A boy in a village plagued by Cossack soldiers battles a curse to help his family and friends in the excellent graphic novel "Mendel the Mess-Up". Mendel, who is approaching his bar mitzvah, lives in a remote Jewish village, Lintvint,... Read More

Covering skills ranging from healthy eating to planning for retirement, Level Up! is an encouraging self-help guide that suggests a systematic method for achieving personal success. In Level Up!, father and diplomat Steve M. Scott... Read More

A community remakes itself to fit a vision of freedom in the sympathetic Revolutionary War–era novel "Chains of Fate". The very notion of freedom—both of the soul and of the body—hangs in the balance in "Chains of Fate", Melissa... Read More

A teenager confronts her haunted past to save her family in Kate Anderson’s slow-burn psychological thriller "Lonely Places". Chase has yearned for stability ever since her family left their home when she was just a child. Since then,... Read More

Encouraging social cohesion, "Be the Weight Behind the Spear" is a spirited memoir that models ethical living and leadership among one’s peers. Army veteran and emergency room physician Josh McConkey’s memoir "Be the Weight Behind... Read More

A faithless boy encounters Jesus and opens himself up to new ways of being with others in the heartwarming religious novel "The Young Samaritan". In J. Schuyler Sprowles’s historical novel "The Young Samaritan", a boy who’s forced to... Read More

Supernatural horrors meet frank discussions of mental health in Ethan and Naomi Sacks’s bighearted graphic novel "A Haunted Girl". After a suicide attempt and a stay in a psychiatric ward, Cleo struggles to reintegrate. She avoids her... Read More

A girl in a whaling village investigates several disappearances in Crystal J. Bell’s mesmerizing historical novel "The Lamplighter". Even as self-reliant eighteen-year-old Temperance mourns her father, who was hanged, she takes up his... Read More