At 5 years old, Jane watches her friends run and play while she sits at the window, her spine crooked from tuberculosis. Eventually, she learns that playing outside actually makes her body stronger. The power of play informs much of Jane’s adult life. Spurred by a visit to a settlement hall in London that provides housing and services for immigrants, she opens a similar facility in Chicago, Hull House. She helps develop safe programming for kids and coordinates the construction of one of the first model playgrounds in America, inspired by outdoor gymnasiums she’d seen in Europe. She goes on to design accessible playground equipment for kids with disabilities, is elected to the Playground Association of America, and even helps pass federal child labor laws. Jane is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. The cheerful, colorful cartoon illustrations will attract younger readers but do little to portray the story’s somber moments, with barely any distinction among characters’ facial features and expressions. Readers will be interested to know about the activism behind the first public playgrounds, though this account is bogged down by clunky writing and too many details.

Rao’s second novel—following Girls Burn Brighter (2018)—concerns Sagar and Janavi, a young couple from Varanasi, a town on the banks of the Ganges River. Thrust into an arranged marriage, the two are ambitious yet uncertain of each other—Sagar is a hydraulic engineer, Janavi a worker supporting children in crisis. So, when Sagar lands a civil-service job in Montana, where he’s charged to coordinate the removal of a dam on the Cotton River, trading in a bustling Indian city for Big Sky Country is both a geographic and cultural change. Both experience racist microagressions from the locals, but both also find common ground with them: Janavi in learning about the often troubled women in the area, and Sagar discovering the Native American lore surrounding the river and its echoes of Indian lore. One of the people sharing that world with him is Renny, one of the workers on the dam-removal crew, and in due time Sagar is embroiled in a murder mystery involving tribal history, scapegoating, and an orphaned child. Rao’s novel is somewhat oddly bifurcated—what starts as a lit-fic immigrant tale soon acquires the plot and pacing of a crime yarn—but on both fronts it admirably undoes the conventions of the assimilation novel, focusing less on how Sagar and Janavi fit into their new country than on ways they find human connection outside of the notions of being an American. Interstitial chapters feature fablelike tales of loss and death along rivers in India and Montana across history, suggesting that there are commonalities as deep and long-running as a river, but also buried like sediment and difficult to surface.

We raise girls to be good listeners in a world of men. As a music journalist, Vincent had made a career out of listening. She listened in clubs, at concerts, and to mostly male artists in her interviews. Music was omnipresent, essential to her life as a teen and young adult. Now in her 30s, she found herself surrounded by silence. “If I tried to unpick how I’d grown from a girl who thrived among the dissonance of a punk record into a woman who preferred to be in silence, I got caught in tangles,” she writes. Then, into that silence came her baby’s heartbeat from a monitor. Later, she heard his cry. In this moving and brilliant book, Vincent examines not just sound but what it means to listen. She explores the quiet sounds of domesticity, motherhood, and the quotidian—often overlooked, feminine sounds. She reflects on what she hears at Beyonce’s Renaissance tour, in the near-mythic sound of the aurora borealis—which has been described as sheets of paper rubbing together—from national security translators, and in the practice of Deep Listening. “I want to make the quiet loud,” she declares, and that is exactly what she does. Her quiet is populated by many brilliant women, including researchers and scientists of sound, while her own journey of motherhood makes vivid the ways in which a mother’s biology is rewired to respond to their child’s sound. Speaking with a deaf artist, Vincent challenges her preconceptions that “being without sound was to suffer,” instead learning “a different way of listening,” one rich in community and creativity. Though the book takes place in many quiet spaces, the reverberations are loud, and the author’s descriptions evocative. From excellent research on those elements of noise that are often overlooked yet build the fabric of our daily lives, Vincent weaves a tapestry of sound and understanding.

In 2014, Anna Werner experiences a “horrible, life-altering, forever disaster” when she suffers a rare spinal stroke that renders her tetraplegic. She tenaciously labors to reclaim control over her body, but the progress is painfully slow. Making matters worse, her girlfriend, Julia, leaves her, and her doctor seems less than optimistic regarding her recovery. Distraught, Anna contemplates a release from the prison of her inert body through suicide. At the hospital, she meets Batul al-Jaberi, a Syrian immigrant working as a janitor who aspires to become a doctor. Batul is tenderly attentive to Anna’s needs, and the pair become close friends, their relationship flirting with the possibility of blossoming into more. In the moving, sensitive narrative, Batul requites Anna’s attraction but is profoundly uncomfortable with her own feelings, which are prohibited by the religious culture within which she grew up. “She was drawn to Anna. It was wrong. And it was safe. Because Anna would never be drawn to her, not in the same way, not with the same obsessive thoughts.” This is both a queer love story and a searching meditation on what happens when human longing is thwarted by an intractable reality. Silberstein’s writing is spare and economical; its simplicity is the source of its considerable power. There is no maudlin drama here, no breathless overstatement—with impressive restraint, the author plumbs the depths of these two fascinatingly complex protagonists and the deals they must strike with themselves in order to make their lives livable: “She loved her because she loved her. If she could heal her by trading places, she would not hesitate. If she needed her, she would do anything.”

The authors argue that modern corporations are deeply out of touch with their customers, and they call this “The Great Distancing”; in their view, big companies have philosophically and operationally drifted away from creating a valuable customer experience (or CX), preferring to focus on shareholders and optimize internal processes. This puts firms at risk of becoming irrelevant, they assert, by missing opportunities and alienating customers. Mainstream management theories and business models focus too much on efficiency and siloed operations, they note, and not enough on delivering long-term, meaningful CX. The book proposes five areas (insights, strategy, blueprints, operating models, and culture) into which one must incorporate CX to counter this phenomenon. According to the authors, CX shouldn’t be a department or set of marketing tactics, but rather the substance of the entire business: Every product, interaction, and relationship, they say, needs to be part of it. The book provides assessment tools and practical frameworks to help leaders make this a reality. Overall, the authors present CX as a companywide capability that can drive growth, employee engagement, and operational efficiency. Stylistically, the book is clear, well-organized, and propelled by clear enthusiasm. The writing is concise and pragmatic, with bullet points galore, which will make it accessible to practitioners and executives alike. Issues such as corporate inertia, systems thinking, and empathy are explored at length, and convincing statistics and real-world anecdotes round out the arguments. At times, the “CX Champion” rhetoric romanticizes business challenges, and readers looking for empirical rigor or industry-specific playbooks may feel the advice to be somewhat conceptual. The book also often feels like a pitch for the authors’ consulting services. Still, it’s a convincing call for business leaders to work differently.