On one fateful night, 13-year-old Pearl becomes both a mother and a killer. Picked up by a cop while on the wrong side of town, Pearl caves to his advances and then accidentally shoots him as he takes his post-coital exit. Pearl’s son Leonard comes along just short of nine months later, and his youth is spent dodging the law alongside his mother until, one day, it finally catches up with her.

Except no one knows what happened to Pearl. She simply dropped off her precocious son with their neighbor, Mitch, on her way to work one morning and was never heard from again. And so 25-year-old Mitch finds himself saddled not only wih his computer business and his risky affair with the mayor’s wife, but also the sole responsibility for a five-year-old boy. Leonard is no ordinary child. Eerily intelligent, he has a severe degenerative disease that threatens his eyesight. Yet Leonard’s poor vision is countered by his perceptive heart. A firm believer in forever love (the idea that our loved ones never really leave us), Leonard routinely sees Pearl in a candle flame or a bird or a raindrop. Mitch is soon totally enamored of his new charge, unable to imagine life without Leonard. When social services splits them up, both Leonard and Mitch must re-evaluate their relationship, and they discover the many permutations of family in their search to uncover the mystery of Pearl’s disappearance.

As in her bestseller Pay It Forward (made into a movie staring Helen Hunt and Kevin Spacey), Catherine Ryan Hyde takes a tiny story and makes it feel epic. Narration flips between Mitch, Pearl, five-year-old Leonard and a teenaged Leonard to create a cacophony of unique voices in a haunting story about the power of love. Iris Blasi is a writer in New York City.

They’re two girls. With two different, thinking brains. And two separate, beating hearts. But the Darlen girls are forever joined in a way that makes them closer than even the closest of sisters: As conjoined twins, Rose (the studious one) and Ruby (the beautiful one) lead their lives while connected at the head by an area the size of a bread plate.

Lori Lansens’ The Girls imagines the twins’ attempt to record their autobiography as they approach their 30th birthday, a milestone that will make them the world’s oldest surviving craniopagus twins. Rose, an aspiring writer, is the primary author, but since she doesn’t live her life alone, she asks Ruby to contribute her own chapters. The resulting experience is like reading someone’s diary while being filled in on everything by her best friend. And so they tell their story. Abandoned by their unmarried teen mother shortly after she gives birth to them, the twins are adopted by Aunt Lovey (the nurse who delivered them) and her Slovakian-born husband, Stash. Their life in present-day, small-town Canada is almost astonishingly normal, as Lovey refuses to label them disabled. Just like anyone else, they fall in love, bicker with each other, root for the Red Sox and, generally, grow up.

Guided by two remarkably distinct voices, the novel unfolds subtly. Even as she settles into the linguistic artistry of an assured writer, Rose struggles aloud with the proper way to develop plot and character. Ruby, on the other hand, is an entirely unselfconscious writer, filling in the reader matter-of-factly on the momentous events Rose leaves out.

Ultimately, the novel is a testament to the transformative power of literature. Though Rose and Ruby set out simply to chronicle their past, the process of writing changes their present. Readers, too, will find themselves altered by this lyrical and haunting story. Iris Blasi is a writer in New York City.

Adriana Trigiani has created a world well worth visiting and revisiting in her Big Stone Gap series. Milk Glass Moon, the last novel in the trilogy, brings Ave Marie Mulligan’s story full circle.

Her family and friends in the small Virginia mountain community are facing changes and challenges. Etta, her daughter, is growing up, preparing to leave the nest and making choices worrisome to her mother. Theodore, her best friend, has seized the opportunity to move to New York. Jack Mac, her husband, continues to reinvent himself in ways Ave Marie could have never imagined. The unforeseen causes Ave to question her relationship with her mother in order to save her relationship with her child.

As in the earlier Big Stone Gap novels, Ave Marie is torn between her love for Big Stone Gap and the Italian Alps. Trigiani brings first-time readers up to date with ease and reminds long time readers that Ave Marie met and married Jack Mac in the first novel, Big Stone Gap, and overcame marital problems in Big Cherry Holler. While it isn’t necessary to read all three novels to follow the story line of Milk Glass Moon, each book adds texture and detail to the ongoing story.

Adriana Trigiani, who wrote successfully for television and the theater before turning out her first novel, is a terrific storyteller. She has created endearing characters with complicated, realistic lives. It’s a pity to see the series end, but fans of the books should eventually be able to see them on the big screen. Trigiana has written and plans to direct the film version of Big Stone Gap. Pam Kingsbury writes from Florence, Alabama.

<b>Her daughter’s keeper</b> Some psychologists say parents who feel terrible about every bad thing that happens to their child are suffering from something called omnipotent guilt. That concept is explored with sympathy and humor in <b>A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity</b> by Kathleen Gilles Seidel, a wife and mother with a doctorate in English literature from John Hopkins. In this modern-day tale with echoes of Jane Austen’s work, Seidel pinpoints how certain social issues affect the lives of affluent people. The novel centers on four mothers who are unapologetic about not only feeling their daughters’ pain, but also fighting their daughters’ battles. In a world where old money collides with new money, parents compete fiercely to ensure their daughters attend the right school, appear at the right social events and make the right friends. However, these four friends quickly learn that when one gets involved in playground politics, kid stuff isn’t always fun.

