Thirteen-year-old Lucy Barber is determined to fill Mama’s role. Only by learning to do her chores does Lucy feel that Mama is close. First, Aunt Faye visits and interferes with the household; then Papa hires Mrs. Jenkins, who introduces new routines, sparking Lucy’s resentment. Worse, 5-year-old Teddy is forgetting Mama and latching on to Mrs. Jenkins instead. Papa and Tom, Lucy’s older brother, don’t notice the changes—Papa is immersed in work, and Tom seems to be hiding something suspicious and is hanging out with a friend Lucy doesn’t care for. Further disrupting the family equilibrium, Papa blames Uncle Ed for the fire that caused Mama’s death. Lucy is determined to drive Mrs. Jenkins away, keep Tom out of trouble, and bring her family together, but when she goes too far, the consequences aren’t what she desired. Details about farm life, domestic routines, and Prohibition firmly establish the rural historical setting, while Lucy’s emotional struggles will resonate with a contemporary audience. Lucy is equal parts fragile and fierce as she tries to deal with her grief, and her misguided attempts to keep life from changing are both understandable and heartbreaking. Ultimately, the knowledge that she isn’t alone in her experience helps Lucy move forward. The cast presents white.

Eleanora Fischer is in love with a man she’s never met…technically. For the past seven years, Nora, a New York therapist, has been writing an advice column for a London-based newspaper, and every Tuesday she gets edits for Ask Eleanora via a Google Doc from her copy editor, known only as “J.W.” Though they’ve never chatted outside of a word-processing document, Nora feels a deep connection with J and cherishes their witty, often personal banter, though she’s afraid that revealing her feelings would ruin the relationship. When her boss at the Sunday Tribune invites her to London at the end of the summer, Nora will finally have a chance to meet J in person. With a planned meetup on the horizon, all Nora has to do is survive the next few months dealing with her cranky new neighbor, a surly Brit named Eli Whitman. He’s just moved in upstairs and is already wreaking havoc, hammering away and submitting plans to build a rooftop party zone in Nora’s quiet Greenwich Village co-op. And the cherry on top? Eli is a former—disgruntled—client of Nora’s from a couple’s therapy session that ended up with him getting dumped mid-appointment. He seems hellbent on destroying her peace and quiet, though Nora is up for the challenge. And she can’t help but notice that this prickly Englishman is quite handsome, though, personality-wise, he’s everything J isn’t. Is her connection with J all in her head, and, either way, how could she now be falling for his complete opposite? Rosen’s enemies-to-lovers romance is a delightfully modern take on You’ve Got Mail, mixed with the kind of will-they, won’t-they sort-of love triangle that’s the bread and butter of all rom-coms. Eli is a dashing crankster with a backstory, Nora is a therapist with vulnerabilities, and J is the mysterious perfect man who always knows what to say—and readers will be eating it up happily.

Led by the fearless yet weary Sturmund, known as the Captain, a brutal band of warriors spends their days fighting in exchange for coin: Patch, a smart aleck; Culp, a master of the long blade; Hull, an aging but dangerous fighter; Ghost, who “knew the ways of the shadows” and “could speak to the forest”; Marney, a map reader and “scholar”; and Bitch, the group’s lone woman and arguably the group’s fiercest fighter, who gave herself her name. Years into the never-ending parade of violence that keeps them crisscrossing the land, the group stops for some much-needed rest on an isolated hillside. When Hull and Ghost are sent out hunting, they encounter a mysterious beast that unleashes unspeakable violence: “The earth quaked. The beast came crashing through trees, its head bending into moss-covered trunks, a shattering spray of splinters filling the air as it burst through the wood.” And now that the creature has caught the group’s scent, it will stop at nothing until they’re all dead. The warriors are determined to hunt it down, but the nature of predator and prey becomes confused in the dark forest. When Marney’s maps take them as far as they can go, they decide to embark on uncharted paths to “knock on that monster’s door.” Readers learn how each member of the company came to join Sturmund. Shocking twists and turns prove that no one is safe, complete with an ending that will force readers to reconsider all that came before.

Laughton crafts a world reminiscent of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones in its brutality. Instead of fighting others to gain and keep political power, however, his characters fight others as an extension of the battles they face within. However, one can only avoid personal pain for so long, as the novel’s shocking (and cinematic) finale demonstrates. Although the book’s events are unapologetically violent, Laughton balances the bloodshed with a poetic narrative voice that marries beauty and pain with a haunting vividness: “What Sturmund saw in that lightless void, none would ever ask…It would seem to Marney…that some of the shadows had come away with him, pulled from the forest depths like corrupted cotton, clinging to his eyes and lashes, in his sight and on his mind from that moment on.” The main question, of course, is what the beast in the story really is. Readers are told that “for all its countless years, the beast was but a child compared to the ancient things with which it shared the world.” But as is often the case in stories such as this, the monster is so much more than it seems, taking on mythic proportions yet remaining somewhat a mystery. Along with naturalistic dialogue and brisk pacing, this epic warrior tale contains many strands that readers will enjoy unraveling.

The author was a child living in the Bahamas when local Bahamians were “rebelling against three hundred years of British domination”; in response, her English mother and stepfather moved the family to Geneva in 1963. There, Moore was enrolled in a finishing school that she found cold, gray, and stodgy. She resolved to make the best of her situation with a plan: “I conclude that henceforth, I must be the best. I must be so exceptional that no one will overlook me.” Several years later, when she was 19, this drive led her to train in a revolutionary form of physical theater in the Netherlands, which involved regularly flinging herself across the room, into walls, and returning to a primitive state for an attentive audience. Soon, however, she’d had enough of the avant-garde theater world and decided to leave for a few years; she joined another theater group in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1973—this time, to great success. Slowly, however, Moore experienced an awakening by reading the works of various female writers (including Virginia Woolf, Colette, and Anaïs Nin), moved into solo shows, and eventually left the theater world behind. Throughout this book-length exploration of her personal growth, Moore details her relationships with neurotic, artistic men before she decided to marry an auto mechanic, settle down, and have two children. Moore presents an account of quite a notable life spiked with sharp, often funny dialogue, whether she’s detailing the initial courting of her husband or her first sessions as a therapist-in-training later in life: “‘Tell me what’s happening,’ I murmured in a soothing tone, holding my chin in one hand and crossing my legs so I would at least look like a therapist.” Moore frequently recounts experiencing profound moments, seeming to come to grips with great revelations—only to carry on with her life as before. For readers, though, this habit is not frustrating but relatable, and those taking note will walk away with some wisdom.

What fun! Fans of challenging seek-and-find puzzles will love this clever book, comprised of 10 “fantastical connected mazes” set out on double-page spreads. Each maze is packed with tiny, cleverly illustrated details and minuscule human figures (they’re generally too small to discern skin color), set against a variety of scenes, among them the Magic Forest, Steampunk, Land of the Sweets, Fairy-Tale Land, and Super Future. Some mazes include multiple levels; many are quite tricky. Each requires readers to enter from the left side of the spread and exit from the right; captions direct puzzlers to locate several items within each vividly colored maze. This isn’t always easy, considering how many red herrings there are. Oh, and don’t forget the pesky penguin, which kids are tasked with locating on each spread. Happily, the answer key at the back provides solutions. Best of all, this book gives children a wonderful opportunity to slow down, learn to focus, test their patience, turn away from screens, and hone their visual-discrimination skills. Another plus: While kids may choose to tackle these mazes solo, they’ll enjoy themselves even more when they share them with a friend. Either way, this offering is guaranteed to provide stimulating diversion.