An unnamed protagonist dons a special khaki vest and borrows Grandma’s camera before heading out of a house to look for butterflies. They’re pursued by a much younger child, and the second-person narration recommends that “if trouble follows you, embrace it.” (Both characters are portrayed with pale skin.) As the older child continues to look for butterflies, the toddler pretends to be a mermaid, a pirate, and a shark. Each time, the protagonist keeps the younger one entertained: offering the shark Goldfish crackers, for example, and telling the pirate where to find secret treasure. The pair hide out in lilac bushes but only find snails and caterpillars, until finally “one butterfly, two butterflies, more butterflies flutter up, up, up into the sea-blue sky” as they look on. Mackey’s text is engaging yet sparse, offering tantalizingly few details about the kids, which effectively invites the reader to ask questions about their backstory: What are their names? Are they siblings? Where are the grown-ups? Couët’s watercolor-style illustrations drive the story, offering beautiful, sweeping landscapes of butterflies flying over a body of water and endearing close-ups of the children examining insects.

The author compares resilient people to willow or palm trees, simultaneously rooted and flexible, and grief as unexpressed love for something or someone lost. The book goes on to put grief into three categories: physical only (loss of objects), emotional only (loss of opportunities), and physical and emotional (death, divorce). The author reassures readers that “it’s okay to live with grief and to keep living.” Compassion, she says, bridges the gap between oneself and others, and it’s comprised of four components: perspective-taking, sympathy, empathy, and care. Energy is divided into two categories—kinetic (active) and potential (dormant); it affects one’s ability to put the best self forward and engage with the world, the author asserts. She encourages journaling, actively giving thanks, and practicing reflection to make feelings of gratitude more reflexive. The book also presents karma as a “Universal Law” of cause and effect; its patterns can be healed through prayer, mantras, and blessings, Faulkner says. The work concludes by contrasting “life by design” with “life by default” and encourages readers to live actively and deliberately. Overall, this is a thoughtful book that effectively invites readers to work toward greater self-awareness. The consistent chapter structure, with each involving “Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How” sections, makes the material easy to follow. The language can be convoluted at times (“A person who desires to be resilient, and isn’t willing to do the work, will end up in a constant cycle of chasing resilience, which ultimately undermines any resilience they may have already had, making it the one way resilience can actually fade or fail”); at other moments, it’s oddly stilted (“Grief is most commonly expressed through tears”). That said, Faulkner does offer some empowering lines along the way, such as “Who you choose to become is up to you,” and readers navigating loss will find concepts like “The Grief-Life Ratio” relatable and reassuring.

Partners Josie and Derek are no strangers to the many manifestations of grief: Derek suffered a childhood weighed down by the death of the older brother he never got to meet, while Josie inherited from her grandmother the gift of spirit communication. Both are now struggling to keep their New Orleans-inspired restaurant, Miss Sylvie’s, afloat in the competitive Manhattan scene. Derek struggles with Josie’s insistence that a table in their restaurant be set aside for spirits he doesn’t even believe in; Josie bumps against Derek’s pessimism for their prospects of keeping Miss Sylvie’s afloat. At the encouragement of a therapist, they decide to hire a manager, and soon land on Stephanie. Derek is wary about her competence and character (“I’m not sure. Something felt off”), but Stephanie is enthusiastic and promises to bring the business to life with weekly happy hours and live music. This enthusiasm is misplaced, and Stephanie soon proves to be as much of a threat as rising rent prices. In the midst of all this, Josie meets with her absent father and is forced to accept that he will always prioritize Josie’s stepmother over her. When spirits convey the message that Derek’s mother is dying, the pair must reckon with their histories. Buchwald’s story is one of making peace with the past, embracing the complexities of grief, and fighting to move forward. It is refreshing to find a narrative featuring ghosts that doesn’t give into the tropes of horror, and that works to fully characterize each and every spirit who appears. There are points where the tone of the writing fails to match the more intense stakes of the story, and more could be done to make the protagonists active agents—the novel’s strengths are its most sentimental moments and the characters readers will come to root for.

After Lizzie Wells loses her husband, the professor of British literature finds the structure she needs to begin living the rest of her life in Victorian mourning customs. She goes on a “widow shopping spree for black clothes.” She puts a lock of her husband’s hair in a locket and wears a pendant marked with his fingerprint. She carries a tiny urn filled with his ashes in her handbag. She buys black-edged stationery and lets her students and colleagues know that she will not be answering email and only communicating via paper for “an undetermined time period.” Watching an independent, 21st-century woman with a thriving career try to follow rules created for women whose entire identities were bound to their husbands could have made for a great novel, but this is about as far as Lizzie gets in adopting Victorian mourning customs. She acknowledges as much when she says that “proper grief stationery, black clothes, [and] keepsake jewelry” are gestures toward the full package. Much like her heroine, Reeves seems to think that gestures toward the premise she created are sufficient to fulfill its promise. Lizzie does occasionally remember to ask herself, “What would a Victorian widow do?” But most of what she does throughout the entire novel is not what a Victorian widow would do. A Victorian widow would not go to work, for example. A Victorian widow would not almost kiss her husband’s best friend in large part because a Victorian widow would not be sitting on a sofa next to her husband’s best friend, unchaperoned, in the first place. And if black leggings qualify as widow’s weeds, then every woman who has ever taken a barre class is in deep mourning. The conceit becomes tiresome quickly, but it does serve as a distraction from what is otherwise a lackluster and slightly preposterous love story. These complaints may seem pedantic, but what could have been a fun crossover novel for fans of contemporary romance and historical romance is unlikely to satisfy either.

Jean Detrez, the narrator of Belgian author Toussaint’s novel (in Polizzotti’s translation from French), has a lot on his mind. When the novel begins, it’s 2016—specifically, the time around the Brexit vote on June 23. Jean’s marriage to a woman named Diane is also coming to an end. A few months later, flipping through his phone, Jean comes across a racy photograph of a woman, prompting him to think about the futurology retreat where it was taken. It’s through his reactions to fellow participants at that event that we learn more about Jean, who works for the European Commission; he’s alienated less by the snobbery than by “the casual familiarity” with which one attendee discussed prominent politicians. At the retreat, he meets an Estonian woman named Enid, with whom he has a brief emotional affair. Jean then muses on the aftermath of his father’s death later that same year, which leads to him considering his ties to his brother and wondering if his father’s death corresponds to the end of an era—giving way to a time “in which excess, slander, and mendacity had taken over the public forum, in which respect for the facts no longer had the inviolate character it had always enjoyed in the past.” There’s also the matter of his strained relationship with Diane and his warmer relationship with his first wife, Elisabetta, whose existence doesn’t come up until two-thirds of the way into the book. Jean is thoughtful in places, with a couple of moving invocations of Stefan Zweig’s life, but it gradually becomes clear that his professional success doesn’t necessarily translate into an ideal personal or marital life. Toussaint has written a subtle but bracing exploration of his protagonist’s perceptions and failings.