Holds are growing on the novel that is being called the smart beach read of the summer, The Vacationers by Emma Straub, (Penguin/Riverhead).

The NYT Book Review gives it a succinct rave in its “Short Takes” section, “Straub may be an heir to Laurie Colwin, crafting characters that are smart, addictively charming, delightfully misanthropic and fun,” ending with the ultimate praise, “When I turned the last page, I felt as I often do when a vacation is over: grateful for the trip and mourning its end.”

In a lead review, People magazine gave it its highest rating, 4 of 4 stars and called it a “delicious, deceptively traditional domestic drama … offers all the delights of a fluffy, read-it-with-sunglasses-on-the-beach read, made substantial by the exceptional wit, insight, intelligence and talents of its author.”

Not everyone is completely in love. Several reviewers, like the daily NYT‘s Janet Maslin, feel the book’s ending is too pat, but admit, like the U.K.’s Independent,  that, “The Vacationers is a holiday read in every way with a gently witty narrative that slips down as easily as a beachside cocktail.”

Most libraries ordered it modestly and are showing holds as high as 25 to 1.

After the shock of discovering that People magazine is cutting back its book review coverage, it may be some comfort that Parade has not abandoned its annual picks of the best books of the summer (well, actually, the selections were made by Amazon’s editors. Interestingly, in spite of the Amazon’s fight with Hachette, the list includes some Hachette titles).

The 20 selections range from the expected (Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes; J.K. Rowling’s The Silkworm, a Hachette title) to heavily promoted debuts (I Am Pilgrim, by screenwriter Terry Hayes; the international bestseller, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, by Swiss writer Joel Dicker and the beginning of a new fantasy series, The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen) to the book that has been dubbed The Smart Beach Read of Summer 2014, complete with a jacket blurb from the author of 2012’s smart beach read, Maria Semple, (The Vacationers by Emma Straub).

The New York Times Book Review has also released its annual Summer Reading Issue, an odd assortment of categories, just three of them fiction (science fiction, thrillers and horror; the humor roundup, for some reason, focuses on nonfiction), while its West Coast rival, The L.A. Times selects many more titles in a broader range of categories, including audio, sports, Y.A. and children’s books.

Links to the summer reading lists are at right, under “Season Previews.”

You know summer is arriving when a new novel set in Nantucket, with an appropriately beachy cover, appears from Elin Hilderbrand. Next week, her 13th title, The Matchmaker, (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio; Hachette Large Print), heralds the new season in expected style.

Fans of Diana Gabaldon have had a longer wait. The most recent volume in her Outlander series came out in 2009. Arriving next week is the 8th in the series, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood (RH/Delacorte; Recorded Books). The books will get even more attention when the 16-episode STARZ Outlander series begins on Aug. 9.

Speaking of series, Daniel Wilson has spawned a sequel to his popular Robopocalypse, a novel, if you couldn’t guess from the title, about humanity’s battle to save the species from a robot uprising. It read like a standalone, but along comes the sequel (perhaps a sign that Spielberg will move ahead with plans for the movie?), Robogenesis, (RH/Doubleday; RH Audio). Booklist says the first book was good but this one is “superior in every way.” Kirkus rains on that parade, “A satisfying but perfunctory installment that suffers from a bit of second-act similarity.”

All the titles mentioned here, with full ordering information, are listed on our downloadable spreadsheet, New Title Radar, Week of 6:9:14.

Media Attention

Dominating the media next week will be Hillary Clinton’s embargoed memoir, Hard Choices. Just a preview of her cover photo for this week’s People magazine caused Twitter to light up with questions on what she is leaning on (no, it’s NOT a walker). You’ll see her in all the expected places, including an ABC-TV/Primetime Special with Diane Sawyer. And, yes, the embargo has been broken (by CBS News).

