Mia Yua's Translations of Beauty is the tale of Korean immigrants coming to the US, a travelogue, and the story of two siblings growing up and growing apart. One twin sister, Yunah, tells the story as a series of flashbacks while she and her twin, Inah, travel around Italy. When they were very young, an accident that seriously harmed Inah motivated the family to leave Korea and emigrate to the US. The Korean immigrant community they joined in Queens inspires some of  Yua's best writing. Auntie Minnie, originally the bride of an African American soldier, goes on to be a wonderful, gaudy success as a self-employed hairstylist.

Material success is a critical question in the narrative, as some Korean characters succeed and others fail. The twins' parents see some success—they buy a house of their own in Queens. But when other Koreans buy grander homes or move out to the suburbs, Yunah senses that they are being left behind. Her father, whose wife calls him "the poet," never seems to get going in materialistic, American terms. The daughters love and appreciate him, but see that his love of art, peonies, and radishes with the dirt still clinging to them, is maladaptive.

Perhaps it is her father's artistic side, his other-worldliness, which discourages Yunah from wanting to become one of the "Korean kids who go to Ivy League schools. They come out all the same, as if out of cookie cutters. They all want to become doctors, lawyers, and investment bankers, as if there aren't enough of them already. They become Republicans. They live selfish lives." The girls' mother is a powerful and strongly materialistic influence in the family. She wants every American success for her daughters and never lets them forget that Ivy League schools are the educational goal.

When the sisters are in their late 20s, Inah becomes a drifter, winding up living in Italy. Deputized by their powerful mother, Yunah goes to Italy to check up on her. But the twins' travels, as Yunah tries to communicate with the depressed and drifting Inah, are less compelling than the interspersed flashbacks of their youth. It is Yua's quirky portraits of the young girls' relatives and friends, in Korea and Queens, which are most original and engaging.

Kingston resident Carole Ione's recently reissued book Pride of Family is a unique blend of memoir and ancestral archeology, encompassing a fascinating personal puzzle and the author's journey of discovery. Moved to investigate her family's past by the unearthing of an ancestor's long forgotten diary, Ione finds herself engaged in piecing together the myriad strands of her family tree. The struggle over a period of years to uncover this history compels reflection on her own life, the lives of the women who raised her, and the variety of experiences of others of her relatives—many of whom led colorful lives as performers.

Subtitled "Four Generations of American Women of Color," this book offers an important vista into a little-known part of American history as well, for many of Ione's ancestors were part of a small and privileged sub-set of 19th-century African Americans known as "free people of color." Her research takes her from upstate New York, where her family operated a popular restaurant in the heyday of Saratoga racing, to the Carolinas of the Reconstruction period and onwards to the island of Saint Domingue. In Saint Domingue (modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic) she unlocks the core of the Carolina part of her family story: it is here that she finds the French line of the family that begot the favored free status of one strand of her ancestry.

Ione's well-constructed narrative both documents and imagines the lives of her ancestors who were part of this class. There are many other fascinating aspects to Carole Ione's story. She writes not just of the ancestral past but about her very interesting life and upbringing as well. Particularly enjoyable is her description of the sporting life in Saratoga during the fifties, sixties and seventies, when visiting celebrities would pass through the family's restaurant on their way to and from the track.

Ione is a deft and skillful writer who effortlessly manages to carry the reader between various time periods and a complex of characters. Her memoir is a beautiful and intricate tapestry of memory, history and genealogy. It is not only an enjoyable read, but an important contribution to a fuller understanding of an under-explored area of American history.

For Mommy, there is no such thing as a room of one's own. Children cycle endlessly from one fully legitimate demand to the next, and as long as one is on duty—which for most of us is most of the time—unbroken concentration is counted in minutes, sometimes seconds. Not only that, but motherhood still comes with an entire load of cultural baggage about just who and how Mommy is supposed to be. To an artist, that feels like looking at the chalked outline of a body on the sidewalk and being told it's time to lie down and fit in.

In the introduction to Mamaphonic, the editors raise a question that just about every creative mother—indeed, any mother with more on her plate than mothering—has heard many times: How do you do it? The 29 works offer meditations from the hilarious to the heartbreaking, as individual as palm prints.

Babies on tour, babies "helping" Mommy collate E-zines, toddlers learning to sculpt and photograph before they can read. Artworks, like babies, are mostly made at home, and the integration of the two can bless both.

Nobody's saying it's easy. "Even on a good day, my paddles feel like they are filled with buckshot," observes Ayun Halliday in The East Village Inky. Yet beyond the exhaustion, distraction, and frustration are the rewards of lifting those paddles till your biceps bulge: discovering that motherhood and creativity enrich each other. We find things to say, do, and be with our children that we never would have discovered while starving in an exotic garret with a plethora of jaded swains dancing in attendance (although somebody's probably raised a child that way, too). These things can inform our work, and our work can in turn deepen our connection to our children. The story of a child with a creative Mommy does not have to be a story like Mommie Dearest, nor is it true that lactation draws directly from the brain cells—it just feels that way sometimes.

Reading Mamaphonic is like being on a retreat with an enormously diverse and wise sisterhood of those who really understand—punk rockers and dancers and researchers, cartoonists and cookie decorators, all pretty much in agreement: How do we do it? We don't know. To do it is difficult, but not to do it would be impossible.

When Judy Reene Singer's eponymous heroine, Judy, discovers her husband is having fling number three, she decides to grab the reins of her life and steer herself down a completely new path. She's always loved horses, and when her riding instructor tells her about a working-student position on a North Carolina horse farm, she heads south quicker than you can find a cheatin' man song on the radio.

It's an enormous life change for this out-of-shape 30-something English teacher, and Judy soon discovers she's out of her depth in the physically and mentally demanding environs of Sankt Mai, a breeding and training farm specializing in high-level dressage horses. What follows is a crash course in riding, manure management, life, more manure, and sigh, love.

This is very much a woman's story, but don't look for poignant I-found-myself revelations between the covers of this book; despite its fairly earnest start, Horseplay is pure leather-scented chick lit—a rollicking first person you-go-girl tale in the witty, wisecracking Olivia Goldsmith/Helen Fielding style. It gallops along with tongue firmly in cheek—something that's fairly dangerous when performed while actually riding a horse—and though there are a few painful moments, Singer basically pulls it off. Riding enthusiasts will recognize her parodies of classic horse world eccentrics: the stern German riding instructor, the handsome horse owner who specializes in horsing around, the snooty trophy wife boarder everyone in the barn loves to hate.

The plot line is bizarre, as is the large assortment of too-strange-to-be-true-so-they-probably-are vignettes. There's the exotic horse whisperer with a secret fetish for dressing in women's clothes; Dr. Bilouge, the veterinarian in charge of stallion breeding, called "Dr. Bulge" by the barn help for the obvious enjoyment he takes in his work; the exotic tea leaf-reading countess whose accent occasionally veers towards Brooklyn.

Singer is a Hudson Valley resident who's spent the last decade as an equine journalist; she knows her horse folks, and so Horseplay will have solid appeal for the horse-obsessed among us. But you won't need to know your pommel from your cantle to enjoy this farcical, silly ride, or to applaud the book's conclusion; the heroine ends up with her dream horse and her dream partner—yes, necessarily in that order.