Tamika, who’s nearly 16, is a creative student who struggles with her grades in every subject except art, thanks to learning differences that are cued as dyslexia. She’s surprised at her widowed mom’s sudden announcement that a previously unmentioned great-aunt needs help, and they’re going to stay with her. During the journey from Chicago to Virginia, Tamika learns that Aunt Lati is in a coma—and she’s even more surprised to arrive and discover that her house looks “like an art museum,” with walls covered in beautiful paintings. This delighted feeling takes on an edge of terror, though, when she spots indistinct figures in the landscapes, figures that her mom can’t see—and that seem to move. One of them has “no real face” but seems familiar—is she Aunt Lati? Fans of ghost stories will be pleased by the supernatural storyline’s unusual twists and mildly scary climax, but it’s the ways in which the cast’s strong-minded women characters play off against each other that will draw a broader audience into a deeper level of engagement. Field expertly uses the short chapters and accessible language of a novel aimed at reluctant teen readers to frame a tale that’s rich in both eerie elements and emotional nuance. Main characters read Black.

Maria was the firstborn child of LaBate and his wife, Barbara, in 1985; they had a second child, Katrina, 2 1/2 years later. When she was 4, Maria “wavered quite a bit on the edge between being tentative and fearful,” but soon became confident. When the family went to see Billy Graham speak, she expressed an unprompted desire to “give her life to God”: “Did Maria fully understand what she was doing at that early age?” asks Labate. “Most likely, she did not. However, in some small way, God had obviously touched Maria’s heart, and she responded in kind.” Maria excelled in public school and homeschool settings, the author writes. After college, she became a teacher and later took an administrative hospital job during graduate school. Shortly before her 30th birthday, Maria’s health took a sudden turn, beginning with an excruciating headache; on Christmas Day, she was rushed to the emergency room. After more than two weeks, doctors determined that she had undetected breast cancer that had spread to her brain. She was transferred to a hospice facility, where she died surrounded by her family less than a month after first entering the hospital. LaBate incorporates journal entries, school essays, eulogies, and social media posts to flesh out his account of Maria, and effectively gives readers a clear sense of her personality. The book’s early sections are very matter-of-fact in tone, often at the expense of description, and they frequently focus on logistical aspects of family life. However, in the book’s later sections, LaBate affectingly grapples with difficult topics, as when he tells of praying for a miracle that would heal Maria, while also trying to accept the fact that “God might not give us a miracle.” Throughout, he writes about his daughter with heart-wrenching vulnerability, particularly in a poem he wrote in Maria’s infancy: “I’d give up all possessions, / All money, luck, and charms / To experience this moment / With you sleeping in my arms.”

A monster with a scruffy orange body, purple ears and tail, and short rounded horns disappears after a tough reading lesson. “It’s kind of my fault,” reflects the story’s narrator, a tan-skinned child with curly brown hair. “I got carried away. I was acting like a teacher the other day.” It’s an insightful remark, but after a promising start, the book goes downhill as the youngster proceeds on a truly didactic search for the monster. “Word families look and sound the same at the end. Let’s use this knowledge to find my best friend.” Charts of word families appear with relentless frequency, competing with both the rhyming text and words that appear in the accompanying cartoon illustrations (for instance, a welcome mat or a button with the phrase “Reading for the win!”). Kids learning to sound out words will enjoy predicting the text; after the protagonist observes, “As I sit sipping from my favorite MUG, / I’m gently pulled into a giant…,” youngsters will eagerly shout out “HUG!” But on the whole, the attempt to blend a literacy tutorial with an exploration of how to be a good friend may prove overwhelming for the intended audience of pre-readers.

As two children—one brown-skinned, one pale-skinned—build a sand castle by the shore, Fox peppers readers with questions (“What’s inside our planet?” “Why do volcanoes form and continents shift?”), then invites them to look for answers: “Let’s explore.” Her calm, lyrical text is both poetic and practical. The crust is “where worms wriggle and writhe,” but miles down, the temperature is “twice as hot as an oven baking cookies.” Though the unseen narrator references both Mt. Everest and Russia’s Kola Borehole, most scenes are set so far below the surface that they could be anywhere on the globe. The author injects the text with small doses of geology such as brief explanations of temperature and pressure, plate tectonics, what scientists can learn from earthquakes, and the astonishing life-giving function of the inner core. Fox’s praise of “the great thing about science” shades into a bigger observation: “We learn and we guess and we try and we fail and we try again. We hope to be right more often than we’re wrong. It’s a lot like being human.” Brown’s illustrations use bold, imaginative compositions, with cutaways, fluid lines, and vibrant, varied color to add drama as she switches from scenes of people exploring the world aboveground and the hidden world deep below.

Lukidis’ methodical descriptions of bat anatomy, behavior, select species, diets, and habitats adequately fill in the informational background, but the high-quality stock photos will likely prove the stronger draw here—even with the distinctly underwhelming close-up of a vampire bat lapping away at a nicked but antiseptically clean chicken toe. Featuring shots of the animals resting in natural settings and head-on views of them in flight, the pictures allow close examinations of creepy faces beneath huge ears and add plenty of visual impact to the overall message that these creatures merit study as both significant checks on insect populations and as indicator species that provide early signs of environmental changes. The author tucks in instructions for a homemade demonstration of echolocation, provides worrisome observations about habitat loss and the devastating effects of the fungal disease called white-nose syndrome, and concludes with ways of making a more bat-friendly backyard and a list of online and print resources.