Attention will also shine on scientist Laurel Braitman who argues that we are not wrong to anthropomorphize animals and that we can learn a lot from their emotional lives in Animal Madness; How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves. People magazine included it in their roundup of a dozen Great Summer Reads. The Wall Street Journal will run an excerpt this weekend and the author, who as a TED fellow, has media cred, is scheduled to appear on Good Morning America, World News Tonight and Nightline.

LibraryReads Picks

Elizabeth Is Missing, Emma Healey, HarperCollins/Harper

The number one pick for the month of June:

“Maude sinks into a confusing world in this gripping psychological mystery written in the voice of an aging woman with Alzheimer’s. She can’t remember what she’s doing or where she is, but she is obsessed with one thought–her good friend Elizabeth is missing. Book groups will enjoy this satisfying and entertaining read!” — Mary Campanelli, Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus, OH

The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street, Susan Jane Gilman, Hachette/Grand Central

This is the first novel by a memoirist whose acerbic humor is telegraphed by her titles, Hypocrite In A Pouffy White Dress and Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven,. Given her previous books, it’s surprising to find her writing a historical family saga, set in NYC’s tenements. It’s already found two important audiences, having been picked by both librarians and indy booksellers as a favorite of the month.

LibraryReads annotation:

“In the tenements of old New York, a young Russian Jewish immigrant woman is taken in by an Italian family who sells ice. Through sheer persistence and strong will, she manages to build an ice cream empire. Lillian Dunkle is a complex character who will both make you cheer even as you are dismayed. Have ice cream on hand when you read this book!”~~Marika Zemke, Commerce Township Public Library, Commerce Twp, MI

I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, Courtney Maum, S&S/Touchstone

LibraryReads annotation (also an IndieNext pick):

“Set mainly in Paris, this love story for grown-ups tells the story of a decent man who almost ruins his life and then goes to great lengths to restore his marriage. If your path to a happy marriage has been straight-forward, you may not appreciate this book – but it’s perfect for the rest of us!” — Laurel Best, Huntsville-Madison County Public Library, Huntsville, AL

TV Series Tie-in

The Leftovers (TV tie-in edition), Tom Perrotta, Macmillan/St. Martin’s Griffin

The 10-episode series begins on HBO June 29th.

In interviews, show runner Damon Lindelof has had to assure people that it will not end like Lost.

When Amazon began their fight with publisher Hachette, they may not have taken into account the fact that Stephen Colbert is published by Hachette.

Colbert explains the situation below and shows Bezos what he thinks of it.

Colbert brings on “fellow Amazon victim,” Sherman Alexie, who is also published by Hachette.

Since debut authors are most at risk from Amazon’s tactics, Alexie helps one of them by recommending viewers pre-order California, by Edan Lapucki, (Hachette/Little, Brown, July 8; audio from Dreamscape) via Powells.

The book has appeared earlier on summer reading lists, including the Pittsburgh Post Gazette‘s, with the following recommendation,

When the American economy collapses and anarchy reigns in the land, a couple from Los Angeles head for the hills where they have to forage for food and improvise shelter. They are quickly confronted by stark choices and must figure out whether reconnecting with other survivors would be worth the aggravation that comes with being a part of civilization.

If your readers want to understand how the internet has opened the government to security leaks, but can’t get their hands on Glenn Greenwald’s best seller, No Place to Hide, you can offer them a new novel released yesterday.

David Ignatius’s The Director, (W.W. Norton), provides, according to NYT reviewer Michiko Kakutani, “a harrowing sense of the vulnerability of governments and ordinary people alike to cybercrime, surveillance and digital warfare in this day when almost anything and everything can be stolen or destroyed with some malicious pieces of code and a couple clicks of a mouse.”

Ignatius knows the territory; he has covered the CIA for The Washington Post for over 25 years.

The Director also gets high praise from NPR reviewer Alan Cheuse, who says the author, in this his 9th novel,  provides “yet another deeply engaging spy thriller, rooted at that point where the intricacies of the intelligence community and the everyday world of civilians converge.”

Did fact inspire fiction? No, says Ignatius, in an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday, He began working on the novel months before the news about Snowden broke. But he seems happy with “ripped from the headlines” comments. As he reminds listeners, “Snowden, before he worked for the NSA, worked for the CIA.”

