Young adult book roundup

“Far From the Tree” by Robin Benway, HarperTeen, 384 pages, $17.99, age 12 and up

“Far From the Tree,” a 2017 National Book Award nominee for young people’s literature, presents a sensitive exploration of what it means to be a family and how that meaning can shift and change. The book is told through the intertwined narratives of three biological siblings who meet for the first time as teens. Eighteen-year-old Joaquin has grown up in foster care; his younger sisters, Grace and Maya, were adopted as babies. Grace recently gave up a baby for adoption, something she keeps secret from her siblings out of fear that they will judge her for abandoning her child — their view of what their “bio mom” did to them. Maya struggles to come to terms with her adoptive parents’ divorce.

Robin Benway deftly manages to place her characters at difficult crossroads while surrounding them with love and support — even if the characters can’t always see it. Grace and Maya sometimes can’t bring themselves to trust that their relationships are solid and won’t crumble when tested. With an abundance of warmth and humor, the novel continues to circle back to the message that love doesn’t require perfection — that perhaps it reveals itself most fully when we don’t quite get it right, but we keep trying.

“Wild Beauty” by AnnaMarie McLemore, Feiwel and Friends, 352 pages, $17.99, age 12 and up

The land gives, and the land takes away. For generations, La Pradera estate has provided refuge for the women of the Nomeolvides family, but at a steep price. Estrella, her four cousins, their mothers and grandmothers must use their inherited magic powers to coax lush gardens from soil that would otherwise remain barren, and if they try to escape, the earth will reclaim them. Estrella has always viewed La Pradera as a haven — her ancestors were persecuted for witchcraft — and the Briars, the family that owns the land, as her protectors. Then a mysterious boy rises from beneath the ground; a stranger arrives with underhanded plans; and Bay Briar, the girl whom the cousins all not-so-secretly love, disappears. It’s a convergence of events that forces Estrella to confront disturbing aspects of her heritage and re-examine everything she thinks she knows.

This original fairy tale is forged in the Latin American literary tradition of magical realism. “Wild Beauty” incorporates ideas on class, race and sexual orientation as naturally as vines curl through a trellis. Anna-Marie McLemore uses sensuous descriptive language to convey it in all its dazzling, terrifying glory. The truth, it turns out, can’t always be covered over with flowers.

“You Bring the Distant Near” by Mitali Perkins, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages, $17.99, age 12 and up

The title of Mitali Perkins’ welcoming multigenerational saga, recently long-listed for a 2017 National Book Award, comes from a line by Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore: “Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger.” Upon immigrating to the United States in 1973, Tara Das adopts a unique strategy for becoming “brothers” with classmates at her new high school in New York. What better way to assimilate, she figures, than to style herself after Marcia Brady, America’s most famous sister? Tara’s younger sister Sonia doesn’t share her sibling’s social ease. But who needs popularity when one has Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March and Judy Blume’s Deenie?

In detailing Tara’s and Sonia’s teen years and those of their daughters, Perkins tells a nuanced, quintessentially American story. She affectionately traces four women’s paths to determining their identities and later adds a fifth: Ranee, the Das family matriarch. In her 60s, she embarks on a process of discovery familiar to many immigrants who move to this country as adults.