Raised by a brutal mother who forces him to carry out her cruelties alongside a constantly shifting cast of shadowy “uncles,” the Boy dreams of finding a home and a place to belong. After a particularly harrowing experience at his mother’s hands, he flees into the woods, where he encounters a mysterious orb that contains a traveling carnival. The Boy begins to feel at home among the ragtag carnival family, which includes the berobed leader, Terminus; a pair of conjoined sisters, Morningside and Eveningside; a menagerie of exotic animals including jaguarundi and Siberian tigers; and especially the magician, Sullivan, who takes the Boy under his wing as an apprentice. As the Boy becomes the Young Man, he learns at Sullivan’s side and, as his powers grow, he begins developing ambitions of his own—but then his ideas about how to make the show bigger and more powerful ignite a rivalry between him and his mentor. After a betrayal, what the Young Man believes will be his crowning achievement yields catastrophic results, and he’s cast out from his found family to wander alone. He drifts, haunted by his past, until he encounters a woman: Her, whose lightness promises to chase away his darkness. Just as he begins to feel he has finally escaped his violent past, he is forced to reckon with it once and for all. The writing is lush and sumptuous, and at its best, it conjures the Magician’s world with haunting vividness. Occasionally, however, the prose tips into an overwrought style that dulls rather than deepens the novel’s enchantment: “His body…lies in scant writhe,” for example.

The story begins just after 12-year-old Sofia’s mother leaves her “baba,” moving Sofia and her brother into their car. As her mother drives around looking for a spot to park each night, Sofia’s mind wanders from memories of her “abuelo stirring a large pot of champurrado” to the girl with the “belly bulging out of her shirt” who now inhabits Sofia’s old house. The story unfolds in brief diarylike snippets from Sofia’s point of view, tracing her attempts to regain normalcy amid a destabilizing reality. Rizkalla is skilled in taking on the voice of a young narrator, fluent in the worries that plague Sofia, whether they come from her school crush, her teachers’ racism, or the responsibility she feels for her family’s well-being. Rizkalla is able to succinctly conjure the shame that stems from Sofia’s class consciousness while not losing the innocence of her youth: “The way Chloe looks down at my hands after we pull away, I can tell she expects me to give her a present, that she thinks I must have been hiding one this whole time to surprise her.” What makes this a memorable debut is Rizkalla’s ability to artfully detail the gut-wrenching powerlessness Sofia often feels as she treads through a world rife with inequality. “I mouth the word to myself, ‘Please,’ imagining what it would be like to show up to the car with a gift card in hand, how proud mama would be, and maybe she would even tear up holding it, she would be that proud,” Sofia thinks, hoping to get the gift card awarded to the highest scorer on a class oceanography quiz. Rizkalla offers a well-written and haunting look into a childhood marked by instability.

“I must have forgotten how to sleep. No matter how hard I try, I’m still awake.” But red-haired, pink-skinned Lucy isn’t going to just lie there and take it. The young narrator decides to repeat the nighttime wind-down routine—“Maybe I skipped a step when I was getting ready for bed?” Lucy sheds pajamas, (re?)brushes teeth, puts the jammies back on, and (again?) says good night to Dad (who seems to be a single parent), but it’s no use: Lucy just isn’t sleepy. The child decides to take a walk to “clear my head” and indirectly finds a solution. (A bear and a book are involved.) This is an original and dryly witty take on the can’t-get-to-sleep tale, and Zocca’s art, which has cartoon-clean lines and a punchy green-and-purple–heavy palette, does some of the storytelling. A wordless gag involves the family dog, who makes off with a pillow but doesn’t even need it to fall asleep in an armchair; meanwhile, poor wide-awake Lucy, who’s lying on the back of the chair in perfect, purposeful imitation of the pooch, can’t catch a break. Part of Lucy’s charm is the youngster’s less-than-cute look: Zocca tops Lucy’s head with a scraggly bun and gives the child a noticeably weak chin that hardly hinders Lucy’s determination.

One Monday morning, the students of Toronto’s Ridgeview Alternative School (“an oasis of acceptance” for kids interested in the arts) arrive to discover their greenhouse blocked off with yellow crime scene tape. Few are upset that the body inside is English teacher Clifford “call me Cliff” Lowell—a rumored sexual predator, known for grooming underage girls and giving popular boys unfairly bad grades. Earlier in the semester, seniors and best friends Jordan Byrne and Nick Moretti entered Lowell’s class. The teacher acted very differently toward autistic Jordan before his transition; now, both boys’ low grades jeopardize their college acceptances and scholarships. New senior transfer Chloe Underwood, on the other hand, at first welcomes Cliff’s attentions and falls under his spell, a process described in explicit scenes of grooming and sexual abuse, but she quickly realizes how manipulative he is. What starts as a silly game among Jordan, Nick, and Chloe, who all present white, becomes an actual plan to commit murder. Lowell is such a horrendous human being that readers will easily root for his demise at the hands of these understandably frustrated teenagers. At times darkly humorous, this story offers meaningful representation of the powerless taking back control within a system that’s set against them. The authors include a fun thematic parallel as talented actor Chloe plays Lady Macbeth in a school production while Nick writes and performs the music, and Jordan works tech.

Meredith Metzger is a devoted social worker in Rockford, Illinois, a hardscrabble city that residents love and loathe in near-equal measure. In her profession, Meredith sees the worst the city has to offer, both in terms of individual decisions and systemic inequities that drive poverty and its associated hardships. But when the pressure becomes too much and leaning on her co-workers isn’t enough, Meredith starts drinking, eventually endangering her son. She puts her colleague Jamal Glover in the difficult position of having to give custody of Meredith’s young son, Mateo, to her ex-husband, Roberto Alvarez. Meredith must then continue to help families in the same position she’s in—a cycle of desperation and difficulty as she struggles to get sober. Narrated by a chorus of fellow social workers, the novel examines a variety of situations in which people may come in contact with the child protection system. But while attempting to explore the gray areas of society, the book seems more interested in reminding the reader how hard it is to be a social worker than in building empathy for all the characters. The tone evokes exhausted resignation or worldly jadedness, making it hard for the reader to engage deeply with struggles the book seems to frame as inevitable and unending. Combined with uneven pacing, including narrative breaks punctuated by documents and newspaper clippings, this is a novel that asks a lot of readers without providing enough of a payoff.