Sony’s movie version of Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (Macmillan/Holt/Metropolitan Books; Macmillan Audio) now has competition. Oliver Stone just announced plans to film another book on the story, Luke Harding’s The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man, (RH/Vintage), published as an original trade paperback in the U.S. in February.

There’s a rivalry between the books’ authors as well. Greenwald worked for The Guardian when he broke his stories about the extent of the NSA’s surveillance on private citizens. After he left to co-found The Intercept, Harding,  one of The Guardian’s  foreign correspondents, published The Snowden Files. In an interview in the Financial Times, Greenwald dismissed it as a “bullshit book … written by someone who has never met or even spoken to Edward Snowden.”

In the New York Times, Michikio Kakutani saw movie potential in Harding’s book, calling it “a fast-paced, almost novelistic narrative that is part bildungsroman and part cinematic thriller.” She also reviewed Greenwald’s book, mostly favorably, but objected to his portrayal of  “the establishment media,” and its “glaring subservience to political power.”

Stone plans to begin shooting before the end of the year. In an interview last year, the director told The Guardian (which is cooperating with him on the film), “To me, Snowden is a hero. He revealed secrets that we should all know, that the United States has repeatedly violated the fourth amendment.”

Welcome to summer! Next week offers not only books from a multitude of Big Names, but two major debuts,  a second novel that is set to outshine the author’s well-received debut, as well as an intriguing LibraryRead pick.

All the titles mentioned here and more coming next week, are listed on our downloadable spreadsheet, New Title Radar, Week of May 26.

Heavily Promoted Debuts

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, Joel Dicker, (Penguin Books, trade paperback, $18; Blackstone Audio; Turtleback library binding)

A mystery novel, set in the U.S, written in French by a Swiss Law School grad, it was published in Europe in 2012 and sold 2 million copies. A hot property at the Frankfurt Book Fair, U.S. rights were won by Penguin. Adding extra sizzle, film rights were bought last month by Ron Howard (he may have noticed that, in France, it outsold another book he is adapting, Dan Brown’s Inferno).

It’s being promoted as the book of the summer, which is why it’s getting advance attention in the consumer media.The Washington Post was the first, last week with a middling review by novelist Dan Strachey (aka Richard Stevenson). He begins by calling it a  “Big Gulp of a pop novel that’s kind of enjoyable in a corn-syrupy way,” goes on to enumerate all that is wrong with it, but ends by admitting,

As maladroit as this novel is in so many ways, it churns along at such a good clip and is rendered with such high emotion and apparent deep conviction that it’s easy to see why it was a bestseller in Europe. It’s likely to be one in this country, too, where in the land of bestsellerdom, earnest lardiness counts for a lot.”

More middling reviews have followed (the lead in Entertainment Weekly’s Books section, it gets a resounding C). Today’s Wall Street Journal looks at its chances for success here (arriving at no real conclusion) and notes that it also received tepid reviews in the U.K., where it was released on May 1 but is now #1 on the best seller lists of both the Times of London and the Telegraph.

Curiously for such a major launch, Penguin has decided to publish the book in trade paperback (with French flaps, of course), perhaps to overcome price resistance to such a long novel (656 pages). It’s a hit with EarlyWord’s GalleyChatter, Robin Beerbower, which is good enough for us. By the way, author Joel Dicker is speaking at the AAP Librarian Dinner next week during BEA.

Fourth of July Creek, Smith Henderson, HarperCollins/Ecco

Another big summer debut arriving this week, it is getting more positive critical response than Harry Quebert. The Wall Street Journal today quotes editor Lee Boudreaux, describing it as “writing by Richard Ford, characters by Richard Russo.” It gets a solid A in the new issue of Entertainment Weekly and was picked by booksellers for the June IndieNext list.

