Also of interest...in family ties

Why Didn’t You Tell Me? by Carmen Rita Wong (Crown, $28)

Carmen Rita Wong’s riveting memoir “asks what it means to lose one strand of your biography,” said Gabrielle Glaser in The New York Times. Growing up, the future CNBC host had a Dominican-born mother and a Chinese-born father, but she learned in adulthood that her mother had lied about her origins. The issues Wong tackles are weighty, but she “tells her story in vivid conversational prose that will make readers feel they’re listening to a master storyteller on a long car trip.”

Growing Up Getty by James Reginato (Gallery, $28)

The Getty family couldn’t ask for a more sympathetic portrait, said James Sullivan in the San Francisco Chronicle. In this history of oil magnate J. Paul Getty and his heirs, Vanity Fair writer James Reginato “dutifully” notes the scandals, “all while tipping the scale whenever possible toward the family’s positive contributions”—to the arts, conservation, politics, and more. Though the Gettys have paid a price for their outsize wealth, “they have, for the most part, paid their fortune forward.”

Normal Family by Chrysta Bilton (Little, Brown, $29)

Chrysta Bilton’s father is a former nude model who claimed to be the Messiah. “But he is not the biggest character in Normal Family,” said Janet Manley in The Washington Post. That would be Bilton’s mother, Debra, a privileged Californian who once dated Warren Beatty, had a weakness for cults, and talked a beautiful stranger into being her semen donor. His donated sperm eventually produced 35 other children, while Debra, a lesbian, was improvising her way to creating a family.

Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden by Zhuqing Li (Norton, $28)

This true tale about two sisters “will resonate with anyone whose family has been severed by political events,” said Diane Cole in The Wall Street Journal. The author’s aunts, who’d grown up wealthy in southeastern China, were unexpectedly divided during the 1949 Communist revolution, putting one on a path to prestige in Taiwan while the other— though a doctor—endured poverty and forced exile. Their niece “unspools the unexpected swerves each life took with spellbinding grace.”