In The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn Dixon, a sentient Roomba joins forces with the other appliances to thwart a plan by the Grid, an all-knowing AI network which controls homes, vehicles and daily life.

After losing her job in a butcher shop, the widowed Mrs. Shim uses her ability to stay unnoticed and her superior knife skills, as she pursues a new career as a killer-for-hire. But she’s a little too good. Her victims don’t notice her, but her rivals do in Mrs. Shim is a Killer by Kang Jiyoung, translated from Korean by Paige Morris.

Paul Stob’s Empire of Skulls traces the rise and fall of the Fowler family, who built an empire on the pseudoscience of reading the bumps on people’s skulls. Who cares that phrenology is utter nonsense when it taps into the core American belief that the self can be measured, understood and improved? But what lingers is the darker story of how that same hopeful message gets co-opted to justify racism and xenophobia.

London Falling looks at the death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler, who was living a double life as "Zac Ismailov," fictitious heir to a Russian oligarch's fortune, consorting with a slippery businessman and a violent gangland enforcer. The intimate tragedy of Brettler's grieving parents is set against a sweeping portrait of modern London as a city remade by dirty money, deregulation and an underworld that operates in plain sight. Critics are saying this may be Patrick Radden Keefe’s best book to date.

In 1986, all 11-year-old Genya wants is to pass the entrance exam for Kyiv's prestigious art school. Then the reactor at Chernobyl explodes. Genya's family evacuates the city, and her exam and her future are suddenly uncertain. Yevgenia Nayberg’s graphic memoir, Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters, captures her childhood memories of Soviet life for middle grade readers.

Growing up in France as the daughter of Hmong refugees, Vicky Lyfoung discovered that nobody, including herself, knew much about the Hmong people. Hmong: A Graphic History is her answer to that ignorance, tracing the history of the Hmong from their origins as nomadic mountain people in ancient China. The book traces centuries of displacement—from the French colonization to the wars that tore through Laos, the refugee camps and finally the diaspora that scattered Hmong communities across the world. This is an accessible, illuminating and deeply personal story for teen readers.