Poised To Breakout

The Vacationers, Emma Straub, Penguin/Riverhead

Following her 2012 debut, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, which Janet Maslin dismissed in her NYT Summer Reading preview as “a benign but mannered Hollywood period piece,“ but praises this second effort as a total departure. It’s the lead review in People Magazine, with 4 of 4 stars; a ‘delicious, deceptively traditional domestic drama…[that] offers all the delights of a fluffy, read-it-with-sunglasses-on-the-beach read, made substantial by the exceptional wit, insight, intelligence and talents of its author.” Entertainment Weekly has it at #9 on the week’s “Must List,” saying, it “has all the hallmarks of a typical family-vacation romp; marital strife, a sunny location, long-held secrets exposed… What set the novel apart are it’s careful observations and poignant humor. Completely guilt-free resort reading.”

Library Reads Pick

The Lobster Kings, Alexi Zentner, W.W. Norton

LibraryReads June Pick: “This well-crafted story truly captures the beauty and brutality of living by the sea. The characters show what it’s like to have saltwater in your veins and commitment to family and community. Zentner depicts a way of life that is fast disappearing. Perfect for summer reading.”  — Lisa Marie Joyce, Portland Public Library & South Portland Public Library, Portland, ME

With Memorial Day Weekend upon us, it’s time for summer previews.

Entertaiment Weekly‘s “Summer Must List” issue looks at what will be big this season in movies, tv, music and supposedly in books, but they give them short shrift (too bad, that cover is going to sell copies, but maybe not to the book reader demo), fitting them awkwardly into various categories — “Sin” (amazingly, no books in this section), “Destruction” (Chesea Cain’s One Kick, S&S, 8/8, clearly belongs here), “Love” (featuring Diana Gabaldon, as much for the upcoming Outlander series adaptation on Starz, as for her forthcoming Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, RH/Delacorte, 6/10). The category of “Survival” is broadly interpreted to include 6 titles, such as Amy Sohn’s The Actress, S&S, July 5 and Rufi Thorpe’s The Girls from Corona Del Mar, RH/Knopf, 7/8

In today’s NYT, critic Janet Maslin casts her eye on 14 summer titles (and goes to lengths to avoid the phrase “beach read”), commenting, “if there’s one overriding motif, it’s this: the crazier, the better.” She is lukewarm about most of the titles she mentions except for The Fever by Megan Abbott (Hachette/ Little, Brown, 6/17), “a hot new entrant in the ‘Is it the next Gone Girl’?’ sweepstakes,” the “astringent wit of Joshua Ferris’s To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, (Hachette/ Little, Brown, 5/13) and Emma Straub’s The Vacationers, (Penguin/Riverhead, 5/29), “a scrappy portrait of a family bringing its Upper West Side troubles to Mallorca for repair,”

Her favorite is the nonfiction debut, Factory Man, (Hachette/ Little, Brown, 7/15) by Beth Macy, which Maslin calls “a big surprise” for finding “a terrifically rich subject” in “a family-run Virginia furniture company that was being put out of business by cheap Chinese knockoffs, and happened to find an owner determined to fight back.”

We’ll let you know as more previews arrive.

When Wendy Bartlett, head of collection development at Cuyahoga P.L, Ohio, has a gut feeling about a title, she buys it in quantity, to be ahead of the demand curve. She lets the staff in on her thinking through her “Hot Title Thursdays” posts on the staff intranet, a clever way of ensuring the success of these titles, as staff in turn recommends them.

Conversely, Wendy relies on staff response when she just doesn’t see the potential in some heavily-promoted title (not a fan of The Night Circus when it was first announced, she asked staff to read galleys to tell her if she was nuts. They told her she was. She ordered more. Good thing; it went on to be a best seller).

We’ve asked Wendy to begin sharing her Hot Title Thursdays posts on EarlyWord. Below is the first, about a book that’s also been generating enthusiasm on GalleyChat. It’s coming out the end of July and is now available via NetGalley and Edelweiss (sounds perfect for the Memorial Day weekend).

