Loux’s tale opens in the Pennsylvania settlement of Penn’s Woods decades after the mysterious disappearance of Jean-Pierre Laux, the eponymous seigneur. A letter arrives at the chateau of Magdalena Laux, wife of a Pennsylvania legislator, warning that a man claiming to be the long-lost father of Magdalena’s own father, Pierre, is on a ship bound for Philadelphia. The life of 20-something Magdalena, a self-proclaimed Cathar, will soon be inexorably changed. Here, the novel jumps back in time to the beginning of the ordeals of Jean-Pierre Laux. He, a Protestant feudal overlord of ancestral land dating back many generations, is walking with his son Pierre, preparing for a two-week trip for an audience with the Catholic King Louis XIV. Jean-Pierre’s beloved wife, Eleanor, is a secret practitioner of the Cathar faith. Although official Catholic persecution of the Cathars has ended centuries earlier, Eleanor worries that the king’s new policy of stationing troops in the home of Protestants will reveal her secret. Her fears are warranted. As Jean-Pierre heads out on his journey, he faces considerable danger. Will he fall prey to a maniacal priest who obsessively hunts out Cathars? Loux prefaces his elegant novel with a useful historical primer for readers not familiar with the history of the Cathars, practitioners of an ascetic and gnostic form of early Christianity. The beautiful, at times lyrical, prose ambles slowly but captivatingly, alternating between Jean-Pierre’s experiences and the lives of his descendants in Pennsylvania. It’s a tale of violence, tragic losses, regret, personal growth, and reconciliation, with vivid portrayals of a curious cast, especially of one compelling secondary character, a waif who takes on increasing importance. With a touch of mysticism plus a couple of deranged villains, the novel is an intriguing mix of personal saga and disturbing religious history.

After someone tells Green Hippo that his kind doesn’t exist, he goes to Frog for help. “NONSENSE!” says Frog, but Green Hippo dismisses his pal’s reassurance. “Well, that’s easy for you to say,” replies Green Hippo. “Frogs are supposed to be green, just like you.” He’s similarly dismissive when Elephant and Giraffe attempt to soothe him. How can they understand? Heading off on his own, Green Hippo finds beauty in the various creatures all around him; newly affirmed, he rejoins his friends, who have a surprise for him. Though Green Hippo resolves his conflict implausibly swiftly, the story’s sweet and encouraging message of self-acceptance ultimately comes through clearly thanks to Horáček’s illustrations. His depictions of vibrant, detailed birds, butterflies, and fish flood the senses after several pages of simple, broad shapes as Green Hippo literally and metaphorically opens his eyes beyond his own sadness and realizes that differences make the world a better place. And while Green Hippo’s friends may not fully understand his plight, their unwavering acceptance makes for an inspiring meditation on the ways in which friends can support one another.

Cat Stevens is known for several things, among them anthems such as “Wild World,” “Morning Has Broken,” and “Peace Train.” Those songs, he writes, came to him after a shattered first career as a pop singer, which left him “all burned out at the age of nineteen, after only sixteen months: show business had done its worst and had made me well and truly sick to death.” Ill with tuberculosis, he read up on Asian religions, following in the path of George Harrison, a strong early influence, then retreated to his parents’ home and began to pour out the songs that would make him internationally famous. As Stevens recounts, that fame never quite sat well with him, and his spiritual wanderings brought him to Islam in the late 1970s, when he changed his name to Yusuf Islam and took a long hiatus away from music, including selling all his instruments in the belief that music was “un-Islamic and downright sinful.” It was in this third phase that Stevens became known for something else: his apparent support for the clerical fatwa that condemned Salman Rushdie to death for his book The Satanic Verses. Stevens protests that he was misunderstood: “Even if the generally accepted view of capital punishment for the crime of insulting the Prophet was absolutely valid, vigilantism was inimical and outlawed by the teachings of Islam.” The “absolutely valid” bit is a little troubling, but suffice it to say that the singer eventually decided that music wasn’t so evil after all, now in the belief that “one main aim of music, as I see it, is to make the world a happier, more harmonious place for us to live in together.”

Early on, Lyons, a professional entrepreneurial coach and the founder of Lyons Consulting Group, writes about studying at the University of Michigan and earning an MBA at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. At the time, he was concentrating on a numbers-driven approach to business that had made his family’s Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship the largest in Michigan. Lyons gave no thought to entering the field of sales and also had no initial interest in what he calls the “touchy-feely” aspect of interpersonal business relationships. His opinion would change at the Wright Foundation, where Lyons met his collaborator on this book, executive coach Bob Wright. In the early 1990s, Lyons took Wright’s “Men’s Basic Training” workshop, which focused on a new, more sensitive “model of manhood,” which was emerging alongside the older, more traditional “tough and stoic” one. Lyons began to use the Wright Developmental Model as a “map for self-awareness.” This, he says, changed the way that he looked at both his personal and his professional lives, guiding him through the ups and downs of his expanding consulting business before it was eventually acquired by Capgemini, a French multinational consultancy. Readers curious to learn more about the deeper lessons that Lyons learned from his experiences may be frustrated at times by the amount of space his book devotes to the specific workings of Lyons Consulting and its sale to another company. However, his insights about sales professionalism, when they appear, are effectively passionate, as when he reminds readers that “sales is about service,” even if it means sending clients elsewhere: “Figure out a way to solve your customers’ needs, even if it is not something you can provide,” he writes. “Use your network.” His personal story in the earlier sections of the book gives extra heft to his later advice.

Maggie O’Malley needs a quick influx of cash, or her family home will be auctioned off to pay the loans and taxes that her deadbeat ex-husband refused to pay. When her best friend, Wendy Hayes, learns of a “Magic, Moonlight, and Mayhem” contest in Ireland with a cash prize of $500,000, she convinces Maggie to join in. Maggie and Wendy stay on the Ravenwood Estate in Ireland and meet the handsome, eligible Ravenwood twins, Caedmon and Kellen. Maggie doesn’t believe in all the woo-woo spiritual stuff involved in the competition, but she’s willing to fake it for a chance to start her life over. Wendy gets sick immediately after they get to their rooms, leaving Maggie to face the challenges alone. It transpires that Kellen has been cursed for six centuries, and this is his last chance at freedom before succumbing entirely (“Seven days to either true freedom or eternal imprisonment”). Caedmon believes the solution is a human sacrifice, something Kellen refuses, especially when he learns that the one human who could break his curse is not just the original spellcaster’s descendant—one Maggie O’Malley—but his fated true love. Burright’s romantic fantasy packs a lot of action into one novel. The contest, Maggie’s ostensible reason for being in Ireland, fades into the background as the story progresses, and the rituals performed as part of the competition feel underdeveloped and almost childish. It’s clear the author concentrated more on developing the characters and the love story, and it was time well spent: Kellen is open and honest with Maggie, expresses his love and devotion to his brother, and refuses to compromise his values, making him stand out in a world of literary alpha males.