Pop-Up Tour de France: The World’s Greatest Bike Race, by Pamela Pease, $36. This brilliant bit of paper engineering makes a terrific and timely gift for avid cyclists. Pease retrieves fascinating minutiae about the world’s most famous bicycle race.
Did you know that on Bastille Day (July 14), a French rider customarily wins the stage race, more or less by a common tacit agreement? Or that if a race passes through a rider’s home village, he’s allowed to ride ahead of the pack to greet family and friends?
Pease’s pop-ups range from a clever parade illustrating how bicycles evolved through time to a fold-out triptych of the central Paris scene on the final day. Marketed as a children’s book, it’s really more appropriate for cycle-crazy older readers.
It’s Not You, It’s Me, by Kerry Cohen Hoffman, $15.99. Most of us harbor a sad, permanent crack, an unwanted souvenir left by someone who suddenly stopped returning our fierce love. Hoffman’s spare, heartfelt story maps the devastated terrain of an awkward, unexpected breakup and its inevitable, semi-psychotic aftermath.
Zoe is the kind of girlfriend who keeps track of how many kisses she’s exchanged with Henry, with whom she is profoundly besotted. As she details each shard of her post-breakup life, she revisits tender scenes from the halcyon period she’s determined to resurrect. Ages 12 and up.
Mare’s War, by Tanita S. Davis, $16.99. This muscular novel chronicles the coming-of-age episodes of two generations. Teenage sisters Octavia and Tali initially dread the summer road trip with their eccentric grandmother, Mare. But as Mare tells the girls about her experiences as a willful young soldier in the Women’s Army Corps, her granddaughters undergo an epiphany.
And it’s a pretty realistic epiphany, with mood swings and snarky remarks on all sides. The girls make some bad decisions, and so does Mare. By the time they reach their destination, they’ve ascended to a new comprehension of what seemed irreconcilably alien at the journey’s outset. Ages 12 and up.
Locked Garden, by Gloria Whelan, $15.99. Sisters Verna and Carlie accompany their newly widowed physician father, along with their formidable aunt, when he’s assigned to a residential job at an asylum for the mentally ill. It is 1900, a time kinder to people with depression and mania than previous eras, but certainly not enlightened.
When a patient, Eleanor, becomes their housekeeper, the girls become fast friends with her. She’s engaging and hugely preferable to their clingy scold of an aunt.
By illustrating the progress, and then the decline, of a woman struggling with clinical depression, Whelan demystifies one of the most common mental disorders, breaking it into something comprehensible. And by shifting the spotlight to the girls’ controlling aunt, Whelan also invites readers to ponder the width of the line between the mentally well and the mentally ill. Ages 8 to 12.
The Beef Princess of Practical County, by Michelle Houts, $16.99. It’s almost county fair time, as countless aspiring young farmers and ranchers know, and they’ll see themselves in Libby Ryan, the protagonist of Houts’ lively novel.
She and her grandfather are raising two promising steers for the Practical County Fair in Nowhere, Ind. (Naming places is not the author’s strong suit.) Both are contenders for the grand-champion prize that Libby covets, leaning a little more toward one steer than the other.
Libby is less enthusiastic about being persuaded to enter a county fair beauty pageant. She prefers blue jeans to ball gowns and the company of her steers to that of prissy pageant veterans. How both contests end up is not quite as predictable as it seems. Ages 10 and up.