When Lydia Meadows trades in her career as a lawyer in Washington, D.C., to become a full-time housewife and mother, she thinks her life will be less complicated. Wrong. Her first clue that life is about to change is the moment she sees her 11-year-old daughter, Erin, and her three best friends dressed alike on the first day of sixth grade at their private school. Lydia realizes together the girls have achieved something she could never reach as a preteen girl: popularity. This should have been good news, but instead, her daughter’s popularity, and what happens when it is threatened, causes Lydia to obsess over Erin’s social activities and nearly ruins Lydia’s relationships with her three best friends. Eventually, Lydia learns that sometimes it’s necessary to allow children to fight and win their own battles. <b>A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity</b> is written with the tenderness, affection and insight that only a mother can muster. <i>Tanya S. Hodges writes from Nashville.</i>

Anna Fiore has a bad habit of finding those she loves in the most compromising situations. First her beloved Aunt Rose has an affair with Anna’s father. Then Anna finds her boyfriend of two years in bed her bed with her boss. Even Anna admits her life sounds like the script of some overwrought soap opera, which may be why she has spent the past 20 years wandering through apartments, jobs and dead-end relationships.

In Flight Lessons, a follow-up to the bestseller The Saving Graces, Anna makes a reluctant return to her childhood home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where for generations her family has run a quaint Italian restaurant. The Bella Sorella is in trouble, the victim of poor management, an outdated menu and a truly crushing review in the local newspaper. It’s Anna’s task to turn things around, and it’s her intention to do it while sidestepping the messy anger she still feels toward Rose. In fact, Anna plans to leave town again as soon as possible.

But Anna finds herself drawn to the exhilaration of running a restaurant, and to the motley crew who work there. She hires and befriends a new line chef, Frankie, who has overcome an addiction and is desperate to win custody of her daughter. Then Anna meets a mysteriously scarred man, who wants to give her a reason to stay.

It’s easy to trace Flight Lessons to the author’s roots in historical romance, since Gaffney excels in deft plot twists and rocky relationships. But her recent novels have also proven Gaffney to be a compulsively readable expert on the essence of women’s friendships, in all their fits and starts.

Gaffney writes with wit and a sharp eye for detail. In fact, Flight Lessons offers an unexpectedly fascinating and authoritative peek inside the world of a restaurateur. In a novel with more subplots and surprises than any soap opera, the fate of the Bella Sorella becomes the main attraction. Amy Scribner is a writer and editor in Washington, D.C.

Paige Dunn is smart, beautiful, loving, and, not incidentally, paralyzed from the neck down. Stricken with polio in the 1950s, she gave birth to her daughter, Diana, in an iron lung, and shortly afterward, her husband left her.

Paige is as honest with herself as others, and if such a terrible thing were ever to happen to you, she would be the kind of person you would want to become. She’s a memorable character in award-winning author Elizabeth Berg’s We Are All Welcome Here, but not the only one. Diana, the 13-year-old center of the story, yanked about by hormones, and Peacie, their black practical nurse and housekeeper, along with Peacie’s boyfriend LaRue, all help deliver a quietly keyed story reminiscent in places of To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s a delicate, thoughtful tale of the growing up of a sensitive young girl in the Freedom Summer of 1964 in Tupelo, Mississippi. Diana yearns for release from her world, and writes to movie stars, letting them know that I, too, was an actress and also a playwright, just in case they might be looking for someone. A couple of unlikely things happen in the course of the story, but even a modest deus ex machina incident at the end does not spoil the reader’s enjoyment of this forthright, sometimes slyly amusing novel.

Creating a book based on a reader’s suggestion, no matter how loosely, is something of a no-no for writers, but in her 15th novel Berg has the self-confidence to take someone else’s idea and run with it, in this case a reader’s true story of growing up with a polio-crippled mother. Some authors, with all those novels behind them, plus a couple of other books, would have burned out by this time, but Berg still manages to toss off an image like this: our skies were inky black and so thick with stars it felt as though somebody ought to stir them. Gems like that can’t help but make you look forward to her 16th novel. Maude McDaniel writes from Maryland.

Although Marti Leimbach’s Daniel Isn’t Talking is fiction, the engrossing story reads like the real-life diary of a mom at her breaking point. The author, whose first novel, Dying Young, was made into a movie starring Julia Roberts, admits the story is taken in part from her own life. Her son was diagnosed with autism five years ago, and the reactions of her friends and family shocked, surprised and saddened her. That experience has infused this novel, which follows a funny and courageous mother fighting to give her child a normal life.

Melanie Marsh, mother of two, has become a shadow of her formerly confident, breezy self, reduced to begging her shrink for medication to cope with her constant anxiety and increasing desperation. The reason: her 19-month-old son Daniel is obsessed with just one toy, won’t stop crying, and, unlike his bubbly older sister Emily, doesn’t talk or play with other children. Melanie’s British husband Stephen is dismissive of her concerns. When Daniel is finally diagnosed, Mom wants the harsh truth and Dad prefers denial. Their beloved little boy has turned into a slightly alien, uneducable time bomb, and the blame and fear rip apart their marriage. Preferring work to the new reality at home, Stephen withdraws from his family and demands that Daniel be sent away to a special school. It is an interesting dissection of two divergent methods of coping. But while we see Melanie struggle with complex emotions as she learns to see her boy as more than different, Stephen is too easily reduced to a selfish two-dimensional character. The most intriguing character here is autism itself, the mysterious condition that cannot be cured, or even effectively mitigated . . . a genetic mistake for which we will forever pay the consequences. Fans of Mark Haddon’s A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time will appreciate the portrait of an autistic toddler, this time from the point of view of a mother who stuck around. Readers will laugh as Melanie gives attitude to the experts and cry as the exhausted mother struggles to survive the screaming fits and odd looks that accompany an ordinary trip to the supermarket. This novel is bittersweet, resilient and not to be missed. Former BookPage business columnist Stephanie Gerber writes from Louisville, Kentucky.