The Fortune Hunter, Daisy Goodwin, (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press; Macmillan Audio; Thorndike)

Wanna find out how the 1% lived back in the day?

Here’s your chance!

If you don’t think “gossipy page turner” when you think of historical fiction, you clearly haven’t read Daisy Goodwin. Her previous title, a debut novel, The American Heiress also did very well for us.

I’m happy to report that her new novel, The Fortune Hunter, is even stronger, particularly in terms of pacing, and will again appeal to a wide range of readers, from romance to historical fiction, to royal watchers, to the Downton Abbey crowd, and even to people who love travel.

Part of the fascination is that Goodwin has based the novel on actual historical figures in Victorian-era Europe, including Victoria herself. The main characters are Elizabeth “Sisi” Winterhalter, the Empress of Austria, Bay Middleton (yes, a distant relative of the current Princess of Wales), the Earl of Spencer, as in Diana’s great-great-grandfather……..you get the idea. Sisi, a legendary beauty, travels Europe to alleviate her boredom. (The cocaine mixture administered by the Hungarian lady-in-waiting doesn’t hurt either.) She decides she wants handsome Bay Middleton, the best rider in England, to be her personal assistant for hunting season. But Middleton is in love with the heiress to the Lennox fortune—a young woman not wise at all in the ways of the world. It’s a love triangle, but also a clash of societal roles, classes and cultures. Fun, fun, fun. I read it in two sittings.

This one has a street date of July 29th. Get those holds in now! ENJOY!

If you were blindsided by the news about a book published on Tuesday, The Most Dangerous Animal of All, by Gary L. Stewart (Harper), you’re not alone.  As Newsweek reports, HarperCollins worked to keep the story under wraps.

If that was an effort to insure that all the publicity hits at once, it’s working. The news about the author’s search for his biological father, which led to the chilling discovery of a man, now dead, who might have been the infamous Zodiac Killer, first broke in New York magazine’s “Intellingencer” blog and was picked up by dozens of other news media. Next up, it is featured in the new issue of People magazine (on newsstands tomorrow; available digitally now).

The Zodiac Killer was believed to be responsible for the deaths of at least five people in the San Francisco area in the late 1960’s. That story was the basis of David Fincher’s 2007 movie, Zodiac.

We’re always on the look out for reviews that make our mouths water. Laura Miller did it for us yesterday in Salon with her review of Geoff Dyer’s Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush, (RH/Pantheon), a book we neglected to include in our highlights for the week. Not only did she make us want to read that book, but every other book Dyer has written.

As she says, the very concept is brilliant,

The notion of installing a writer of Dyer’s baroquely sensitive and self-conscious temperament aboard an American aircraft carrier stationed in the Persian Gulf is obviously a stroke of genius. In fact, Dyer’s two-week writer-in-residency stint on the USS George H.W. Bush was his own idea…

She wanders off for a paragraph about the book not being what she had expected, a failing of many reviewers, but quickly gets it back on track and offers great stuff for readers advisors to steal.

Media focus has been heavy on Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (Macmillan/Holt/Metropolitan Books; Macmillan Audio), propelling it up Amazon sales rankings (it’s currently at #14).

More attention may be coming, in the form of a movie. Sony has optioned rights. Many have noted the book reads like a spy novel. Appropriately, Sony is planning to produce the movie with the team behind the recent James Bond movies.

In addition to earlier appearances on the Today Show, The Colbert Report (where he said he is working on an even more explosive story on the NSA), and NPR’s Fresh Air, Greenwald appeared on Fox News today.

This week, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert dive into politics with two authors that have been at odds with each other. Elizabeth Warren appears on Colbert on Monday. Her book, A Fighting Chance (Macmillan/Holt/Metropolitan: Macmillan Audio) is already a best seller (#5 on the NYT list after 2 weeks at #2). She appeared on Stewart’s show last month.

Her nemesis, former Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, author of Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises (RH/Crown; Random House Audio; Random House Large Print), appears on Stewart’s show on Wednesday. His book is now #34 on Amazon’s sales rankings.

