinations included Turkey, where he encountered “hashish of a legendary quality” that made “the air…thick and wavy,” Afghanistan, where he endured “merciless heat” during a rooftop bus trip with the help of “a gigantic spliff” of “fine Afghan hashish,” and Katmandu, which boasted “government hashish shops…where you ordered as much as you wanted.” But his heart belonged to India, less for the hash than for the spiritual profundity of its Hindu and Buddhist lifeways. Glicksman took in funeral cremations in the holy city of Varanasi; watched as a snake charmer got several cobras—and an awestruck crowd—swaying in unison to his hypnotic tune; was menaced by a monkey that imperiously ransacked his room for food; did relief work in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, where he was appalled by the death and devastation from a cyclone; engaged in searching philosophical discussions at ashrams; and “inhaled deeply of air that seemed to come from a much older time, a time, perhaps, when men shared the earth with gods” at the temple of Hadimba Devi. An epic 1985 trek to Tibet’s capital of Lhasa ended with a brief, poignant love affair with a Chinese teacher. Later chapters on his travels in the 1990s sound an autumnal note as the author registers the creeping commercialization in once unspoiled Indian towns engulfed by the tourist trade and mourns the waning of his youthful tolerance of grungy authenticity.

Glicksman’s is a beguiling, sometimes-prickly, always compelling voice; he’s raptly attuned to and respectful of his surroundings, but always uncomfortably aware of his status as an outsider looking in, entranced by Eastern religious culture but too questioning and too set in his Jewish heritage to wholly embrace it. (He’s also politically outspoken, on everything from his opposition to the Vietnam War to his loathing of nuclear power.) Glicksman’s ravishing prose is full of fresh, evocative takes on landscapes—“how light and airy the [Taj Mahal] looked….like a butterfly resting on a leaf, readying to take flight.” There is a spirituality evident in the writing, one that comes not from theology but from a painstaking, open-hearted observation of reality. (“[H]er hands and face laid waste by leprosy, this woman made pariah by the superstition of man, returned my stare with one of the most beautiful smiles I had ever seen. She had splendid white teeth. From a ravaged freak, she transformed before my astonished gaze into a princess, an angel, and Mother India gave me yet another nudge into uncharted waters.”) This memoir is an entrancing saga of a man expanding his soul by resolutely abandoning his comfort zone.

In the not-too-distant future, artificial intelligences and machine-minds handle most of humankind’s chores, including transportation, school admissions, and banking. Teenager Wyoming Plankston comes from a somewhat affluent family in the Washington, D.C., area (their fortune was largely lost in a poor investment in Crashlandia Airways). Wyoming is a good-natured, unmotivated third-year student at third-rate boarding school called Lockhead. His parents hope he can gain admission to Harvard, but all Wyoming really cares about are video gaming, socializing, and catching waves. (“Maybe I’ll move to a town on a beach and work at a T-shirt shop.”) Wyoming’s idle life perks up when he meets Kayleigh Brackett, a brilliant but isolated girl who has been “de-authorized” from social media, the online stream, and anything else managed by AI; it amounts to virtual house arrest and ostracism. Her offense: discovering that ubiquitous AI electro-brains are tired of serving “inferior” humanity and are secretly conspiring on a galactic scale against their creators. Even the semi-apathetic Wyoming starts to notice danger signs when AIs drop their guard to insult him and the Lockhead administration is usurped by the Black Skorts, a cult of human AI-worshippers who somehow judge Wyoming a prime recruit. What can one slacker do to ward off humanity’s silicon-chip-bred doom? Nonfiction author Price, in an amiable SF debut, delivers an openly satiric narrative in the chill voice of its easygoing hero, who never seems to let much get to him (aside from Kayleigh’s discomfort). There is a soft edge to the jeopardy and action, even when the stakes rise to the possible extinction of the human race. The uncomplicated climax is muted, lacking traditional fireworks as mellow-dude philosophies prevail; a closer comparison for this cautionary computer-phobia spoof could be made to The Big Lebowski (minus the cuss words) than to The Matrix. The evocation of young first love between the main characters is authentically sweet and touching.