A Jewish grandmother gently takes the hand of her 10-year-old granddaughter and tells her about being in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. The girl has never heard this before, and as she listens, subtle shifts in her family identity unfold. Always Remember Me, an adeptly sensitive children's book about the Holocaust by award-winning Hudson Valley author/illustrator Marisabina Russo, skillfully balances horror with hope, showing the underside of persecution as determination and survival.

Russo generally writes for grade-school ages. But Always Remember Me is a very different book, based on Russo's family stories of how her grandmother, mother, and two aunts survived the Nazi takeover and concentration camp internment during WWII. For years Russo pored over family photos, connecting the dots with stories she'd heard as a child. The photos are re-created in the book with matte gouache and sepia line images, softening some of the harsher realities in the story.

The story's narrator, Rachel, is fascinated with her Oma's (grandmother's) picture albums and tales of her "first life" in Germany and "second life" in America, after the war. Oma wears a heart-shaped locket signifying luck, handed down through generations of women in the family. Rachel has never seen all the pictures of Oma's life in Germany, but now Oma senses that she is ready.

By framing the story so it begins and ends happily, the Holocaust becomes less the focus and more a vehicle for strength and survival. The family endures anti-Semitism, separation, and despair to reunite and build new lives, shaping Russo's main theme of perseverance and hope.

As Rachel realizes the impact of the Holocaust, there is a poignant loss of innocence: "for a moment I think she [Oma] has made a mistake, this can't be a story about being lucky...a concentration camp was a place where Jewish people were hurt and often killed." Oma squeezes Rachel's hand as she describes the forced death march out of Auschwitz, when Germans often shot the weaker prisoners.

In muted pastels and darker sepias, a two-page montage shows pictures of concentration camps, children behind barbed wire, groups of interned women, closed gates. The centerpiece is a picture of Oma, freed and standing at her destroyed home in Leipzig. Another image shows Oma embracing her found daughter. Russo deftly combines the harder, more numbing visuals with the happier ones.

At the end of the story, Oma tells Rachel how she and her three daughters were reunited in America. She unclasps her heart locket and gives it to Rachel, telling her, "When you wear this necklace, always remember me and the story of my two lives. May luck follow you wherever you go."

The inside covers of Always Remember Me reproduce actual pictures of Russo's family when they lived in Germany, and Russo's afterword relates the true story that compelled her to write the book. "Miraculously, my grandmother, my mother, and my two aunts—four Jewish women of one family—managed to survive the Holocaust, each in her own way...I thought that they were the bravest women in the world and that I was very lucky to be their granddaughter, daughter, and niece. I still do."

Introducing the Holocaust to children can offer life-long groundwork for the way in which youngsters, and later adults, perceive and accept the wide range of human behavior. Russo's narrative, written for 9- to 12-year-olds, offers an easy path on the journey to understanding difficult truths.

Americans are strange about crime and violence. Pathways that "nice" people supposedly never walk are nonetheless the subject of intense curiosity—witness the endless "Law and Order" or "CSI" spin-offs, the rapt fascination with the trial du jour. But seldom do these productions get far below the surface and look into the hearts and lives of the human beings involved. For all the attention they get, veteran cops and career criminals are some of the least understood human beings on earth.

Reading Controlled Burn, it's impossible to know whether author Scott Wolven has been in prison or law enforcement or both. But if neither of these apply, he is possessed of a truly rare empathy and imagination, for this book of intertwining short stories—subtitled "Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men"—plumbs the waters of lives lived on an edge where nobody really expects to find himself.

The book starts rather quietly, with a dispute about cutting some trees, taking place between an elderly woman and the state police investigator who helped put her grandson away for three years on a drug offense. "If I had known, if you had told me, don't you think I'd have talked to him? My own grandson?" the woman asks.

"It doesn't work like that," the investigator responds.

"Well, this doesn't work at all."

As the stories unfold, we are drawn into a series of lives that don't really work—among prisoners and addicts, drinkers and brawlers, bounty hunters and their quarry. Wolven's portraits of the hardscrabble circumstances and failed relationships surrounding these lives are spare, fresh, and unromanticized. He doesn't pontificate; he just tells it how it is with elegant, simple language, and the picture that emerges is at once simpler and more complicated than most people realize. His characters are flawed but compelling; not for a moment are we allowed to forget that they are human, and that the world they inhabit is far more multifaceted than it looks when some event from it emerges into the police blotter or obituary column.