On Tuesday, Stewart turns his attention to the tech world, featuring the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (2009 to 2012), Aneesh Chopra. His new book is Innovative State: How New Technologies Can Transform Government, (Atlantic Monthly Press, May 6).

Of the books arriving next week, the leader in number of copies headed for library shelves, is Emily Griffin’s The One & Only (RH/Ballantine;  RH/Audio), followed by Steve Berry’s newest Cotton Malone thriller, The Lincoln Myth (RH/Ballantine; RH Audio; RH Large Print). The media will be busy with books, two by potential presidential candidates and readers advisors can recommend a new mystery that is a LibraryReads pick of the month.

Titles listed here, and highlights of others coming next week, with ordering information and alternate formats, are on our downloadable spreadsheet, New Title Radar, Week of May 19, 2014

LibraryReads

Sixth Grave on the Edge, Darynda Jones, (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press; Macmillan Audio)

“The continuing adventures of P.I. Charley Davidson and Grim Reaper (not as mutually exclusive as one would think) are just as delightful as in previous books, with new characters including a wonderfully snarky new demon. Jones expands on Charley’s existing relationships and supernatural powers. It’s the perfect paranormal-romance-mystery blend that you never knew you always wanted.” — Donna Matturri, Pickerington Public Library, Pickerington, OH

Media

JFK Jr., George, & Me: A Memoir, Matt Berman, (S&S/Gallery Books; Audio, MidWest Tape)

Berman was the creative director at George, the political magazine that JFK Jr. co-founded.

Media:

• Vanity Fair excerpt (on newsstands now, with cover line, “How J.F.K. Jr. Tamed Barbara Streisand”);
• NBC-TV/TODAY – May 20
• EXTRA feature – May 20
• MSNBC-TV/Morning Joe – May 21
• USAToday.com video interview, week of May 22
• MSNBC-TV/Hardball with Chris Matthews, May 23

Media — Fathers Day

Good Talk, Dad: The Birds and the Bees…and Other Conversations We Forgot to Have, Bill Geist and Willie Geist, (Hachette/Grand Central; Hachette Audio)

CBS Sunday Morning regular, Bill Geist, and his son, Willie, co-anchor of MSNBC’s Morning Joe and and the third hour of NBC’s Today show, collaborate on a book that is prime material media attention leading up to Father’s Day.

Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live with One, Terry Crews, (RH/Zinc Ink)

It seems this book is also timed for Father’s Day (it will be in People Magazine’s Father’s Day Gift Guide). We worry recipients might not appreciate the implication that they need improvement. What gives Terry Crews, former NFL player and TV star, his expertise? Perhaps his experience doing Old Spice commercials.

This is one of the books in David Zinczenko’s (Eat This, Not That) new Random House imprint. Media: ABC Good Morning America – 5/19; NBC Tonight Show – 5/19; PBS Tavis Smiley – 6/2.

Media — Possible Presidential Candidates

One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America’s Future, Ben Carson, Candy Carson, (Penguin/Sentinel)

Carson became the “New Conservative Folk Hero,” (Atlantic magazine) when he disparaged some of President Obama’s policies during his remarks at a National Prayer Breakfast. Shortly after that, his 2012 title, America the Beautiful,, (HarperCollins/Zondervan) became a best seller. According to the conservative publication, The Weekly Standard, he is “warming to the idea of running for president.”

I Heard My Country Calling : A Memoir, James Webb, (Simon & Schuster)

This memoir may signal that the former U.S. Senator from Virginia is heeding the calls to run for president in 2016.

