Amy Scribner

Bridget Jones aficionados will be thrilled that, after 14 years, there is a new installment about the adventures of this irrepressible British woman with a zest for life and wine.

They may be less enthused to find out that Bridget is no longer with her love Mark Darcy (played to perfection—and with a wink to Pride and Prejudice—by Colin Firth in the movie). I won’t ruin things by explaining exactly why Bridget is single again. Suffice it to say, she is heartbroken, and must hold things together for her two young children.

In Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, Bridget is starting over again in a dating world that has moved mostly online. Like the previous Bridget books, this one is written as Bridget’s scribbled journal entries, but she now also Tweets (often drunkenly) and texts (also drunkenly). “The fantastic thing about texting is that it allows you to have an instant, intimate emotional relationship without taking up any time whatsoever or involving meetings or arrangements or any of the complicated things which take place in the boring old non-cyber world,” Bridget muses without a trace of irony.

Some things never change: Bridget’s raucous old pals Tom and Jude are still around, as funny and loyal as ever, and Daniel Cleaver, Bridget’s old fling and godfather to her children, makes a few appearances to toss some of his trademark double entendres her way. But Helen Fielding, to her credit, has evolved Bridget from a navel-gazing 30-something whose biggest worry was caloric intake to a (fairly) responsible mother who is lonely and overwhelmed. It’s not surprising that Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is deeply funny and compulsively readable. What is unexpected is how poignant it is in its exploration of love, loss and the courage to try again.

No one does slice-of-life like Terry McMillan, whose latest novel sets us down in a shabby modern-day Los Angeles neighborhood where Betty Jean Butler struggles to make ends meet and keep her family together.

Her daughter, Trinetta, is caught in the clutches of drug addiction. Her son, Dexter, is in prison for a foolish carjacking. And her other son, Quentin, is a successful chiropractor who wants nothing to do with his family. Add to all this a husband succumbing to senility, two busybody sisters and a fulltime job at a local hotel, and Betty Jean’s hands aren’t just full—they’re overflowing. Luckily, Betty Jean has a wisecracking best friend across the street to lean on, and a sassy nurse to help care for her husband—even if that care is delivered in a way found in no medical textbook.

When Trinetta leaves her two young sons with Betty Jean before disappearing into the streets, Betty Jean knows something’s got to give.

“Even though I haven’t told anybody, I’m scared,” she says. “What if I can’t handle all this responsibility? What if I’ve forgotten how to be a parent? . . . I don’t want them to turn out like mine did. I want them to be proud, honest, dignified, civil, kind and loving. I want them to be strangers to trouble.”

Betty Jean has to swallow her pride and ask for help in ways she never imagined. Slowly, in their own ways, friends and family band together to help her raise the boys, who have promising futures despite their troubled past.

McMillan will likely always be best known for her runaway bestsellers How Stella Got Her Groove Back and Waiting to Exhale, both made into movies. But Who Asked You? stands up to any of McMillan’s previous work, with a cast of wholly memorable characters and a plucky heroine you genuinely want to win. Although McMillan writes primarily about African-American families, her ever-present wry humor and keen portrayal of love in all its exasperating imperfection make her work universal.

Sisters Rachel and Helen live in Roam, a place that “felt like the abandoned capital of an ancient civilization: still a wonder to behold, out here in the middle of nowhere, but worn down, broken, nearly empty.”

At 17, Rachel is the younger of the sisters, blind since the age of 3 and cared for by Helen since their parents died in a car accident. Rachel is beautiful, while Helen “was ugly since the day she was born.” Their outsides match their insides: Rachel is pure and kind, and Helen is bitter and needy. She lets her younger sister believe that she is the ugly one, and that the world is too dangerous to ever venture outside of Roam. No one in Roam realizes the cruel hoax Helen has perpetrated, not even Jonah, the hapless local mechanic Helen’s been involved with since he was a teenager.

Rachel and Helen are sure they’ll spend the rest of their days together in Roam, settled by their great-grandfather, who made his fortune by building a silk factory and forcing Chinese immigrants to work for him. But Helen makes a miscalculation one day that gives Rachel the chance to see for herself whether she can survive on her own.

A creative writing professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose Big Fish was made into a Tim Burton movie in 2003, Wallace specializes in novels with a tinge of folklore. The Kings and Queens of Roam is a tall-tale jaunt that features a giant lumberjack, a tiny bartender who can see all of Roam’s ghosts (he prefers to call them old-timers) and a doctor convinced he can cure Rachel’s blindness with water from an underground river.

Wallace toggles between two equally compelling stories: that of the sisters and that of their great-grandfather, Elijah McAllister, who exploits his friend Ming Kai to get rich. Set in a mossy, haunted backwoods somewhere in America, this is a whimsical, tender tale about friendship, trust and the price of second chances.

The titular character in the superb Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures was born Elsa Emerson in 1920s Wisconsin: a blue-eyed, curvy blonde whose farmer parents also ran the county theater. Elsa was destined to be on stage, starring in numerous local productions. After a tragedy befalls the family, Elsa finds even greater escape in acting, marrying a young actor passing through town on his way to Hollywood. Her husband struggles in the burgeoning studio system, but when Elsa meets his boss Irving Green at a party, he rechristens her Laura Lamont and sets about making her famous.

It doesn’t take long. The screen loves Laura, and as her star rises, her husband’s fades. They divorce and she marries Irving, completing her transformation from small-town girl to glamorous 1940s Hollywood icon. Still, she wonders, was she really Laura Lamont, or was the wide-eyed girl from Wisconsin still inside somewhere?

“She was always two people at once, Elsa Emerson and Laura Lamont. They shared a body and a brain and a heart, conjoined twins linked in too many places to ever separate. Elsa wondered whether it would always be that way, or whether bits of Laura would eventually detach themselves, shaking off Elsa like a discarded husk.”

This is Emma Straub’s first novel, and it is a marvel. Her silken writing conjures images of old Hollywood, all red lipstick and Glenn Miller, but even more impressively, Straub paints a vivid portrait of a woman torn between her desire for fame and what she must leave behind to win it.

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Read an interview with Emma Straub for Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures.