Almost everyone is familiar with the classic story of Romeo and Juliet, but Robin Maxwell’s latest novel, O, Juliet, takes things to the next level, allowing us to experience the thrilling, all-consuming passion of first love all over again.

In Maxwell’s retelling of the famous Shakespearean tale, readers are introduced to some of the more famous figures of Renaissance Italy: the incomparable poet Dante Alighieri, the generous patron Cosimo de’ Medici and a rival merchant family, the Strozzis, fighting for control of Florence. Among these warring factions, Juliet Capelletti struggles to escape her impending marriage to Jacopo Strozzi, her father’s scheming business partner who intends to take over the family’s failing silk business. Much to her father’s chagrin, Juliet has her own dreams—dreams of freedom from convention, and dreams of expressing her own poetry inspired by her literary hero Dante. Quite unexpectedly, Juliet meets Romeo Monticecco, a young man with ideals of his own. Romeo, sent away to study, has returned to his home in the hopes of fostering peace. Naturally they are drawn to each other with disastrous consequences.

After much success focusing on Tudor and Elizabethan England in books such as Mademoiselle Boleyn, Virgin: Prelude to the Throne and The Queen’s Bastard, Robin Maxwell has now turned to Renaissance Italy, delving into one of the richest times and places in European history.

Fans of Maxwell, historical fiction and the Bard himself are certainly in for a treat; O, Juliet, is an enjoyable retelling of the ultimate love story, one full of luscious period descriptions and perceptive insights. Maxwell has written a novel that is sure to leave readers breathless with pulses racing, hearts breaking and pages turning as they hurry to discover the tragic story of these two star-crossed lovers that Shakespeare never told.

Joan Bryant holds an Art History degree in the Early Christian and Byzantine periods.

The engrossing debut The Murderer’s Daughters is a survival story, if ever there was one—a sturdily written book about the close-knit lives of sisters Lulu and Merry, whose father murders their mother when they are just young children. Yes, it describes the fateful day, but little by little, it also lets you in on a secret: life goes on after events like that, too, and what you do with every minute of it counts.

The book deeply inscribes the 30 years that follow the tragedy in a tightly written, unsentimental narrative that doesn’t let either the reader or the characters opt out. Luckily, it also allows everyone to reap the ample rewards of following this story through. Each step forward for Lulu and Merry is hard-won and ultimately uplifting.

Even though he’s been incarcerated ever since the crime, their father’s presence is deeply scorched into the lives of Lulu, the elder, who tries to build her life on top of the past without allowing her family to glimpse its shaky foundations; and Merry, who feels haunted into continued visits to her father in prison. Both sisters dread hearing news of their father’s parol, but in the end that event may be the only way for the two to break free from their long emotional imprisonment of an entirely different sort.

Just like real life, what happens is believable, and the changes are on a human scale we can understand. There hardly seems a word or thought out of place in this narrative, so true does it keep to our sense of how people really do behave when their lives seem constantly under siege.

First-time author Randy Susan Meyers spent a decade of her own life working with victims, attackers and others affected by domestic violence, and all her words ring true.Merry, for one, is looking for perspective on her recently released father: “I could only hope to learn how not to hate him immoderately or love him too much. I needed to make my father life-size.” It’s finally that sense of “making things life-size” that informs this book and offers a way for these two survivors to move on, as they begin to make sense of the intricate tapestry of their lives.

Barbara Clark writes from West Yarmouth, Massachusetts.

“Are there no nice people in this book?” this reviewer wondered, even as she avidly turned the pages of Kimberla Lawson Roby’s latest novel. The novel’s subtitle asks, “Does Alicia, daughter of the Reverend Curtis Black, finally have the perfect life?” and the answer is a definite “no.” She thinks she does, however. Alicia has married the up-and-coming pastor JT Valentine against the wishes of her famous zillionaire father—a character who resembles real-life megachurch pastor T.D. Jakes.

Alicia loves JT and he actually loves her, and since she’s been a spoiled rotten princess all her life, JT is prepared to spoil her some more. The thing is, both of them are people to whom a decent person would give a wide berth. A budding novelist who finally uses her dad’s literary agent when no one else will take her on (and gets a big fat advance to boot!), Alicia displays greed and shallowness that would have been repugnant even in the go-go ’80s. JT’s wickedness is breathtaking; he is a flat-out, hairy-hearted sociopath. Convinced that God is ever on his side, he sees no problem with cheating on his wife with one woman after another. He lies to his women, to his wife, to his business partners. He lies when he doesn’t have to lie. Basically, he lies to everyone about everything—all the time. Fortunately, one of his women, a minx named Carmen, is as crazy and evil as he is. But unlike JT, she’s patient.

Roby’s characters may not be admirable, but they cause the same chill and fascination you’d feel if you came across a den of rattlesnakes. A skilled writer, Roby knows just how to keep readers hooked; you know that somebody has to get their comeuppance, and you hope the very first somebody is JT. After him, whatever happens to the other miscreants in this tale will be icing on the cake. When the hammer finally comes down, it’s not quite as satisfying as the reader would like—there are no gruesome deaths or Shakespearean piles of vile bodies—but it’s enough.

Be Careful What You Pray For is an irresistibly nasty work.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

As we pick up with Valentine Roncalli in this follow-up to the vibrant bestseller Very Valentine, she is taking over the family business from her grandmother, who has, in her 80s, remarried and moved to Italy. But the Angelini Shoe Company isn’t just any business—it’s been passed down through generations, each proprietor painstakingly building custom wedding shoes in the same Greenwich Village shop. But this is post-recession 2010: who has the money to buy such frivolity as custom shoes they’ll wear only once?

Valentine wants to expand the business by introducing a line of affordable yet stylish shoes to supplement the custom brand, but she’ll need the approval of her insufferable (and business-savvy) brother, Alfred. Valentine travels to Buenos Aires in search of a suitable manufacturer, but things get complicated when she discovers a long-hidden family secret that opens old wounds in the Angelini-Roncalli clan.

Valentine is one of Adriana Trigiani’smost winsome characters (yes, she even rivals the Big Stone Gap gang).She’s honest, wry and utterly human as she approaches her mid-30s without a man in sight (other than ex-boyfriend Bret and gay roommate Gabriel—both fabulous comrades but not exactly marriage material). When she again crosses paths with Gianluca, a suave, slightly older Italian who is looking for more than a fling, Valentine must figure out if she’s able to balance work and life.

“I am my best self, the most alive I can be, when I’m creating in the shop,” says Valentine. “I would never admit this to a man I was interested in, but it’s the truth. Love is not the main course in the banquet of my life. It’s dessert. My mother would say that’s why I’m still single. And my sisters would say I’m lying. But I know this to be true, that love is my treat, my tiramisu, because I’m living it.”

Brava, Valentine is laugh-out-loud funny (the Thanksgiving dinner family blowout is one for the ages), but it’s also an unexpectedly poignant examination of the power and pull of family, faith and love. Can’t wait to see what Valentine’s up to next.

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

Mary Gooch’s biggest problem is not the size of her body, but the scope of her world. At just over 300 pounds, the 43-year-old Canadian is well aware that she’s fat; she has resigned herself to being that way. What she doesn’t realize, though, is the degree to which her weight has insulated and isolated her from the rest of society. She’s spent years in denial about how sheltered her life is, and when she’s forced to see it, the shock is worse than any she’s ever felt upon catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror.

Mary has been quietly accumulating pounds for years when her husband, the tall, handsome Jimmy Gooch, fails to come home one night—specifically, the night before their 25th wedding anniversary. Eventually he sends a note explaining that he has left $25,000 from a winning scratch-lottery ticket in their joint bank account, and that he needs “time to think.” At a loss, Mary sets out to find him, using the only clues she has: his family connections in California, some restaurant receipts and not much else.

Lori Lansens, best-selling author of The Girls, structures The Wife’s Tale as the story of a damaged heroine on a quest. The trick is that (as in any good quest story) the real object of the search isn’t what the searcher thinks it is. Mary’s pursuit of her husband draws her slowly back into the world she’d been hiding from. She takes her first airplane flight, gets a makeover, stands up to her boss and her difficult mother-in-law, makes new friends, learns how to use an ATM card. She finds hidden reserves of endurance; she loses her appetite and her certainty about what her life is built on.