Media:

• NPR/Diane Rehm – May 19
• CBS Sunday Morning- May 25
• CNN-TV/The Lead with Jake Tapper – May 26
• MSNBC Morning Joe – May 27

Kids lots of great books to look forward to this month. Below are titles I can’t wait to recommend:

Young Adult

We Were Liars, E. Lockhart (Delacorte, $17.99, ages 12-up, May 13)

National Book Award winner Lockhart is not an unknown, yet reading this novel shatters preconceptions that I “knew” her work. I was stunned on the first read and enthralled on the second. I’m delighted that it is the #1 LibraryRead pick for May, so adults will get to know this incredible book as well. Below, the LibraryReads annotation:

“This brilliant and heartbreaking novel tells the story of a prestigious family living on a private island off the coast of Massachusetts. Full of love, lies, secrets, no shortage of family dysfunction, and a shocking twist that you won’t see coming. Though this book is written for teens, it shouldn’t be overlooked by anyone looking for a fantastic read. — Susan Balla, Fairfield Public Library, Fairfield, CT

Torn Away, Jennifer Brown, (Hachette/Little Brown, May 6)

If you missed Jennifer Brown’s The Hate List, stop what you are doing and read it right now. Ever since that book, I have eagerly anticipated each new title by this author who gets inside the heads of teens and relives their emotional lives. In this one, a tornado has ripped a destructive path through 17-year-old Jersey’s life. Her entire world has been turned upside down, literally and figuratively. If you have kids looking for a weeper, this is the one.

One Man Guy, Michael Barakiva (Macmillan YR/ FSG; Macmillan Young Listeners; May 27)

This title is taken from the Rufus Wainright song (here performed at Central Park’s Summer stage). We follow the “coming of age” of Alek Khederian who finds himself sentenced to summer school to maintain entrance in honor track classes in his sophomore year. Barakiva captures the awkwardness and apartness Alek is feeling as he begins to get to know the cool guy Ethan, an openly gay skateboarder dude. This nuanced summer romance novel leads readers to the unexpected as we feel the heat of NYC summer and the pressures of family expectations.

Picture Books

The Baby Tree, Sophie Blackall, (Penguin/Nancy Paulsen, 4 and up, May 1)

When a child is told a sibling is on the way, the typically expected question is “Where do babies come from?” With a dry humor reminiscent of Bob Graham (”Let’s Get a Pup!” Said Kate and Queenie, One of the Family) the preschooler in this story is given various replies. Babies grow from seeds, come from hospitals and are dropped on your doorstep (see what real kids have been told in the book’s trailer). Blackall skillfully depicts the child imaging newborns growing on trees like apples and swaddled infants displayed at the hospital as if they were vases for sale in a Pottery Barn window.

The preschooler finally does receive accurate answers from his mom and dad and Blackall adds a round-up of additional questions for parents who are navigating children’s curiosity about human reproduction.

Author Robie Harris, (Its Perfectly Normal) is my go-to for the informational book on age relevant sex-ed. She has this territory in What’s in There? All About Before You Were Born, (Candlewick Press, 2013).

The Baby Tree holds its own with Robie Harris’s book and the two would be great companion volumes. When this topic comes up there are never too many good books on the subject.

Elizabeth, Queen of the Seas, Lynne Cox, illus., by Brian Floca, (RH/Schwartz and Wade, May 13)

In the small town of Christ Church, New Zealand, Elizabeth, an elephant seal who weighed as much as 15 Labrador retrievers, lay sunning herself in the middle of the road. People knew that this was not a good idea and made plans to remove Elizabeth to a home far away among her own kind. No matter how far she was relocated, miles and miles away, despite days of swimming through huge waves and against strong currents, she returned to her two-lane highway again and again.

World-renowned swimmer and bestselling author Lynne Cox and Caldecott Medal-winning illustrator Brian Floca tell this incredible animal story without anthropomorphizing Elizabeth.

Count on the Subway, Paul Dubois Jacobs and Jennifer Swender, illus. by Dan Yaccarino, (RH/Knopf)

The writing team of Jacobs and Swender is a known quantity to early childhood educators.Their Children’s Songbag (Gibbs Smith) is a perennial favorite. The text’s jazzy beats capture the rhythms of the subway wheels on the track as Yaccarino’s pictures present a parade of diversity of New York City’s commuting public. Count to ten and back again, I guarantee this is the one to read over and over again.