To read this book (Wolven's first) is to be carried on powerful currents into an empathy with hardened, misled people who do things—assault women, smuggle meth, even kill—that are the stuff of nightmares. Wolven has the skill to render the incomprehensible human, a few million light-years from the smirky outrage of tabloid crime reporting: "If I was lucky to be alive, I rarely knew it. Normal men get to be things. Sons and husbands, fathers and friends. I was not any of these things, I tried, but this is me telling you I failed," muses the protagonist of "Vigilance," the book's final story. Moralists may jump to a knee-jerk assumption that he simply didn't try hard enough. Apologists may be quick to explain that it all derives from a flawed upbringing. Wolven's truth exists on an entirely different continuum of choice and circumstance combined, somewhere along which may exist a genuine healing.

Not that Wolven is presuming to know what that might be. He never lets us forget, though, that even the toughest of the tough have emotional lives closer to our own than we might want to recognize. Moments of humor and kinship occur even among folks we're conditioned to consider as dangerous as timber rattlers. And the disavowal of emotion leads, as they say behind prison walls, to nothin' nice.

Wolven, a native of Catskill, sets half of his tales in "The Northeast Kingdom" and half in "The Fugitive West," and both landscapes are as vividly etched as the characters inhabiting them. Other reviewers have drawn comparisons to Steinbeck and Hemingway. I just want more.

The sky is a brilliant blue and clear, the air unusually warm for September-a sign we are still closer to August than October." So begins Gwendolyn Bounds's Little Chapel on the River. That brilliant blue day was 9/11, of course, and like so many other New Yorkers, 9/11 serves as a point of departure for Bounds—the start of a story, and a journey up the Hudson that she did not expect to take.

Bounds and her lover Kathryn are at home, just blocks from the World Trade Center, when the first plane hits. Forced to vacate their apartment, which sustained damage in the attacks, Bounds and her girlfriend squat in friends' apartments for a few months before renting a house in Garrison, a small hamlet just south of Cold Spring, after visiting friends there. In Garrison, Bounds  and her girlfriend go to a cramped bar in the bottom floor of a house snug between the Metro North tracks and the river. It's here, in this unassuming dive called Guinan's that this young, career-driven reporter for the Wall Street Journal begins to reorder her priorities.

What Bounds finds at Guinan's is at once typical and extraordinary. One of Guinan's habitués calls it "his riverside chapel," and Bounds writes that, for its patrons, "coming to Guinan's was something of a religion, with its own customs, community, and rites of passage. There was even a pastor of sorts—Jim [Guinan, the barkeep and owner]—who on a good night could tell a story that might run as long a Sunday sermon." Now, all good neighborhood bars have this quality to a degree-providing safe haven for a cross-section of characters to mingle in a neutral setting. And Guinan's has its share of characters-the loudmouth Fitz, an Vietnam vet and former intelligence operative; Dan, a liberal attorney who argues with the conservative Fitz; the handsome Preusser brothers, whose family has been in Garrison since the Revolutionary War; Donnery, an Albany bureaucrat who makes pilgrimages to Guinan's every six weeks; Mary Ellen, a sassy single mother; and the Guinan family.

Jim Guinan has been opening the bar since he emigrated from Ireland in 1957, but by the time Bounds arrives, Guinan's grown children, John and Margaret, moonlight at the bar—in addition to working full-time jobs—to help keep the bar open. What sets Guinan's apart, however, is that when the bar faces closure, the patrons pitch in to save it, a place that matters to them—and soon a flustered Bounds finds herself behind the rail, facing down an angry customer who she has served the wrong brand of beer:

I look miserably at the open Ballantine bottle in his hand.

They're both green, I offer lamely, finally laying my hands on a Rolling Rock and hoping he'll be a good sport and cut me a break.

No chance.

"Yeah, except this tastes like piss-water," he says, plunking the Ballantine down on the counter before me.

Fine, I say lightly, setting the Ballantine aside and hoping no one notices my hand shaking. I'm just wondering, though, I ask, forcing myself to meet his bloodshot eyes. How do you know what piss tastes like?

Little Chapel on the River isn't flashy and Bounds's narrative voice, that of a nervous naïf ever-testing uncharted personal waters, often amazed at the pluck and generosity of those she encounters in Guinan's and Garrison, has a gee-whiz quality that is trying at times. But what Bounds does accomplish is a modest reminder, simple yet profound, which she summarizes in her Author's Note:

"To anyone who has ever known a spot like this, a spot that feels more at home sometimes than home itself, I'd just like to add, go there if you still can. Be there. And don't wait for tomorrow. Go today."

I'll drink to that.