Emily Woo Zeller

"Khai Diep has no feelings. Well, he feels irritation when people move his things or contentment when ledgers balance down to the penny, but he doesn't experience big, important emotions like love and grief. Rather than believing he processes emotions differently due to being autistic, he concludes that he's defective and decides to avoid romantic relationships. So his mother, driven to desperation, takes matters into her own hands and returns to...

"One morning, Deming Guo's mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. Set in New York and China, the Leavers is the story of how one boy comes into his own when everything he's loved has been...

"Alexis, a 12-year-old native Hawaiian, is terrified of the ocean and the creatures that live there because of an encounter she had early in her life with a moray eel. Her mother, a civilian contractor for the Navy, likes to give Alexis elaborate puzzles to solve when she's away on assignments. One puzzle gets her working for her grumpy neighbor, who everyone calls Uncle Tanaka, helping him gather marine samples. She has to use all her problem-solving...

Few of us realize what strange wet miracles of science operate inside us after every meal. In her trademark style, Mary Roach investigates the beginning, and end, of our food.

Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen (1898) is an autobiography by Lili'uokalani. Published in 1898, the book was written in the aftermath of Lili'uokalani's attempt to appeal on behalf of her people to President Grover Cleveland, a personal friend. Although it inspired Cleveland to demand her reinstatement, the United States Congress published the Morgan Report in 1894, which denied U.S. involvement in the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii. Hawaii's...