Occasional traces of hackneyed sentiment slip into the novel, but the fast-moving story and Mary’s gradual metamorphosis overcome such flaws easily. By the novel’s satisfying end, Mary has learned that it’s better to strive for balance and control than to hide behind one extreme or another. It’s not a simple transformation, and even if it’s not quite realistic, it certainly rings true.

Becky Ohlsen writes from Portland, Oregon.

In her debut novel, The Summer We Fell Apart, author Robin Antalek explores the complexity of family ties in an unflinching and realistic manner, without a hint of sentimentality. Summer tells the tale of the four Haas siblings, raised in a disordered and largely unsupervised environment by a one-hit-wonder playwright father with a serious fidelity problem and a flaky actress mother. As adults they are scattered, but they share the common bond of a chaotic childhood—which affects them all in different ways.

Each of the Haas siblings’ stories is told in separate sections of the book over more than a decade, with a defining moment being the death of their not-so-beloved father. The four are each a definite type, but Antalek’s unflinchingly human portrayal of the siblings helps make up for the stereotyping.

Kate is the archetypal oldest child. Forced to care for her neglected younger siblings as a child, she remains the responsible one as an adult, living a type-A lawyer’s workaholic existence while eschewing a real emotional life. It is only when a tale of love thwarted in her younger years is revealed that her more human side emerges.

Finn is the disturbed and destructive son. A heavy drinker since adolescence, his life is a shambles and his body falling apart in adulthood. It may be Kate who can save him—or he may be beyond saving.

George is a schoolteacher, hungry for the love he didn’t receive as a child. It could be the father of one of his students who can give him just that—as long as George can really let him in.

And finally there is Amy—the baby, the dreamy and artistic child, the one her mother can turn to when her own life is falling apart. Amy yearns for stability as a child, and she seems to achieve that more than any other Haas sibling as an adult.

Antalek captures the love-hate sibling dynamic perfectly in this absorbing novel, and she conveys an understanding that, while family is vital, you can’t ever truly expect them to be what you want them to be.

Rebecca Stropoli writes from Brooklyn, New York.

You know you’re in Fannie Flagg territory when the first thing you learn about a character is that she has a Yorkie named Princess Grace Kelly. But, in Lisa Patton’s new novel, Whistlin’ Dixie in a Nor’easter, being in Frannie Flagg territory’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Tennessee native Leelee Satterfield is one of those women who went from the care of her father to the care of her husband, in her case Baker Satterfield, a man she’s loved since high school. In the habit of never saying no to him, she agrees to pack up their two little daughters and Princess Grace and follow him to Vermont because he’s decided he wants to run an inn. The shock of the transplant is, of course, enormous. The winters are appalling, the summer lasts an eyeblink. The inn stinks, is hideously decorated and run by a German brother and sister, the Schloygins. Rolf is merely dour, but if Stalag 13 had had a matron Helga would have been it.

Leelee may be intimated by the Schloygins, but she finds her employees simply weird. There’s Roberta, who uses the inn to evacuate her bowels since her husband won’t put a toilet in their house. Jeb the handyman also runs the computer company across the way. It’s a shack with one old computer—you can tell it’s old because it’s beige. Pierre, the French chef, speaks little English, and Kerri is the flirty waitress who Leelee mistrusts immediately. Yet, it’s not Kerri who Leelee should have mistrusted. The move to Vermont has been as much of a shock to Baker as it is to Leelee, and eventually he splits. Now the stunned, sheltered Leelee is left to run the inn and its restaurant pretty much alone.

Of course, she’s not as alone as she believes. The motley crew have taken a liking to her and help her out, and her old girlfriends from Memphis even come up for a few days to put some starch in Leelee’s formerly pliant spine. There’s an innocent love interest in the person of Peter, hired after Baker’s desertion and Leelee’s reordering of the inn’s regime. Oh, and by the way, she boldly renames her establishment The Peachtree Inn, even though a real peach tree would find the climate of Vermont lethal.

Funny, somewhat silly, often perceptive, Whistlin’ Dixie in a Nor’easter is a cozy read to curl up with during the fall.

Arlene McKanic divides her time between Jamaica, New York, and South Carolina.