Deb Horan, owner of Booklovers’ Gourmet, 72 E. Main St., Webster, reports “plenty of new reviews in this issue” of Shelf Awareness, including Cindy House’s Mother Noise, the author’s “unexpectedly uplifting memoir” of addiction, recovery and parenting; also, City of Orange, David Yoon’s post-apocalyptic novel set in California, “an often funny and always compelling journey;” and Lindsay Eagars ”spectacular middle-grade novel” The Patron Thief of Bread, in which an eight-year-old struggles with her loyalties.

In the Writer’s Life, Canadian author Deborah Ellis discusses Step, ten stories about the journeys a child takes on their eleventh birthday; the gift her grandmother unwittingly left; and a line by Chaim Potok that gets her through tough times.

In Black Boy Smile: A Memoir in Moments, D. Watkins moves into new, vulnerable territory. Watkins wrote about growing up in east Baltimore in The Cook Up and The Beast Side. Now, in Black Boy Smile, he dissects what he calls “the lie” codes of Black masculinity that forced him into stoic silence in order to survive his upbringing. In his new memoir, Watkins practices the opposite—he shares traumatic memories of sexual abuse and violence as well as ways in which “the lie” inhibited his growth and happiness. Through it all, his love for the people of east Baltimore shines through, and Watkins’s story is ultimately a hopeful, redemptive one.

Roger Angell, the “elegant and thoughtful baseball writer who was widely considered among the best America has produced,” died May 20 at age 101, the New York Times reported. His well-informed, lyrical baseball season wrap-up essays in the New Yorker became a tradition. As a fiction editor, he discovered and nurtured writers like Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason and Garrison Keillor, and worked closely with authors like Vladimir Navokov and John Updike.

The best books this week:

Our Last Days in Barcelona by Chanel Cleeton; Wild Prety, by Brian Klingborg; Are We Ever Our Own, by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes; Two Nights in Lisbon, by Chris Pavone; Never Coming Home, by Hannah Mary McKinnon; Hide, by Kiersten White; The Honeymoon Cottage, by Lori Foster; Breadsong: How Baking Changed Our Lives, by Kitty Tait, Al Tait; My Moment: 106 Women on Fighting for Themselves;; The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, Alex Andriesse, editor; The Best of the Rejection Collection: 297 Cartoons That Were Too Dark, Too Weird, or Too Dirty for ‘The New Yorker’; Malibu Rising, by Taylor Jenkins Reid; Falling, by T.J. Newman; The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams; Diary of a Young Naturalist, by Dara McAnulty; Unequal: A Story of America, by Michael Eric Dyson, Marc Favreau; Francis Discovers Possible, by Ashlee Latimer, illustrated by Shahrzad Maydani; Inheritance: A Visual Poem, by Elizabeth Acevedo, illustrated by Andrea Pippins;; Burn Down, Rise Up, by Vincent Tirado.